Learner apathy is there to stay!

Millions spent on setting up an LCMS for global delivery of e-courses and a couple of hundreds sign up!

1000 licenses bought for a specific course and a handful go through it in a year!

Custom-built courses created at huge costs and there are no takers!

Are these just one-off horror stories or ground reality? For every successful e-Learning case study there are many more that don't make the grade! And, what's more, even after making it mandatory, it is difficult to get 100% sign-up. Or even worse, get more than 50% completion of the course.

Rather than play the blame-game, e-Learning customers and vendors globally have come to the conclusion that learner apathy is there to stay. Drastic ideas have been thought up and radical changes brought about - to gain some successes. Continuous innovation based on a deeper understanding of "what will tickle the learner's fancy", is expected to help reduce learner apathy as we go along.

Before getting into how advertising can help, let's recount the reasons for learner apathy, from two different angles: first, the learner as a corporate employee and next, as an adult.

The Corporate e-Learner: The missing WIIFMe

Research indicates that the typical corporate e-Learner doesn't own up to e-Learning, for he or she believes that:

• This is all additional work to be done, for no pay and no benefit
• They have been doing well so far without this, and can continue to do so
• They can't find time to do this on top of their jobs
• Bosses will get upset with their taking time away from the job on hand to learn something that "may be useful"
• That these courses are anyways "boring"

To tackle these issues of W hat's I n I t F or Me (or WIIFMe), most corporate have adjusted their reward and recognition mechanisms to promote e-Learning. They have run awareness campaigns to educate the learners and their bosses about the power of e-Learning and the benefits that can accrue to the individual, the team and the corporate. The "boring" part has been tackled by jazzing up the delivery and deploying more and more technology to make e-Learning interesting. However, this has at best, worked in fits & starts.

The Adult e-Learner: The "Y" Generation

The global ICT explosion has changed forever the way we receive, process and act upon information. Reading habits are down and viewing habits are up - a host of TV channels, thousands of video games and the Internet, itself has changed the way adults basically think, assimilate information and learn.

• The expectation is one of action learning in an online context - not just learning from the course, but from others on the course about their experiences & learning - they are comfortable with e-mail more than mail, voice chats over the web than teleconferences and collaborative document creation online than working on task-forces
  
• The expectation is one of highly interactive learning - being used to action-oriented video games that call for hair-trigger responses, anything that is static, such as page-turners or pop-up-quizzes is seen as boring. Even simulation without successive challenges thrown in is not seen as engaging beyond a certain point
  
• The expectation is one of learning by experiencing - no more will just presentation of facts and concepts do - these need to be experienced and have to dovetail into past experiences to make fresh learning
  
• Finally, the expectation is one of learning by fooling around - highly regimented and structured learning is typically rebelled against and they expect to figure things out for themselves by trying out things and experimenting

So, what's missing from current generation of e-Learning? Let's see if our marketing brethren have some answers.

Can we learn from our Marketing brethren?

We cannot expect most learners to own-up a course right away. A chain of increasing interaction and engagement needs to take place, along the lines of:

• Attracting them to the course
• Interesting them to explore the course
• Creating a desire in them to get on with the course, and finally
• Getting them to own-up the course sufficiently to complete it

This is not very different from what our marketing friends need to do to get customers hooked to their products.

All marketing activities fall in line with the 4 Ps of marketing, originally propounded by Kotler:

• Product - designed to satisfy customer needs and also includes another P or packaged aesthetically
• Price - offering value for money
• Place - made available at the right place at the right time in the right format
• Promotion - making customers know about the product, selling the benefits and not features or attributes and attracting customers to buy now - including offering freebies, tasters etc.

Quite a few of the key principles that marketers deploy to cover these 4 Ps is deployed in e-Learning too. To list a few of these:

• Course design based on learner needs
• Aesthetically designed courses
• Various pricing options to ensure that the deal does not falter on price
• Being online, distribution is never an issue
• Free tasters to get learners to sample first
• Technology driven marketing of courses to the target audience and many more such activities

But, there is a lot to learn from our marketing friends, especially about " emotionally connecting to the customer ". This will become the key to engage the apathetic learner and make him or her into a motivated learner.

As it is, e-Learning suffers from low information levels, since it is adjusted to what a learner consciously can absorb or accommodate at any given point in time. This is partly offset by giving the learner access to a vast amount of content or courses that normally gets published. But there is little to no emotional connect with the learner, which is the basic minimum must to engage - if you ask any marketing person.

A number of lessons are available from advertising for incorporating in course development. Advertising communicates to the target customer, what a particular brand is all about. It either entices and encourages the customer to start-off an engagement or solidifies a pre-existing relationship. e-Learning is about communicating too and some of the principles of advertising can easily be adapted to make effective & engaging content.

Learning from the Science of Advertising: AIDA model

The key learning from the various models used to explain a buy decision is that the decision is not instantaneous. The process of how an ad works is said to be sequential:

Awareness - the ad must first gain the target consumer's attention

Interest - the ad must next arouse the consumer's interest for the product or service

Desire - the consumer must then desire the product or service

Action - finally leading up to a purchase by the consumer

AIDA is a very elementary model that has been expanded and modified to explain better how ads work and help draw up guidelines for ads. For instance, John Caple (a great copywriter) recommends following a sequence, when writing advertising copy:

• Get attention
• Hold attention
• Create desire
• Make it believable
• Prove it's a bargain
• Make it easy to buy
• Give a reason to buy now

These principles are not true of only product advertising. They are the same for any from of advertising, as clear from a recruitment advertising case that we have worked out in the past.

