Promoting e-learning in your organization

The recent Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD) newsletter includes an interesting article on promoting e-learning in the workplace written by Saul Carliner.

Carliner points out that e-learning isn't the Field of Dreams - just because you build doesn't mean they will come.

In Ten Tips for Getting Learners to Take E-Courses, Carliner notes that "Anyone who has experience with classroom courses knows that they require extensive promotion and a bit of arm-twisting to get people to use them, so why should e-learning require any less promotion and arm twisting?"

All too true.

The client lead for one of the earliest e-learning projects I worked on understood this well. The project was a series of online courses covering the features, benefits, etc. of a suite of banking products.

We had great fun on the project, and of course it was a natural assumption that learners would have great fun too - but she recognized several aspects of her corporate culture that might work against e-learning. The client lead planned out an extensive internal marketing campaign, since e-learning was pretty new to this organization.

One of the most interesting parts of the campaign was a special laminated card that read something like, "Sh! E-Learning taking place." Most of her learning audience worked in cubicles that were less than private. Officially, the cards - hung on the outside of the cubicle - were a way for those doing their learning to alert others to be on the quiet side. The cards were also a "covert" e-learning promotional tool - the more cards that were hung up, the greater day-today exposure the e-learning courses would receive. The cards also added a bit of peer pressure, if you will, to the e-learning, sort of a way to leverage the urge to "keep up with the Joneses."

I've always kept this project in mind when we start off working with a new client, making certain I always raise the question of promoting e-learning to ensure its success. It's such a crucial aspect of e-learning, but one that often doesn't get much though put to it - until the day the new course is rolled out.

Ten Tips for Getting Learners to Take E-Courses by Saul Carliner is available here.