The polarised debate 'face to face V's e-learning' Is outrageously outdated – Face to face quite simply doesn't work. It’s no secret that classroom courses are expensive, outdated and for the most part considered useless. Over 10 years ago, the American Society of Training & Development surveyed 5,000 learners who had attended a short course in the preceding 12 months. They asked them whether they had used the skills they had been sent on the course to learn since attending the course. 93 per cent, that’s 4,650 people out of 5,000, answered a blunt and resounding no. That was in the last millennium and have face to face trainers reflected on this and amended their practice as a result? Not that I’ve seen.

Stuck in the 90’s?
This monumental waste of money and resources continues because of the vested interests of the internal training teams and those external trainers who swan around the country’s conference rooms with a hard drive full of PowerPoint and wacky games (supplemented by foam rubber stress balls in interesting shapes because a polyurethane tortoise always adds value to the learning experience).  The touchy feely opportunities to ‘resonate emotionally’ with each other keep many people in black turtle necks and expensive loafers, after all, when you’re on your feet all day, comfy footwear is a must. 

The low rent Paul McKenna’s of the corporate world are changing our behaviour one water cooler at a time and my, how grateful we must all be.  Except are they really changing anyone’s behaviour? Numerous pieces of research from the 1980’s to the present day have shown that significant amounts of the world’s training budget have no discernible impact on performance and yet, we continue to spend the bulk of it on booking trainers, hotels, data projectors and putting people in canoes because despite preaching change, we don’t want to go through that pain ourselves.

Of course I’m exaggerating slightly here, but the polarised debate about face to face versus e-learning is so outrageously out of date, that those who want to say that e-learning is rubbish and that we need more opportunities to sit in a hotel off the M4 to connect with our inner juggler, are doing themselves and the world of learning and development no favours.

Keep up with the e-learning debate
People might have missed it, but we’ve evolved beyond the ‘e-learning is cheaper and can do anything you can do in a classroom’ argument, into a much more focused and intelligent debate about what e-learning can achieve and what face to face programmes need to do to significantly impact behaviour and practice.

Plus, most of us in the e-learning field have made efforts to improve learning and development by using e-learning components judiciously alongside experiential face to face courses, adopting the traceability of digital learning to ensure only those who have completed online pre-requisites actually get to walk through the training room door.

For instance, over the last 10 years I have been involved in using actors to create realistic staff or customer scenarios live with groups, using music as a way of investigating team dynamics, planning a ballet production and presenting it to a company of dancers, using war-game style simulations and deep dive investigations of local issues in field visits and interviews with government ministers.  I have set up work based tasks and recruited coaches and mentors to support individuals undertaking projects which test their new skills in the real world and give them an opportunity to show what they can achieve, when given the responsibility and accountability to deliver.

Does learning really impact employees’ lives?
These experiences are potentially and genuinely life changing and cannot be replicated online.  However, they can’t happen in a classroom either if an essential part of the learning process, the knowledge acquisition part, needs to be downloaded via live presentations and discussions.  In an environment when time spent on development is inevitably and rightly under pressure, suggesting that we should reject the opportunity to use a major development tool to support the learning process seems to be short sighted at best and self serving at worst.  Yes, there is rubbish e-learning out there, produced by people who understand bits and bytes, but who fundamentally fail to understand learning or even basic communication skills.

The reality for many learners is that a blended learning programme which uses face to face only for those activities and experiences which can’t be delivered through other means, by which I mainly mean online through tracked, multimedia e-learning programmes rather than click through e-reading, is more valuable than the majority of the face to face experiences they currently have to endure.

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