eLearning Guild 360 Report

At DevLearn in San Jose, the eLearning Guild announced that

Electronic versions of the printed research reports are now available for FREE for all paid Guild members and all associate members that complete the survey related to a particular report.

The following links will work if a member is logged in (the links also validate if the member is entitled to the report):

Measuring Success — www.elearningguild.com/showfile.cfm?id=2513

Mobile — www.elearningguild.com/showfile.cfm?id=2463

Immersive Learning Simulations — www.elearningguild.com/showfile.cfm?id=2348

Learning Management Systems — www.elearningguild.com/showfile.cfm?id=2349

Synchronous Learning — www.elearningguild.com/showfile.cfm?id=2398

Today I read through the 286-page report on Measuring Success. It is a combination of expert opinion and the interpretation of Guild research results.

Steve Wexler, the Guild’s director of research, provides a cogent overview. He begins:

This report is one of the longest (and most fun) reports the Guild has published. But despite its formidable girth, the report is about answering two just questions:

1. When you test, are you truly able to show that someone has learned something; and,
2. Are you able to show that your learning interventions benefit your organization?

Several tools are evaluated on ease of use, power, vendor assistance, etc. Adobe, Articulate, and Toolbook seemed to dominate the show here.

My favorite section is a Point/Counterpoint between Ray Pollock (CLO at Fort Mill, former academic and line manager) and Will Thalheimer (founder of Work-Learning Research and well known to those who attend Guild events.)

In the line manager role, Ray says that “As a business leader, there were a very few metrics that really mattered to me – revenue, margin, net profit, growth. much people had learned in training” and “…learning without behavior change is irrelevant in performance improvement.” Will retorts that these metrics serve no diagnostic purpose; they don’t show where things could be improved.

The report is chock full of advice. It’s well-indexed, so you can find what you’re looking for rapidly. Overall, I like this report more than any of the hard-cover books on the subject. While the report is lengthy, it is not comprehensive.

I would like to have seen some assessment of Jack Phillips and Knowledge Advisers. There’s not much on CLO-level assessment of alternative delivery methods. Lauri Bassi’s studies of training investment and market valuation are not mentioned.

The report concludes with a 25-page listing of books, articles, organizations, journals, conferences, chapters, and 15 web sites.

What about blogs? Many address measurement issues.

Jay Cross, The Big Picture on ROI
Hal Richman, Optimizing Learning Value for Capital Effects by Jeff Kelley
Jay Cross, Making the Business Case for Informal Learning
Tony Karrer, ROI and Metrics in eLearning
George Siemens, Connectivism
Wesley Frier, Beyond Seat Time
John Ingham, The new frontier of human capital measurement
Dennis Howlett, ROI is so Business 1.0 Not
Altul Rai, Measurement of Business Processes
Elsua, Making the Business Case for ROI
Stephen Downes, Can’t Count Friends or Count on Them
Greg Verdino, Key Takeaway from Forrester
Dave Lee, e e learning

These are merely the first dozen posts I grabbed from a search. They do not appear in order of quality. They are not representative. They are all fresher than any printed article or book. And there are hundreds, if not thousands, of them, ready for harvesting. Judicious use of Del.icio.us could point to the most popular among them. Turning a blind eye to the blogosphere means missing current opinion.

In sum, Steve Wexler and crew have produced a valuable, important report. I’m looking forward to digging into the others in the series.

Here’s Steve announcing the
liberation of eLearning Guild reports at DevLearn