Online Training. What Happened?
10 years ago, bandwidth of internal servers was considered the biggest barrier to widespread use of e-learning. The era was characterised by bespoke Learning Management Systems, with the e-learning consultancy ranks bolstered in 2000 by legions of Year2000 consultants who needed to redeployed once the anticipated digital meltdown failed to arrive.
But when technology both increased available bandwidth and decreased the digital resources required, there was still not a huge take-up. With the exception of discrete mandatory topics such as money laundering, the suites of digital courses are left largely untapped. The more senior the audience, the less the appetite.
Why?
1. Online learning is often billed as the opportunity to learn in your own time. Since a lawyer's office time is fully committed, it is a product designed for a different clientèle.
2. Online learning has no commitment associated with it. Nobody knows that you were intending to complete the online module, so it's easy to put it off.
3. Online learning is rubbish for skills training. It can cover the associated processes (delegation for example), but without the associated skills it is akin to teaching cricket without a bat or ball.
4. Online learning does not allow peer learning. However bespoke a module is (and few are), lawyers gain as much from discussing issues with fellow students as they do from material presented.
So What?
There is still a clear business case for leveraging
face-to-face trainer time by front-loading knowledge acquisition. At the junior level, where knowledge-rich, frequently-run programmes (new-joiner for example) lend themselves to online-transfer it might be possible to dispense with face-to-face entirely.
In an ideal world, however, training would be blended; lawyers undertaking pre-session reading, online learning of processes and perhaps a pre-session quiz to confirm understanding. In the real world, some do, most don't, and the subsequent session has to cater for the resultant knowledge levels, frustrating all camps.
If we can find a way of increasing this compliance with pre-course work, the savings could be considerable. It is possible. One head of learning and development pointed out that she has no difficulty in getting partners to prepare for case studies when Ashish Nanda is coming.