As I was clicking through the news feeds on our community, I spotted this article.  In the posting, Jane Knight is attributed with this idea:

"...she lamented that people still don’t see beyond the idea of e-learning as a formal course. 'E-learning is so much more than that, it’s about collaboration, communication between learners and the sharing of knowledge and experiences…people think of e-learning as formal courses and all this other stuff as something else'. She noted that it may be a definition problem: 'E-learning is just not the right word anymore…it’s got more to do with e-working and performance support'."

In many ways I agree with Ms. Knight.  Corporate learning, from my experience, has more to do with walking into someone's office and asking them a question than going to a training class.  It is when we are stuck on a particular problem that needs to be finished by the end of business that we are forced into a real learning mode.  Motivation to learn is 80% of the success of learning.  Or probably of accomplishing anything.  Desire, focus, commitment are all very important to achieving anything in life.  Goals are just daydreams unless you have enough desire to spur you to action to achieve the goals.

It is the same with e-Learning.  Getting a job done that makes our boss happy is a primary motivator to learn.  If e-Learning helps me get my job done, then it will be an effective learning method for me. 

Thus, I believe the question to consider when discussing Ms. Knight's conclusion is whether e-working or performance support are included in the definition of e-Learning.  The corporate training people that I work with don't use the term that way.  As I network with my clients, ASTD members, ISPI members, etc., I do not hear them use terms like e-working and performance support in context of e-Learning.  And I think that is actually what Ms. Knight is saying.  She believes they should start including collaboration and communication as a part of e-Learning.

A few years ago one of my clients, a vice president of a Fortune 200 company, presented me with his concept of "informal learning".  It included ideas that could be supported with online tools.  For example, "Ask the Expert" would be a dedicated discussion forum where a few key gurus in the company would monitor questions submitted from employees.  There would be numerous forums - each focused on one area of subject matter expertise.  The employees getting stuck on a problem at work would turn to this forum and ask for help to get the job done.  It sounds great.  I cheerfully endorsed the new technical solution to a corporate problem.  I even accepted the term kicked around for this process, "Corporate Knowledge Management."

However, in reality it appears that the forums didn't accomplish the objective.  Mainly because executives did not build in the culture and incentives necessary to make such an online solution successful.  It wasn't a technology issue.  It was a management issue.  And partly a political issue.

Managers were unwilling to assign their experts to the job.  They were disincented to allocate time from their departmental employees to contribute to the overall good of the corporation.  Therefore, no experts were available to answer the questions. 

And individuals that had the desire to be an expert were not compensated to provide the answers.  Their workload was already in excess of what they could get done in 40 hours.  Very few of them would stay late or work on the forums from home to answer questions submitted in desperation by employees grappling with a real job problem.

The death of "collaboration and communication" in context of learning came at the hands of management.  Performance support with online systems wasn't defeated by the technology.  The culture doesn't support it. 

That's why I hesitate to adopt Ms. Knight's new definition.  E-Learning is accepted in companies today.  They see it as a cost-saving mechanism that provides an excellent, measurable, available way to provide the knowledge that employees need.  Probably more importantly, formal e-Learning courses can contain exams that provide scores.  And managers can use the scores as something tangible and culturally acceptable to track progress.  Instructional experts may question the efficacy of such testing, but your typical corporate executive will readily endorse the scores as a viable method of seeing if employees are learning.  It is culturally acceptable because that is how we all made it through school.  That is how we all get certifications. 

E-learning is culturally a formal process.  Changing that definition will take years, in my opinion.  So I would advocate that we try to implement other informal learning tools using more clever terminology that is culturally acceptable.  I personally like "informal learning".  Our community is an example of informal learning by communication and collaboration of e-Learning practitioners.

However, without the motivation to contribute to the community, the communication falls flat.  It is the same fundamental problem within the corporation of not providing incentives.

If anyone has any suggestions for motivating people to write, share, communicate, collaborate, please let me know.  Tools for informal learning are nice, but they put the responsibility on me to take action to actually Utilize them.

My conclusion:  I'm not ready to change the definition of e-Learning just yet.

The full article can be found here: http://www.clickpress.com/releases/Detailed/7073005cp.shtml