It captured responses from 57 Training Managers from blue chip companies representing over 80,000 employees and the results were strongly indicative of the Australian IT Industry's current views. Although 60 per cent of companies surveyed said they were using some form of online learning, an overwhelming 83 per cent rated online learning as not particularly successful. For gaining skills only 3 per cent found it extremely successful with 30 per cent finding it not very successful. We believe that humans learn best from humans and that online learning is not an acceptable substitute for face to face training. Staff enthusiasm for this type of learning is low because it is mass personalised and a very sterile and artificial form of communication.
People are different, yet online courses are pitched to everyone in the same way.
Online learning focuses on how streamlined training can become without realising the sacrifices made to achieve it - namely losing human interaction and personalisation. It is all about the learner adapting to the medium instead of the medium adapting to the learner. The emphasis needs to be on learning and the outcomes. But the paradox is that even though eLearning is not seen to be that effective it is seen to be cost effective and convenient way of skilling up your staff without taking them out of the office. However, respondents rated its overall effectiveness fairly low with 29 per cent claiming it was not very successful and 3 per cent saying it was not at all successful.