Online publishing, e-learning and knowledge management – Part 2

In my previous post on this subject I addressed the similarities and differences between the worlds of online publishing and knowledge management. In this post I’d like to talk a little about how the worlds of knowledge management and e-learning often collide, before discussing how both relate to online publishing.

I recently helped to edit an article on unifying e-learning and knowledge management for a learning and communications company. The article addressed the silo problem within large organisations that divides the two disciplines of Knowledge Management (KM for short) and Training and stops them functioning in useful collaboration. Collaborating usefully is something which, on the face of it, these two disciplines ought to be able to do. After all, both have responsibilities in a similar area: i.e. in what an employee knows, and how that employee can be helped to do a particular job better by knowing new or different things.

In practice, however, KM and Training are two very different communities. They have their own languages, concepts and above all cultures: librarians don’t necessarily feel an instant sense of rapport with trainers (publishers may feel the same way!).

In the article I was editing, the glue proposed to hold these two disparate worlds together was Blended Learning.

Diagram showing unification of blended learning and knowledge management. Property of LINE Communications

Our model, as symbolised in the diagram shown here, had blended learning as the all-embracing design principle with KM activities as components within this design – or, to use the jargon of the e-learning world, as different ‘learning modalities’.  At the time it occurred to me that, had I been working for a KM client, we might be drawing the map very differently; with Knowledge Management as the organising principle, and e-learning as one of many knowledge and information modalities.

We all behave like medieval cartographers when we do these diagrams, putting our home territory at the centre of a map, so to speak. But before I get on to why I think there is a certain degree of justification for drawing the map in this rather e-learning-centric way, we should pause for a word or two about Blended Learning.

What is Blended Learning?

Blended Learning (for those who don’t know) is the combination of traditional stand-up training with e-learning. In its initial form it was largely about bolting self-paced modules of online learning onto pre-existing stand-up courses, but over the years it has gained more sophistication, and confounded the doubts of early naysayers who doubted its ability to scale.

Nowadays it can involve a wide variety of different components, both online and offline, orchestrated so as to make the most efficient and effective use both of trainer resources and trainee time. It’s a very diverse picture, but let me try to sketch for you an indicative example, typical of the more leading edge examples being launched within large organisations today.

An enterprise-scale blended learning programme might kick off with a series of webinars, ensuring global message control, and proceed with the help of face-to-face workshops, personal coaching, online videos, modules of self-paced e-learning web-delivered via computer and/or smartphone, and online assessments.

The rise of Web 2.0 has had an impact on blended learning as well, widening the available online tools to include blogs, wikis, rss feeds, and social networking. Typically, a large-scale programme will have its own dedicated learning portal, linked to a Learning Management System which tracks and reports on assessment scores, completions, etc. – and this portal can provide a focus for online Web-2.0-style collaboration. Somewhere in this mix is often a series of downloadable pdfs, and access to online texts.

The creation of rich-mix technology-enabled training programmes such as this throws a lot of responsibility on the instructional designer, who must co-ordinate all these media in a sensible way to achieve particular learning objectives. Instructional design (or learning design as it is increasingly called nowadays), is the core skill of a service-based e-learning company. The rich mix available to today’s learning designer, a diversity that was not present in the purely face-to-face world, contains the possibility of many interventions which are not, strictly speaking, instructional at all. The provision of access to searchable online texts could be more about reference than learning. Pdfs could be published as part of a compliance programme, for instance, solely to update the learner on new regulations and procedures – where no deep change in attitudes or behaviours is required.

An awareness has spread that there is a spectrum of interventions available within technology-enabled learning, as represented in the diagram below.

‘Depth of training’ really indicates the extent to which the learner’s enquiry is led and mediated. At the ‘deep’ end of the spectrum, educational experiences that involve personal transformation will require much more instructional design than interventions at the other end of the spectrum; instructors/educators provide structure to the experience. At the ‘shallow’ end of the spectrum, learners themselves provide structure and direction; it’s all about access and discoverability.

