aLearning: A Trail Guide to Association eLearning

By Ellen Behrens

"aLearning: A Trail Guide to Association eLearning" is just what it says it is -- a guide that will help you: -- Discover new, affordable elearning options. -Match content to the appropriate online deployment option. -Integrate social media options into your curriculum. -Gain leadership support. -Estimate revenue and expenses so you can plan a workable budget. -Market your alearning initiative and assess its success. Packed with charts, activities, and step-by-step instructions for applying what you're reading, you'll have completed a workable plan by the time you've finished the 270+ pages. Based on years of award-winning experience in adult and online learning, Ellen Behrens brings her association-specific perspective to this important guide, the result of her own successful launch of an association's online learning program and her previous corporate background in developing training for the Web.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257286447

Book preview

needed.

INTRODUCTION

WHY A STRATEGY? WHY A TRAIL GUIDE?

Settling into a booth in a local Middle Eastern restaurant for a casual lunch meeting, we set aside the menus in favor of the luncheon buffet, dishing up kibbe, hashwe, chicken schawarma, and the latest education projects at our respective associations. Well, I said, I’ve already started my list of lessons learned from our first online course.

Our trade association, with over 600 institutional members and more than 400 industry members, representing more than 5000 individuals, was launching its first stand-alone, totally online course in another month. Despite experience on my previous job developing elearning for a Web company, the project had surprised me on a few counts.

My lunch companion, a colleague at a comparable association, set her fork aside. Online learning wasn’t the reason we had arranged the lunch, but it was clearly a topic of interest to her. Like what? she asked.

Well, if I were to name one thing off the top of my head, it would be legal, I said. Allow enough money in your budget to cover a legal review.

She pushed her plate aside to pull a pad of paper out of her bag. She found a pen, poised it over her paper, and looked at me like an eager student. How much do you think we should allow for that, if we decide to do our own online course?

Later the moment returned to me, and with it a startling realization: despite her years of experience in her association, the last several as a doctorate-bearing director, online learning was brand new to her. And she wasn’t the only one facing the likelihood that, on top of her established expertise in adult learning theory, instructional design methodology, facilitation skills, and her association’s industry, she would have to learn yet another specialty to serve her membership – elearning for associations, or alearning.

Since my conversation with her, others in similar situations have called with questions:

Where do we start?

Will we need an LMS?

What should we put in an RFP?

If you’re thinking this has nothing to do with you, you’re wrong.

Data from ASAE and The Center in 2006 showed associations plan to shift resources from face-to-face events to online events and to grow the elearning sector as much as 27%. A separate survey on elearning in non-profits conducted in 2006 by Isoph/LearnSomething resulted in even higher numbers: 61% of respondents projected increases in elearning, compared to 56% who said they planned to increase training and education resources overall.

If your association doesn’t have an online initiative yet, it will.

Resist the impulse to assume it won’t affect you if you’re in a small organization. According to the study, associations least likely to have a fully-dedicated education or professional development staff member are those most likely to expand their elearning offerings. Of the nearly 7000 associations reporting data in the ASAE report, the two demographic clusters reporting the highest expected increases in online learning were those with 3-5 and 6-10 full-time employees. Of associations in the first category, only 13% have a fully-dedicated education specialist on staff; of the larger-staffed organizations, 36% report having a fully-dedicated education specialist. And since ASAE notes that the small organizations (the groups detailed above included) report their data in proportionately smaller levels, the real numbers of smaller associations without an education specialist on staff could be much higher in than the data reported, and those planning to venture into online learning might be much higher as well.

And just as soon as you catch up to all of this, you’re going to be asked to figure out how your association can leverage Web 2.0 for your educational programs. Assembling a strategy for Learning 2.0 that will shuffle wikis, blogs, podcasting, v-casting, online forums, discussion lists, and other Web tools will require you to make a series of decisions about options that are constantly evolving, with ever-changing possibilities.

The data is clear: the movement is afoot. If this is not your world now, it will be soon.

Who Will Benefit From Reading this Book?

Even before the elearning course my association developed went live, my phone started to ring. E-mails popped into my Inbox. Word had already gone out that we were immersed in online learning, and people wanted answers to questions they believed I could answer:

John, an IT manager was dropped into elearning despite his lack of training in adult learning, instructional theory, or any exposure to online learning as a methodology. Why was he suddenly at the head of his association’s initiative? Because he was the go-to guy for technology, someone in leadership believed he knew all about online learning. It’s online, right?

Carson, the membership coordinator for an association too small to staff an education professional, had no idea where to start with online learning, but was given the directive to do something by his board of directors.