If we look at the recruitment ad above, that is looking to hire a team of software engineers, the copy, visual treatment, and headline - all of them individually may seem out of place. However, the project had to do with launching a new software tool before the competition did. The deadline was just over a month for 40+ engineers to deliver something a "sane" company would probably take half a year. The hires therefore had to be "insane" engineers if you could call them that - those who would probably work 20 hours out of 24 everyday, those who thrive on crazy challenges and those who felt stifled in existing software houses which go about doing things methodically. The ad worked very well indeed - 42 engineers were hired the same day that the ads were released across India; the team came on board soon and delivered the product well ahead of competition to become the first-movers in the space. This ad had all the components of AIDA -

• The visual and headline got instant attention due to the shock-value
• The overall treatment got the "right" targets interest ed in the company for it was different
• The copy highlighted that it was a difficult but exciting job and provoked desire by challenging only the "fittest" to apply; and
• The deadlines brought about a sense of urgency to act today

We have attempted to build in some of these principles learnt from our advertising practice into designing the content for the electronic courses that we create for our customers. The following case studies will help highlight our 4E model - Entice - Enamour - Engage - Enable, which is patterned after the AIDA model.

Deploying AIDA in e-Learning: 4E Model

The 4E model, similar to AIDA, is a sequential model to engage a learner.

• Entice - First, hook the attention of the learner and entice him or her to start-off the engagement process
• Enamour - Next, make them experience something different from what they expect to typically learn from an online course; so that they become interest ed in going forward
• Engage - All the content that follows in the learning hour has to create a desire in the learner to continue further and take them to completion
• Enable - All content deployed has to have an action-orientation, i.e. be linked to the learner's job; allow the learner to experiment, fool around and learn from it. This again reduces chances of a drop-off midway during the course

It is not always possible to achieve all 4 steps in one hour, especially so if the course is very packed or the learning objectives for the hour are too complex. Our experience shows that by sticking close to the model, we get far better responses from learners - in terms of enrolment and completion rates for voluntary programs and feedback such as "the course was useful" instead of "course was interesting".

Case: Problem Solving Tools & Techniques course for India's marquee software services firm

Step: Entice - software engineers are extremely comfortable with online learning. But they hate to enrol for any course, which does not increase their skills in coding or learning a new software language. In corporate environments where continuous education is voluntary and employees are expected to be self-actualised enough to enrol on their own, this can be a challenge. To hook such difficult learners, we challenged them to start-off on an animated game of helping a fish made up of matchsticks escape from a crocodile under time pressure. All they had to do was move three or four matchsticks to get the fish to face away from the croc. It would then escape. They were given three chances to solve it.

Step 2: Enamour
If the first task set was one of action-oriented problem solving, the next one was a mental challenge - or an "orientation" challenge, as shown below. At the end of this SCO, the learner was sufficiently challenged and interested in knowing more about the course and was proceeding to hit the next SCO in sequence.

Step 3 & 4: Engage and Enable
Every problem solving tool or technique was treated a little differently; but the underlying principle was one of allowing the user to learn to use the tool or provoke thinking by challenging and by connecting to their job. Some examples:

In a SCO on Covey's Quadrant that helps to prioritise problems, learners were encouraged to enter their own data on screens and allowed to publish a Covey's Quadrant. This way it connected to their daily job, showed them how to use such a tool and the importance of using such a tool instead of intuitively prioritising their problems.

To get the learners appreciate and accept "Is / Is-not Matrix" as a useful tool that they could deploy on the job, we put up an interesting but silly problem with seemingly no logical answer. Most learners enjoyed this challenge and could not figure out how to solve it. More importantly they could connect the technique to their daily job of de-bugging software code.

Many hundreds of engineers have been through the course and the feedback has been excellent, to get us a preferred e-Learning partner status.

Case: Course on Motion Pictures for MBA students of a Middle East based University

Step: Entice - since it had to do with movies, we worked on using a sequence of cinema posters to get them to start-off on the course.

Step: Engage
Activities were embedded within the course that allowed them to pick up key learning in an interesting format that also ensured that they would remember. A case in example is a Crossword that we built in to the course.

Some other examples:

• To engage learners of a 100-hour mandatory, online Insurance Agents Training course, we deployed a mascot in the form of an "oldish" looking agent. He turned out to be a mentor, a coach and a facilitator at various points of time during the course. This was a must from the course design, since the target learners were spread across the breadth and width of India, with most coming from small locations. The typical learner was High school pass, minimal English skills and culturally from the backwaters of India. Over 5000 agents have successfully completed the course with most of them now as certified agents after passing an offline certification exam conducted by a Government body
  
  
• For a course on business basics for managers of a corporate, we created a story-telling format for the course. We created a story with three friends from different companies getting together to form a new company and working their way through building up their business over 4 learning hours. This directly linked to the aspirations of most target learners since all of them dreaming of a unit of their own, sometime in the future. And got us motivated learners!

In conclusion:

There is a lot to learn from good advertising that pulls customers towards the product or service on offer. Similarly, good e-Learning must draw the learner towards the course. Adapting shamelessly from advertising can help, especially to emotionally connect to target learners. The 4E Model - Entice - Enamour - Engage - Enable is one such model to achieve the Big E - Educate learners!