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DON'T LOSE SIGHT OF FACE TO FACE (Broker's Monthly - August 2007)

Those of us who provide training services to the insurance sector have witnessed a disturbing change over the past few years: brokers and insurers in ever growing numbers are turning to e-learning to train their staff!

What's so disturbing about that? In one sense, nothing. E-learning is a convenient, cost-effective and flexible way of learning - and its growing use reflects the increasingly technological lives we all lead. But could there be a downside to the meteoric rise of online learning?

E-learning is very much part of my company's overall service offering so I am hardly going to knock it too fiercely, but over the last few years we have seen a headlong rush into e-learning and major falling off in face to face training.

In less than a decade e-learning has gone from being a hi-tech niche area to almost the default option. The availability of e-learning materials has also expanded, but in the rush to meet demand, quality has sometimes been a casualty and the quality of different offerings still varies significantly.

But done well e-learning certainly does offer persuasive benefits. It gives employees the flexibility to learn as and when it fits in with their other time commitments. It saves the expense and downtime involved in arranging training days for multiple employees whose training needs may or may not be identical. The better e-learning systems can deliver training modules direct to the desk top in bite-sized chunks on a user-defined (or training manager-defined) basis - enabling individuals to study at a pace that suits them, anywhere they have Internet access.

Better systems allow training managers to record and track each employee's online training activity. Systems with assessment modules or online qualifications can include these in the electronic record. Many systems also allow other training - including CPD credits, face to face, examination and experiential training to be recorded manually alongside e-learning. All this gives training managers an unprecedented ability to monitor, direct and record employees' learning.

E-learning suits some people (self-motivated, self-sufficient and self-contained individuals in particular) very well indeed. But does is suit everybody? One of the problems with e-learning is that - for all the animated graphics, fill-in-the-gap options, and multiple-choice elements some systems use to create a feeling of interactivity – e-learning remains an essentially one-way process. Some platforms allow students to email open-ended queries to course authors who will respond by email. This clearly adds value - but it doesn't fundamentally alter the nature of the learning experience.

Good face to face training has a clear edge in this respect. By good, I mean skilled trainers running workshops with groups of no more than a dozen people (ideally around 8 or 9) and engaging thoroughly with everyone in the room. As soon as you have more than a dozen involved it becomes hard for even the best trainers to draw more reticent participants out of their shells and get them to participate fully. It is well documented that we all learn better when we get actively involved in the process.

A genuinely two-way interaction enables students to see a topic from a variety of different perspectives and thereby gain a richer (multi-dimensional) understanding - which the trainer can test and refine there and then. A good trainer will use a number of different techniques - demonstrations, interactions, discussions, debates and exercises - to provide a rounded insight into a subject.

E-learning may be fine for introductory or intermediate level courses, but it breaks down at the level where students must learn how to exercise their judgement on complicated real-life situations. More complex, technical or nuanced subjects are far better suited to the face to face approach.

Words and images on a screen - however well conceived, written and presented - can never truly compete with the combination of, say, speech, case study, breakout session, and open-ended questions and answers that a well-planned face to face workshop will typically encompass. Learning together with their peers allows participants to compare and discuss their impressions with one another and arrive at a richer and more grounded understanding as a result.

Of course, face to face training is more expensive and more time-consuming than its online equivalent. And I would certainly not want to argue that e-learning is inherently inferior. It is simply different - better suited to some training needs and less well suited to others. The best option, I would argue is for insurance firms to combine the two, allowing each to play to its strengths in achieving a balanced overall training and competence delivery to all employees. Blended training, as we term this approach, combines the best of both worlds: the economy and flexibility of e-learning with the interactivity and depth of face to face.


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