Germaine, an education director with twenty years of experience in developing effective live learning opportunities, knew the types of online learning she experienced weren’t the right answer for her members, but didn’t know if other possibilities existed that could fit her need.

Judy, a contracted association executive whose expertise was in managing multiple small associations, wondered how she could leverage elearning across them.

This book is intended to answer their questions, and to help all other association executives who have been sent into the woods of online learning without a compass.

Others who will find this book of value include online learning industry representatives who have little insight into the particular challenges associations face with elearning, and association consultants who are being asked more and more often to lead their clients into elearning, but have little experience and expertise in this area.

If you’re an association executive with direct or oversight responsibilities for the educational functions of your organization, this book will help define your needs and online direction. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that because you know what it takes to offer successful face-to-face programs that you’ll know how to implement effective alearning programs. They are as different from each other as urban street walking is from trekking Mount Everest.

What’s the Best Way to Read This Book?

aLearning: A Trail Guide for an Association’s eLearning Strategy will take you step-by-step through the decision-making process of developing an online learning strategy in the same way a good trail guide can get you through the woods or up the mountain.

You should read each chapter in order, following the process as you go for the best results. Developing your strategy requires you to complete certain preparatory steps, and shortcutting the process means risking the outcome of your online initiative. Even better, if you can sit on your hands long enough to scan the book through once before acting on it, you’ll get the advantage of seeing the entire picture before you start putting the puzzle pieces together. Some steps are more useful in certain situations than others, and deciding which steps to follow and which you can safely skip requires a full understanding of the process.

Periodically you’ll come across an Activity. Each is designed to help you process what you’ve just read and to find the best ways to apply the information to your own situation. Some activities will ask you to recreate charts and tables used in the book, so keep a sharp pencil and plenty of paper handy – you’ll need them. Even better, save your notes and create your own charts electronically so you can manipulate them in ways that will best meet your needs. Any activities you skipped when you went through the book the first time should be completed the second-time. Many of them build on the responses to previous activities, so make and keep careful and thorough notes, using the activity number so you can refer to them later.

What’s Covered?

Hundreds, if not thousands, of books have been published about online learning, but none of them focuses on elearning for associations. The challenges of providing educational programs – face-to-face or online – within associations are myriad. Your learners are individuals who pay dues to belong to your organization and expect you to deliver targeted professional development opportunities they can access for free or the lowest fee possible and at the highest level of quality. Developing educational events that rely on volunteer subject-matter experts, balancing various membership constituencies, securing funding within the non-profit sector, and other issues add to the complexity faced by any association’s leadership. For those reasons alone, books on online learning for the corporate environment – while helpful on many levels – won’t address the specific hurdles you need to anticipate and overcome.

aLearning: A Trail Guide for an Association’s eLearning Strategy details a step-by-step process for defining your association’s educational needs and level of readiness for online learning.

It covers just enough of the technology involved so you’ll have what you need – without overwhelming you with too much jargon and geek-speak.

You’ll learn how to map your content to the best delivery method, organize an effective team, manage your volunteers, estimate a budget, get buy-in, and market your online program.

You’ll be guided through a basic resource assessment to determine whether you can – and should – develop any or all of your online offerings in-house or whether to outsource to a vendor.

You’ll also learn about the standard custom content development method so you’ll know what to expect from your vendor, which will help you write strong Requests for Proposals (RFPs), effectively evaluate the responses and select the vendor, and work with the vendor to develop the online offering.

It includes activities for applying what you have read to your own situation so you can make immediate connections between concepts and real-world implementation.

You’ll find this book approaches strategy from a broad perspective that embraces many of the elements more often seen in business planning than strategic planning. This intentional blending and blurring provides a comprehensive means for designing your initiative while anticipating hurdles and challenges that could jeopardize a successful program. Regardless of the terminology you prefer or use in your association, by the time you reach the back cover of this book, you will have the pieces you need to formulate a plan that addresses strategy and anticipates business issues, from budgeting to implementation. You can rearrange them any way necessary to provide your association with the documentation it requires.

What’s Not Covered?

Excellent coverage on these topics is available elsewhere via magazines, books, podcasts, and on various Web sites and blogs, and won’t be repeated here:

adult learning theory

instructional design theory

behavioral theory related to learning in general and elearning in particular

development techniques, tips, and tricks (when and how to use graphics to illustrate a point, which authoring tools to use when building an online course, etc.)

aside from being included in the chapter on mapping content, this book will not delve deeply into online communities, wikis, blogs, etc. (see Mark Rosenberg’s book Beyond ELearning and the many blogs and other sites that cover Web 2.0 for full treatment of these online options)

legal advice

the nuts and bolts of certification other than to provide food for thought when it comes to offering certification courses online

Having Said All That…

Online learning is growing and won’t go away, so if you haven’t made peace with it yet, don’t wait much longer. Even associations with a strong culture of connecting socially will move into online learning if for no other reason than to save the association and its members costs.

