The Chartered Institute of Professional Development is an excellent source of information regarding the effectiveness of e-learning within organisations. Visit the link for details, but here are four key principles that are useful for Senior Instructional Designers and Learning and Development Managers to remind themselves of:
- Start with the learner - recognise the limitations of the population that you are trying to reach.
- Relevance drives out resistance - if the e-learning material is seen as relating to something that matters in the organisation, people are more likely to try to use it.
- Take account of intermediaries - Much learning requires an intermediary to advise and direct the learner. This is just as true of e-learning; it will not be successful if taken in isolation from other learning.
- Embed activity in the organisation - this is a subtler point but follows from the previous one. E-learning modules should be seen as one element in an organisational learning strategy; where possible their use should be linked with instructor-led courses and other human resource management systems (for example performance appraisal).
- Support and automate - this final catch-all point reinforces and underlines the others. E-learning does not offer us the opportunity to automate all our learning processes. Instead it is a powerful new element in a wider strategy which requires support for learners in the context in which they learn. (CIPD, 2009)
