ROI: The Same Challenge Everywhere & Learning Games : Toucan House Newsletter: 17 October 2003

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Newsletter :: 17 October 2003

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Welcome to the Toucan House Online Ed. Updater

17 October 2003

This occasional newsletter keeps you up to date with innovation and change in online and flexible learning. In this edition:

- We introduce Lisa Galarneau. The newest member of the Toucan House team, Lisa joins us as eLearning Solutions Director from California where she's worked on a number of large scale initiatives
- Return on investment: The same challenge everywhere. What are you measuring, and why?
- Learning games. Games are no longer the domain of the entertainment industry, they have legitimate training value

Previous updaters are archived at www.toucanhouse.co.nz

Lisa Galarneau joins Toucan House

We've been busy these last few months! Among other things, Lisa Galarneau has joined our team as eLearning Solutions Director. Lisa comes from California and has considerable experience working on large and small technology projects across a variety of sectors. She has been recognised internationally for her work on several websites, most notably a multimedia site about California history produced for the California Secretary of State and a ground-breaking educational site about the history of shoes (www.centuryinshoes.com) which garnered a Webby nomination, among many other awards and accolades. In addition, Lisa has worked on educational projects for Fisher-Price, Leapfrog, About.com, HungryMinds, Homeschool.com and more.
Lisa has a Bachelor of Arts degree in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley, a Graduate Certificate in Online Teaching and Learning, and a Master of Science degree in Education with an emphasis on eLearning.

Lisa's particular skills lie in learner profile analysis, information/interaction design, and project management. She is very passionate about the potential of technology to create effective, engaging and enjoyable learning experiences. At Toucan House, she will be working with our clients to conceive, define and implement the best learning solutions for each organisation's unique learning needs. She very much looks forward to sharing her expertise and passion with others.

To start that process, Lisa shares a few pearls with us for this edition of the Updater:

ROI: The Same Challenge Everywhere

Some people think that the U.S. is operating light years ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to eLearning. In some ways, perhaps, they are. But most organisations are still struggling with the same issues that everyone else in the world is. One of the biggest issues surrounds the value of eLearning and how returns on investment can be measured. But for that matter, how does one measure whether training in general has been effective? Most accountability processes to date have concentrated on the delivery of training, not on whether desired outcomes have been achieved, or more specifically, whether the training has brought on the desired behavioural changes in the organisation's employees. Why? Simply because it is very difficult to measure or prove whether people have actually learned.

The first step in measuring ROI when it comes to eLearning is to ensure that the training solutions are aligned with your company's business strategies. There's no point in measuring something if it's not what you should be doing anyway. In the final analysis, the overall performance of your company will demonstrate whether your training programs have been effective. So for instance, if your company is looking for increased revenues, then perhaps training employees to be more customer-focused is one way to achieve that goal. And if the training objectives are tied to organisational goals, employees understand why they are undertaking the training. They will be more likely to take the training seriously and set about achieving some real learning.

Here are a few questions you might consider in gauging whether your training is aligned with strategy:

Are the elements of your training program tied to specific business objectives?
Do your employees understand how their learning contributes to the company's success?
Are you tailoring your training programs to the unique needs of your learner populations?
Once completed, are you assessing the success of your programs in changing employee behaviour?

The next step is to determine an ROI tool that balances the following parameters:

Quantitative and qualitative measures of performance
Being confident about your conclusions without spending a fortune seeking certainty about them
Being able to take effective remedial and developmental action within a limited budget

We'll look at these issues in the next Updater.

Learning Games

Video games are often criticised for all manner of societal ills, but there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that games can be tremendous learning tools. Several recent studies have looked at the link between video games and improvements in 'strategic thinking and planning skills.' It has also been noted that 'teenagers learn more from video games than they do from books', a fact that should surprise few who have spent any time at all around modern teenagers. In fact, there are a growing number of experts who suggest that learning games might be one of the few ways to really engage learners of the so-called 'millenial generation'. Having been raised on music videos, video games and the like, they have become accustomed to processing a great deal of external stimuli. In fact, it may have even caused their brains to evolve into something more flexible and 'plastic' than their linear-thinking predecessors. Kids' ability to multi-task, for example, is astounding. Perhaps you have watched a 12-year old watch TV, surf the web, text his friends, and queue up his favorite MP3s all at the same time? Obviously they are quite adept at it. What this means is that they have little patience for instruction that moves too slowly or fails to engage them.

In anticipation of meeting these complex needs of the workforce of the future, several organisations have looked at video games as training tools and created some effective and fun solutions. In the corporate sector, learning games have been leveraged very successfully to teach everything from sexual harassment issues to the complexities of 3-D CAD software. Industry pundit Marc Prensky is a great believer in the power of games and gently points out to those who might consider them frivolous: "If you learned a country's capital while chasing Carmen Sandiego, or an important date while playing Trivial Pursuit, or a fact while watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire, or an interesting lesson from making a wrong move in Sim City, does that change the nature of what you learned?"
So the fundamental question is, can learning be fun? Some certainly believe that learning is an activity to be approached with seriousness, rigor, and intensity. To them, anything that looks like fun seems like it might be counter-productive. But perhaps this notion is simply dogma. And while there are certainly some negatives associated with video games, namely the profusion and popularity of violent titles, there may be many opportunities to leverage this engaging, interactive platform into a vehicle to encourage and indeed, transform learning.

In the next Updater, we'll look at the challenges associated with adapting training content into effective learning games.