Written by Dick CarlsonIt’s almost exactly one year since I announced the death of the LMS in a post on this blog, and (in a phone conversation yesterday) I found myself talking about my theory one more time with a nice woman who was willing to give me introductions to lots of people who might hire me. I guess I’m a fool.
Many of those companies would probably be willing to write long-term, high-dollar contracts to have me build strategic operational implementation visions with rich functional specification statements, describing best practice drivers to manage all critical metrics involving the success alignments contained in a world class deployment of their mission critical Learning Management System. Or something like that.
The truth is, from my point of view, that you can no longer “manage” learning in any meaningful sense. Yes, you can manage memorization. Make people go through a series of e-learning screens on your HR policies and then do a multiple-choice quiz — but that’s not learning. Make people watch videos of sexual harassment role playing and then identify good touching and bad touching — but that’s not learning. Make people click and drag parts of a hamburger onto a bun and hear music when they do it right — but that’s not learning.
Learning happens when someone can actually successfully apply the knowledge in a real life situation. And measuring that is incredibly expensive, time consuming, and difficult. I rarely see it happen, because in almost every case it proves that your training was pretty useless.
And actually, that memorization stuff really doesn’t last very long, anyway:
Example 1: Name the capitals of all 50 states
Example 2: Recite the ten commandments
Example 3: Set up speed dial on your cell phone
What an LMS is very useful for is tracking that people experienced the process of hearing and/or seeing information. For privacy training, sexual harassment training or Sarbanes-Oxley this is critical to the organization’s legal future. “Why, yes, your Honor. Mr. Frisbee was given complete training before he drained the widow’s and orphan’s fund. We’re completely innocent.”
For giving people context (french fries go in the oil before they go in the cardboard box) it’s just fine. But to actually impart knowledge and/or skills that will stick in a meaningful way, most of what an LMS measures has very little to do with learning. And since most learners today don’t really learn in a linear fashion, they just click through the course or game the system to comply with your requirements. So you’re really not measuring anything, anyway.
(If you want to have some fun, offer a $1000 prize to the first person in the org who can find a way to game the system into thinking that he or she has taken every single course. But be prepared to be embarrassed, big time.)
My problem is that I really love learning. I spent a lot of time (and money that I’m still paying back) getting skilled in how to really make it happen. Sort of like a welder who really respects a solid bead between two plates, I’m troubled by something that just looks nice but really doesn’t make the grade. And like that welder, it worries me that people are taking money (and sometimes a lot) for a structure that will collapse at some point.
When that happens, all of us will be blamed.
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