Just what you needed to hear, right? In addition to all you’ve learned about education, learning, training and facilitation, and meeting planning, you’ll now have to add yet another specialty to your portfolio. But it’s really not so bad.

You don’t have to know everything there is to know about elearning – that’s why you bought this book. Use this trail guide and you’ll stay on the path to developing your online strategy and making the first steps toward implementing it.

Ready? Let’s get started!

PART ONE

TRAIL SIGNS, TRAIL GEAR, AND MAPPING

This section of the book prepares you for the elearning hike. What you need to know about elearning and its related technology in general are covered so you will be able to make informed decisions when you head down the strategy-making trail.

CHAPTER 1

TRAIL SIGNS – ELEARNING BASICS AND CHOICES

Our online course had been rolled out to our membership with terrific fanfare and great immediate success. Word among other associations was spreading, and I knew we’d learned a lot that we could share with others. I was thrilled when ASAE and The Center accepted my proposal to present at one of their conferences. The other presenters and I prepared via conference call, doing our best to whittle away at a huge topic. We devised a presentation structure that would allow the audience to drive the conversation. We rehearsed, tried out ideas, suggested others.

The presentation fell flat.

Maybe you were in the audience that day at the conference and saw something peculiar happen. You weren’t sure what, just that the four people in the front of the room talking about online learning seemed disjointed. They tried to articulate asynchronous and synchronous learning – whatever those are – and tried to give examples, but none of it was coming together. You got the strong sense that if it had, you would have learned just what you needed in that session to get your online learning initiative started in your association. Instead, you left frustrated and confused. The answers were right there in the room, or at least most of them seemed to be, yet they stayed just out of touch, elusive as a butterfly, and you without a net.

I can’t speak for the other presenters, but I can tell you what happened to me. In the midst of the presentation, right there in the front of the room, looking out at 60 or so people who were looking back at me, I realized that the four of us were talking about online learning in at least four different ways.

Despite all of our preparation, we hadn’t done the most essential thing of all: we had not defined our terms. Asynchronous learning, I realized – right at that moment – was something I’d thought meant the same thing to everyone else, but it didn’t. If there’s more than one way to offer online learning, there’s more than one way to define it, more than one way to confuse it, and more than one way to miss making the right choice about it.

Speaking the Same Language

Are Webinars and Webcasts the same thing? Is there more than one way to offer asynchronous learning? What does asynchronous mean, anyway?

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the terminology and jargon, but the important thing to remember is that in any conversation you’re having – whether it be with a colleague, staff member, or vendor – you need to make sure you’re talking about the same things in the same ways. Don’t ever assume that when you say asynchronous or online course that the person you’re talking with will picture the same thing. Give up the notion that working to define and describe what you’re discussing will make you look less informed. On the contrary, you’ll demonstrate that you’re aware of how easily – and often – things are misunderstood in this field.

Some excellent resources are available on the Web – glossaries and wikis that define and describe the terms and references in elearning. For our purposes, this chapter will cover references used in this book as well as descriptions of fundamental delivery modalities. And because trail signs give you information about how much time you can expect the route to take or the trail’s distance, this chapter will also include some basic industry standards for development time and level of investment for various types of modalities. These are key resources you’ll need when it comes time to make choices about which modality is most appropriate, and how to budget for them.

Key Terms and References

The three primary types of online learning are:

Synchronous – training that occurs when the instructor and participants are in the session at the same time (though not necessarily in the same place)

Asynchronous – training that occurs when the instructor and participants are in a session at different times (and usually in different places)

Blended – a combination of synchronous and asynchronous training

Synchronous. Classroom training is synchronous training: the instructor and learners convene at the same time, in the same place, to cover educational materials together. The most well-known example of online synchronous training is the Webinar, which is when a speaker makes a presentation over the Web, usually using PowerPoint, while others watch the presentation and listen to the speaker live -- in real time.

Asynchronous. The earliest asynchronous courses were correspondence courses. Once very popular with individuals serving in the military and other adult learners who wanted to squeeze their education into busy schedules, correspondence courses were offered by schools that sent books and materials, including tests, to the students through the mail. Students completed the readings and mailed assignments back to the correspondence school. Completing these courses could take some time, mostly because of the delay caused by sending and receiving everything through the standard mail service. Later these courses became known as distance learning, but they were very similar in structure, though overnight mail sped up the process.