It’s important to understand that a given blended learning programme might include interventions that fall anywhere along this spectrum. Most do. Given this, it is clear from the paragraph above – if only in the terminology I have fallen into using – that such a programme will necessarily span different disciplines. ‘Discoverability’, for example, is a concept well known to knowledge managers and online publishers, but almost unheard of within e-learning circles. Perhaps it should be better known on that side of the fence, however, since there is more and more talk within e-learning about the importance of ‘the self-directed learner’.

When you look at it from this point of view, Blended Learning is an inherently silo-busting concept.

E-learning thriving, KM just surviving?

So if there really is an opportunity here for a less siloed approach, why should it be under the aegis of e-learning and not the other way round? Why shouldn’t knowledge management lead the charge?

One of the reasons is purely pragmatic. E-learning is an industry in boom, while KM, for the moment at least, looks to be in retreat.

The latest Ambient Insights report on the US e-learning market shows demand growing by a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.4% and revenues to reach $23.8 billion by 2014. This healthy picture is echoed in the UK. A 2009 report by Learning Light, building on work of my own in 2007, forecasts growth rates for UK e-learning of between 6.7% and 8%.

Meanwhile, according to the FT, knowledge management faces a more uncertain future. According to journalist Lucy Kellaway, companies are giving up on any attempt to manage their information, ‘… on the grounds that to do so costs too much. Since the recession began, many have closed their libraries and taken the axe to their knowledge management divisions, set up with such pride and optimism barely a decade ago’. (Published: 22 November 2009)

If information management really is becoming a ‘nice to have’, training seems, in the corporate market at least, to be holding its own. One cynical view of this picture offered to me by an IBM consultant, is that UK organizations train so little, and actually need to do so much, that there just isn’t any slack – no room for cuts. The shift to services, certainly, has made training a less negligible item for corporates. In certain industries – retail banking, mobile telephone sales, hotel and leisure – an organisation’s brand and service values are practically the only real basis of competitive advantage, and for a service-based organization, training offers the only real way to ensure that employees really understand and embody their brand. Organisations have other big needs too – compliance, product training and change management that can only really be met at scale with substantial help from technology.

In most of these programmes, the organisation is profiting from its own knowledge, recycling what it knows already – which is the basic job of knowledge management. But whereas KM is seen as a year round activity, a matter of infrastructure, e-learning programmes tend to be wrapped up in new, one-off initiatives, and are thus less vunerable to cutting.

A learning programme provides the impetus, the motivation, the objective, the unifying story to bring change about and attract investment from organizations, since its returns are often more measureable.

Online publishing and e-learning

This is also true of less immediately performance-related learning programmes, such as those involved with professional development. An organisation with a lot of accountants, for instance, like one of the big consultancy firms, has a strong interest in keeping the professional skills and knowledge of those accountants up to date. Learning programmes that do this can seem to have more urgency and point to them than general improvements in the ‘knowledge infrastructure’. This is especially true where learning is linked to a professional qualification. As in Education, qualifications are something which gives the acquisition of knowledge a shaping rationale and a measurable end-point.

It is in this latter field of professional development that many people expect to see convergence between e-learning and online publishing in the future. And it’s is not just about accountants, lawyers, doctors, nurses, etc.

Recently I was talking to a life sciences publisher, with a big audience for their products in the developing world, who are just about to launch their first e-learning programme. This is vital knowledge, from an authoritative source, linked to professional accreditation, and with a wide potential audience.

It will be interesting to watch developments in this space. Technology enabled learning is now such a rich and varied thing, with so many powerful new channels to exploit, that the potential for development seems huge. As user acceptance and bandwidth grows, the only thing holding us back from more convergence between e-learning, online publishing and knowledge management, will be the lack of mutual understanding. Were these silo walls to dissolve, a creative potential could be unleashed that could surely only benefit all the industries involved.