I should of course add an extremely important caveat to the above title: as long as the budget is big enough.

Having said that, whatever the available funds are, the principle still applies. The more engaging e-learning is, the greater the number of people in the workforce it is aimed at will use it.

This seems an obvious statement, but in the early days of e-learning, when the industry was still in its infancy, the majority of e-learning output were dull, tedious screens of rolling text and a few uninspiring images. There was desperately little animation, low interactivity and certainly no games based learning.

It reminds me of when CD-ROMs were first introduced into the marketplace containing whole encyclopaedias on one disk and not much else. It was thought by many that simply because the information was in a new form, and could be contained on a small piece of plastic rather than a bulky book, people would quite happily trawl through screens and screens of text with the odd image and use their old books as doorstops. As we now know, much to the chagrin of the CD-ROM industry, sales were disappointingly low and as a result forced everybody involved to have a serious re-think on how they were to package such information on this new format. 

A similar pattern of events happened to the e-learning industry when it first started out. Initial success was below what was anticipated, and far fewer people than expected used this new resource. Just because the text and images are on a screen rather than in a book did not mean people were suddenly going to start rushing to the computer to learn sometimes quite dry subjects, even if it would ultimately help them in their respective jobs.

Thus the evolution of e-learning began. Slowly it became visually and aesthetically more pleasing, interactivity grew to be more imaginative and extensive and finally game-based learning on big projects started to appear.

Of course it will always be necessary to produce quick, low cost e-learning at a fraction of the price for certain fields, now known as rapid e-learning. However, in the case of traditional e-learning (high budget, content-rich based modules), although many monotonous examples are still being produced, there is now a commonly felt mantra that to motivate the workforce to use e-learning, it is now not enough for it just to purport to help them better themselves at their work. In addition, e-learning should be fun and engaging. If the subject is not a particularly interesting one, introduce some light relief by way of a simple game or even some humour. In a nutshell, if you personally find it a pleasurable experience, then there’s a good chance your workforce will as well. Dare I say it, it may well be worth investing a little more money to achieve such a goal.

James Lubbock.