When the Web and personal computers became more available, distance learning moved online. Over the years, a few different types of online learning evolved. Instructor-led online learning became popular with higher education and is still the dominant form of elearning in academia. These self-paced, facilitated courses, like traditional correspondence courses, provide textbooks, manuals, and often other articles or Web-available readings (blogs, for example) that learners are required to read and be ready to discuss. The online course system provides ways for students to login and participate in discussions by typing their comments. These chat sessions can be synchronous or asynchronous, depending on what the instructor has decided is most valuable. This interpersonal exchange is intended to emulate as closely as possible the same sort of exchange that goes on in a live classroom when the instructor poses a question or issues a challenge, and the learners respond to it or to each other.

The most common type of asynchronous training among associations is what’s often referred to as a recorded or archived Webinar. When the software or service used to broadcast the Webinar includes the option to record the live program, that session is captured so it can be replayed later. When someone accesses it, they’re viewing it at a time that’s different than when it was originally offered, a time that no longer provides for the live presence of the presenter, so it is asynchronous.

Another, less known form of asynchronous training has been popular within corporations for many years. Some would argue it’s more expensive than archived Webinars, but the format provides much more flexibility and more effective instructional treatment of complex content. It’s more visual than the blended learning used in academia, and integrates images and sound more effectively than Webinars. This type of asynchronous training has been called self-paced, non-facilitated training because no live facilitator or instructor is involved. The instruction is embedded in the content. Developing such a course is much more time-consuming because anything an instructor would be expected to do, say, or show as an illustration, demonstration, or example must be included in the content of the course. Any questions learners might ask must be anticipated and built into the course as well.

Blended learning. Blended learning is just what it sounds like – a blending of the other two primary types of learning in any of several different ways. A common form of blended learning – particularly among associations – is the same format used by higher education. Learners access readings and participate in chat discussions using an online course platform. That online chat component might be synchronous or asynchronous; most instructors require some of each. This keeps learners connected to the instructor and to each other, fulfilling the need many students have for social interaction in a learning situation. But because learners drive their own pace through the materials, the course also has a strong asynchronous element to it. This combination makes for a blended learning environment.

Another way of blending learning is to provide an asynchronous introduction that is required for completion prior to an in-person classroom or field-training event. For example, a department store that requires new-hires to complete an asynchronous course covering the company’s mission and vision, employee responsibilities, store policies, and other concepts, knows that when those new employees show up for their in-person training that certain rules and assumptions can apply. Everyone is on the same page from the start, and time in the classroom, showroom, or warehouse is that much more efficient.

Each of these fundamental online learning structures requires different levels of technological support, expertise, and investment. Each requires a different amount of time to design, develop, and make available. Most importantly, each fits a particular content type better than the other (more on this in Chapter 8).

How Much Time is Needed?

Imagine that you have struck out on a particularly interesting hike. The trail guide tells you it will loop you through a verdant forest along an ever-ascending ridge and come out at the top of a mountain with a grand ocean vista before you wind your way back down the other side of the ridge to the original trail head. You can see from the trail map that off the main path are short spurs where you can get closer to the ridge for views along the way. Sounds great! But how long will this hike take? Should you pack a sandwich? Bring rain gear in case the fluffy clouds overhead turn dark and ominous? The trail guide says the hike is a mile and a half. But that doesn’t entirely answer your question. The answer to how long the hike will take depends, of course, on many things: how fast do you walk? How steep is the ascent? How long do you spend at the various overlooks or at the top of the mountain when you get there? Do you like to stop along the way to look more closely at plants or smell the flowers? Will you pause to take pictures?

As Einstein said, time is relative.

Even so, some general guidelines can help you. Remember, preface these sentences with Generally speaking.

Webinars take less time to develop than the other options, especially if you hire a company to conduct the preparation and live aspects of the event (more about making this choice in Chapter 9).

Self-paced, non-facilitated asynchronous training takes the most time to create; the more sophisticated the content presentation, the longer the development time.

Blended events require more systems set-up than the other two, but once the system that will serve as the platform for the sessions is in place, the courses generally take about the same amount of time to coordinate as face-to-face classroom events.

Asynchronous Training, Interactivity, and Timelines

If you have a topic that would benefit from special treatment to make it interactive and available to your members 24/7/365 (24 hours each day, seven days a week, 365 days per year), consider hiring a company to develop the course for you. This type of course works best for content that won’t change much over time so you