Here's to eLearning! Employees can sign-on any time, learn at their own pace, review content that is particularly difficult for them a couple of times and take that final exam with a glass of wine at home! This is eLearning at its best. It is a win / win situation for both employee and employer. Everybody should be happy.

So why isn't everybody happy? Course developers that put together the content for sometimes hundreds, if not thousands, of online students have not been trained in eLearning course development. The end result is that you have the same paper manual, probably broken up a little differently for the online system, just now it's online. Perhaps in the "old" days, there was an instructor attached to this paper manual ... now it's just the manual - page after page of text with the occasional graphic. With an instructor, at least you could get a little interactivity. Now, it's dry as toast and a student's retention level is about as long as a kid in kindergarten.

eLearning can be fun, challenging and, if properly executed, a student's recall will be FAR over and above a regular text book and even a classroom experience. eLearning material can be presented with lots of color, interactive quizzes and questions, video, audio, just to name a few tools that can be used to catch a student's attention and imagination. So what's the problem? This sounds great, let's do it! The problem is, is that all of those tools for imaginative learning take thought and time. And as we all know, time translates into money. So whether we are talking about a small business or a large corporation, the training department is always the first place where the budget is cut and the last place extra money allocated. I have seen it time and time again. Managers will pay lip service to how extremely important it is to have well trained employees, how the company benefits, etc. ... but when the rubber hits the road, training gets thrown out the window.

The end result? We have a lot of eLearning out there that is very poorly presented, poorly received and badly regurgitated. hmmm ... I wonder why that is?