Cons of E-Learning
“E-Learning can be fast, cheap or good. We can make it do two of those things and companies rarely choose the good.” - Dr Marc Rosenberg
- E-L has been in development for the last 30-40 years and so far has had little impact on the acquisition of knowledge. Only 20 per cent of businesses world-wide have E-L within their training strategy. It’s rated far below face-to-face learning in terms of effectiveness.
- Being technology driven, there is a danger of focusing on the medium and giving no thought to the actual content.
- E-L undermines the pedagogy that is the fulcrum of traditional teaching. It democratises development, deprofessionalising training practitioners in the process. It’s difficult to tell the sages from the charlatans.
- E-L teaches black and white subjects well (such as, how to put together an engine), but fails to teach the soft skills, such as leadership, influencing and decision-making that will be critical to business in the future.
- The technology promises much, but the reality is even in the UK, the baseline connectivity benchmark will still be inadequate for supplying multimedia E-L. And that’s in a country with a developed communications infrastructure. Much of the rest of the world is only just starting to offer internet connectivity.
- E-L is all too often used as a sop to compliance. Learners are provided with a click/turn PowerPoint presentation that they can easily race through without even reading anything. Often, there’s no focus on how successful the training has been.
- On paper, there may be cost benefits, but a smaller budget spent on something that doesn’t work is still money wasted.
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What do you think? Is E-Learning a waste of time and money, or is classroom learning dead and it’s the next stage in education?
