Michael Allen's 2009 e-Learning Annual

11.2. COURSES ARE DEAD

When I tell training vendors "courses are dead," they look at me as if I'd brought a skunk to their picnic.

Roger Schank (2005) sums up the failure of training in four little words: "It's just like school." The better part of two decades of schooling has brainwashed, er, convinced us that courses are the default means of learning. People think of courses as the basic, fundamental model against which other modes must compare themselves. Propose that workers learn something through conversation, a game, or trial and error, and the knee-jerk response is "How do you know it will be as effective as a course?"

Upon close inspection, you find that courses themselves are not that effective. Only 10 to 15 percent of what is taught ...