Jeevan Joshi from KnowledgeWorking, and the other organisers did a good job preparing the conference by blogging topics which ultimately form the unconference output. The day was not expensive (another plus) and there were many experienced, deep thinking and credible presenters and participants at the conference.

What was disappointing (and I appreciate this has been acknowledged by the organising committee) was that the collaborative discussions were only 20 minutes long. Each were facilitated, and I only went to 3 of the 20 streams. For my streams, by the time the facilitator introduced the topic and gave us their opinion about it (which I didn’t expect at an unconference), 10 minutes had passed. Each topic was accompanied by about 4-6 deep questions. Twenty minutes was hardily long enough for 1 question. The lack of time seemed to encourage a whole lot of motherhood statements that were not explored to uncover the ‘why’.

A speaker raised the issue of needing to develop the skills of critical thinking in our organisations. We cannot expect critical thinking of the topics raised at each stream in 20 minutes. Perhaps next unconference the stream sessions could be 50 minutes for 1 question with 10 minutes to share the synthesis of the discussion with the rest of the audience. (I must say, the main reason why I am pursuing the completion of my EdD is to develop my skill in critical thinking – I appreciate it is an acquired skill).

I listened to a few of the 10 minute ‘soap box’ in the open session, and I thought this was a good initiative. It helped to make real the issues, as speakers were talking from a case study perspective, and illustrated the diversity of organisational milieu.

Organisational learning milieu is diverse

As an observer, I did notice 2 anomalies:

1. There were 16 stream facilitators, and only two were women. I’m not use to seeing this skewed representation of women in learning professional gatherings. I wondered why this was so?

2. The facilitators and audience was strongly represented by the learning fraternity of financial services organisations (i.e. banks). I appreciate fnancial services have been leaders in evolving learning practice for a long time, often out of legislative necessity (e.g. the early adoption of e-learning). However, while such learning ‘mature’ organisations perhaps have the luxury to critically evaluate important topics such as learning effectiveness, embedded learning and accountability, many of my clients are just grappling with operationalising e-learning. Of course, the ‘big questions’ are important to all organisational learning professionals. But many of my clients are still working through achieving staff equality in network speed and LMS access. So, when topics such as learning effectiveness is discussed, there is a world of difference in what needs to be done to make it effective (i.e. embedding learning into the workplace versus just getting e-learning to work on a remote desktop).

The disparity of organisational learning in Australia

I left the unconference more concerned than ever about the disparity in organisational learning strategy and operations. Learning and development budgets are being cut, there is a shortage of tertiary qualified learning practitioners, and the qualifications themselves being offered by RTOs and universities are doing no favours to organisational learning capability development. I see the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’  (i.e. those who can afford to evolve capability development with new initiatives, new technologies, new aproaches to evolve culture and climate, versus those who cannot) widening, and this will be a critical issue in Australia’s workforce capability strategy and lifelong learning.

So, thanks to the organisers and stream leaders of the unconference. I am sure scheduling will be different next year. And, perhaps we will get some real understanding of ‘why’ and tangible outputs that will move our learning and development fraternity towards new thinking and new policy.

Top line tips for developing an e-learning strategy

1. Talk with other organisations about their strategy – their reasons for implementing a strategy, what’s worked, what hasn’t, and the resources required to implement and sustain their strategy.

2. Conduct 1:1 or focus interviews with the e-learning strategy touch-points in your organisation:

• Business strategy requirements today and future e.g. responsiveness, competition, changing consumer demands, legislation changes
• Human capability requirements today and future e.g. retiring workforce, Gen Y retention, staff ability to ‘unlearn’, ‘relearn’ and manage rapid information, cultural and climate readiness to self-manage learning and participate in a social network
• Manager requirements e.g. getting new staff upskilled as quickly as possible, helping managers in their role as coach
• End-user expectations e.g. perception of e-learning, social media – what makes learning technologies useful and easy to use, engaging and reusable
• IT e.g. pipeline technologies, challenges to standard operating environment
• Information management and/or knowledge management e.g. knowledge retention and information maintenance and renewal

3. Learning technologies and informal learning in a strategy has removed the role demarcation between learning and development, knowledge management, information management and information technology. Your strategy should ideally be all encompassing. Consultation with all areas of the business is paramount.

4. Ask yourself the bigger question Do we have everything in place to enable learning to effectively and efficiently occur in our organisation? All six elements in the figure below need to be addressed for a strategy to succeed.

5.  Your first priority solution may not necessarily be a LMS for e-learning courses. It my be social media for project team sharing and collaboration, or a video library to manage expert knowledge. Be sure of your strategic priorities.

6. When you have decided upon your strategic e-learning solution, be sure to prioritise quality over cost wherever you can. A poor user experience will railroad your strategy as quickly as you implemented it.

7. Your strategy needs to be translate into a tangible Action Plan.  Your action plan will need to encompass a change plan and communication plan. Your earlier focus group outcomes will help you to develop this.

Useful resources for e-learning strategy development

Towards Maturity 

Jane Hart, in particular Learning in the Social Workplace

Bersin and Associates, in particular the Enterprise Learning Framework

Brandon Hall

Please feel free to comment and share your approach to developing an e-learning strategy.

The same can be said about role-based performance support tools.

In their landmark Knowledge Management text Learning To Fly, Collison and Parcel talk about the 2 questions that people ask of themselves when they have a need that they must satisfy:

1. What do others know? How do I find them?
2. What information is available? Where & how do I find it?

Performance support is about providing staff with access to the right information and people ’just-in-time’, at the point of need. Performance support tools need to be placed in staff workflow, where the ‘need’ arises. And the best people to know where the information should be placed is the decentralised business unit or department.

Mmmm…how often do centralised functions assume all staff can and do access the intranet? Often I find not every staff accesses, uses or even knows how to navigate the intranet…for a range of reasons.

If you are thinking about developing a strategy of enabling and improving staff capability through performance support, be sure to work hand in hand with those at the coalface. They will help you to embed the right tools on the right platform for the right reasons.

You can download our free e-learning tutorials from iTunes.

Or read the podcast 21 transcript.

Or watch the entire free e-learning tutorial series on our E-Learning Academy YouTube Channel.

Episode 21 is embedded below.