E-learning Isn't All it's Cracked Up to Be

Editor's note: Fortune.com's recent article, E-Learning Has Arrived on the Plant Floor, extols the benefits of company-created electronic courses at Sun Microsystems's big plant in Newark, California. This Fortune.com article prompted O'Reilly editor in chief Frank Willison to write the following thoughts.

I know I'm getting too old for this business because I feel like I am reading the same articles that I read ten, or in this case, thirty years ago.

A lot of the promise of this kind of training and education was described in 1969 by George Leonard in "Education and Ecstasy". Then there was a burst of activity surrounding CDROM education in the 80s. Now the Web. Each made great claims, and each predicted a complete change to the world of learning.

All have fallen short, in my view, because the quality is still missing. Online courses are not authoritative, and they don't supply enough knowledge to justify their costs. Companies prefer them to traditional courses and to books, but they aren't sufficient in themselves, and, I believe, companies fool themselves so that they can avoid the costs associated with paper and human interaction.

The big issue still seems to be that this kind of authoring requires an understanding of the course-writing technology and the rhetoric of distance learning, and both are rare. An experienced programmer can work with our editor and produce a book because the technology of writing is well understood and the rhetoric of a programming book is understood by the writer, at least well enough to produce a book that our editors can fix.

Courses, however, are still written by instructional designers, and they seldom can replicate the authority that our books have. Two years ago a company called DES (Digital Education Services) approached us to use some of our book content as the basis for several online courses. However, the DES courses were very thin on technology and very thick on "This is what you will learn" or "This is what you have learned" kind of structures. The parts of the courses that should have made them superior to books--interactive graphics, video, audio, and the like--required another technologist who understood the subject even less than the instructional designers. The result was courses that just didn't contain much information, and that information lacked authority. O'Reilly's experience with DES is a case in point. Starting from our already written and reviewed books, DES couldn't make a decent course to save their company's life.

The use of e-learning, so-called, in that Newark plant, looked like little more than the use of the Web to send text-based messages to the shop floor. It's probably faster and easier to archive, but it is certainly more prone to error and misinterpretation because it lacks a human component. If so many people in Florida couldn't figure out how to use a ballot laid out a little differently from the usual ballot, how many shop-floor people are going to understand how to make a change they hadn't anticipated from an email message with very basic graphics? If they do, probably the change needed only a message (like, "substitute green wires for blue wires in product L25). That's email, not e-learning.

In the 80s, we were talking about information systems that began with context-sensitive help. That brief help could lead the user to other help topics, sections of a stored, online manual, or a video-based course available on a network. After that, for an additional fee, the user could connect with a help center for specific questions and issues. Here in the 00s, I have trouble finding a product with decent help, with or without context, forgetting the related material. The problem isn't with delivery; it's that, in most cases, the person writing the helpful material understands it little better than the person seeking the help.

Maybe ten years from now, if some organization makes a concerted and expensive effort, there will be good Web-based training. But by then, everything will be easy to use, right?

Frank Willison

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