Michael Allen's Guide to e-Learning, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3What You Don't Know Can Kill (Your e-Learning)

Of course, e-learning isn't more effective than other forms of instruction just because it's delivered via computer. The quality and effectiveness of e-learning are outcomes of its design, just as the quality and value of books, television, and film vary with the particular script, actors, episode, and movie. e-Learning can be very good, very bad, or anything in between. The way e-learning's capabilities are used makes all the difference.

One cause of frequent instructional failures is that the actual reasons for undertaking e-learning projects are not defined, are not conveyed, get lost, or become upstaged. Most often, the success-related performance goal of enabling new behaviors is overtaken by the pragmatics of simply putting something in place that could be mistaken for a good training program.

When executives and other reviewers are not attuned to the criteria against which e-learning solutions should be evaluated, the focus of development teams turns to what those reviewers will appreciate: mastering technology, overcoming production hurdles, and just getting something that looks good up and running within budget and on schedule. These latter two criteria, budget and schedule, become the operative goals, stealing focus from the original reason for building an e-learning project. (See Figure 3.1.)

Figure 3.1 Transformed ...