I read an interview this morning on the e-learningguru.com website.  An excerpt of the part I found interesting is below. 

The basic idea is to use video clips from movies or TV to show a behavior that is being taught - a form of modeling that can be applied to e-Learning.  Travis Bradberry, Ph.D. found that the online training was more effective than the similar training delivered in a classroom.  And he also claims that using blended learning produced three times the positive impact of classroom training alone.

I'm wondering if instructional designers in this community has other data or conflicting views of the efficacy of blended learning versus self-paced e-Learning versus traditional classroom learning.

Here is the excerpt:

"Travis:  What we tend to hear when we're doing coaching and we're doing training when we explain to someone what the skill is, they always say, "well what does that look like?" What we do is we actually bring in snippets of Hollywood movies and television to actually show what we're talking about in action.

We show someone who's memorable, some character such as Lucille Ball or Nicole Kidman or even David Hasselhoff, the brilliant actor that he is, but he's memorable and people get to see that and they say that's right, there's a guy who is impulsively making too quick of a decision. Or someone who's really listening to that other person's feedback before they act. And then people tend to as they watch the clips think about themselves and the final stage there is there's a whole goal tracking system in there where you actually choose which actions you're going to take, it sends you automatic reminders, it will share your goals with other people that you choose and all that.

Kevin: I've heard anecdotally that those automatic reminders can dramatically improve training results. Do you have any data or know of any studies or anything on that yourself?

Travis: Well we did a big project that's actually ongoing with Fortune Brands. They had a 360 in place and they really sort of want to take it to the next level, the part of the leadership development initiative. So what we did for them was we created the e-learning component to this 360, we put it up on-line, we added the video clips and the learning activities to teach the leaders their competency model and then we had the goal tracking and the follow up.

We measured how impacted people were who used this stuff and those who went through the formal training and used the on-line learning a hundred percent were impacted and those who just went through the classroom program were impacted, I think it was something like 38% had a positive impact. And the exciting thing was the number was actually higher for those who just used the on-line learning. Because there were some people who wouldn't do the classroom training or wouldn't do the follow up coaching but they had the time or the motivation to just use the on-line learning. And there was a similar impact to actually having them in the classroom.

Kevin: That's great so that whole debate over what's better, is there any difference, I mean you're getting at least the same results if not better through e-learning than through the workshops.

Travis: Yeah, and we're finding the you know I think sort of the truth. When I read all the articles and different things out there, I think the best thing you can do is provide blended learning. Get someone in the classroom, find a way to get them to follow up after the fact, and with the amount of time that people are on the internet and on email today it's a learning process and it's real interesting to find that the people who really participated in the program, that showed up in the classroom, that got an executive coach and participated in on-line learning, I mean literally a hundred percent of them were positively impacted and it was three times the number who were positively impacted that just attended the classroom training.