May 28, 2013
As practiced today, e-Learning has failed to meet the ROI requirements of business. Consequently, e-Learning is being successfully challenged by streaming video, games and simulations as training media of choice. Why? Three major reasons. First, because of the repurposed PowerPoints — being passed off as e-Learning. These pseudo courses are never even completed by two-thirds of the trainees assigned to take them. They are full of lots of words and information —...
May 23, 2013
Flew home last night from Dallas and the “2013 ASTD Convention & Expo.” The best training Expo I’ve ever attended — and, I’ve been to a lot of them. The reason is simple. Today, the values inherent in well-conceived training programs are respected throughout the world. With organizational representatives from nearly one hundred countries in attendance at the conference, training has gone global! As more and more jobs and growth become “local”...
May 17, 2013
On Saturday, I will be flying to Dallas for the ASTD International Conference & Exposition (May 19-22). For more than fifty years ASTD has been hosting a conference and I can happily say that I’ve attended more than half of them. This is, by far, the largest training event anywhere — with visitors from around the world. “ASTD 2013,” describes itself as “the premier event for workplace learning and development professionals, with...
May 14, 2013
To understand the power of e-Learning, it is instructive to look at the visual learning technologies that preceded it. The first generic industrial training video course was produced by NUS Corporation (Rockville, Maryland) in 1973. It was produced for the nuclear power industry and was in black and white, mastered on a two inch reel-to-reel video recorder. Two years later the first color generic video course was released for the same market....
May 9, 2013
Maintenance and Operations training for America’s workforce has never been more necessary. And, the opportunities for more effective learning have never been greater! Why? Because the evolving video-based learning technologies have made more and better learning a reality, while increasing necessary retention time. And, that result gives us both better on-the-job performance — and, increased corporate profitability. Mechanical Maintenance, Electrical Maintenance, and Instrumentation Training are all better attuned to job and task...
May 7, 2013
In one of the most apropos columns I have recently read, “Bring Back the Apprentice,” published in THE WASHINGTON POST, an alternative to formal education is succinctly argued. The authors, Stuart E. Eizenstat (former chief White House domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter and undersecretary of commerce for international trade in the Clinton administration) and Robert I. Lerman (an economics professor at American University and a fellow at the Urban Institute)...
May 2, 2013
Certainly, the training requirements of today’s workplace are intensifying. A recent National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) undertaken by the Department Of Education has reported that, “Growing numbers of individuals are expected to be able to attend to multiple features of information in lengthy and sometimes complex displays, to compare and contrast information, to integrate information from various parts of a text or document, to generate ideas and information based on what they...
