I have a problem...

Not really, but I try to tie the title to the lesson. :-)

In this week's class, we discussed how to use e-Learning to promote problem solving skills. As always, I compare what our department produces with what I'm studying about in class, and we seem to do a good job of this. We include scenarios in our e-Learning courses and the scenarios are tied to the job. We don't follow some of the principles mentioned in this chapter, such as using job experts and seeing how they would solve a particular problem, or promoting learner awareness of problem solving actions and skills. The latter is done with some of our other training in which they are provided with flow charts to help document a process or procedure, but it doesn't exist in our e-Learning. I know that our audience typically doesn't have good metacognitive skills, but I think part of the reason is the rushed timeframe for our training. Sometimes, our team members are placed before a computer and told to complete x hours of training in a day. By flying through the course and skimming over the examples, learning isn't really taking place. I wonder if metacognitive skills on the job are influenced by the work culture. We can each have our own standards, but if they are met with apathy by coworkers and supervisors, do we still pursue them as strongly?

Collaborate... Moderate... Try Not to Hate

Remember the INXS song "Mediate" from their 1987 Kick album? That's one of the few remotely popular music references I can include, since my musical tastes are quite out of step with most music today. But that's a different story. As Sophia Petrillo always used to say when sharing a story about her past on The Golden Girls, "But, I digress."

This week, we discussed collaboration in e-Learning and how it improves the learning experience. I can attest to collaboration improving the distance learning experience, certainly. I'm in my second year of graduate school and most of my classes have been online. In most of those classes, we had to asynchronously collaborate with each other. We had to post responses to discussion questions to the class message board and we had to post responses to at least two other posts before we could consider our participation complete for that class week. Sometimes, I gritted my teeth when I did it, but ultimately I benefited from expanded viewpoints.

I am curious about collaboration in corporate e-Learning environments. I work in a retail training department and we have a very low degree of concurrency (except for when a new course launches) plus we have very low resources for monitoring such collaborative tools as message boards or forums. We tried to do a wiki and it sounded like the answer we had been seeking, but the project ultimately got canceled because there weren't enough resources for monitoring it to make sure that off-topic discussions didn't get started (which is a huge concern for management). Additionally, much of our audience consists of retail store employees who do not have a great deal of time for training. The vast majority of their time is spent selling or completing other tasks; they fit in learning when they get a chance. I'd love to try using collaborative tools, but I think we have to use it with certain segments of our learners and not use it across the board. I wonder if we could do a hosted blog or a wiki with just a select group and see how it goes. We're revamping some of our training efforts in 2008, so we'll see.