AchieveGlobal's blog

Burying the Lead

By Jack McDaniel

In a recent InformationWeek article, W. David Gardner reports on a recent governmental meta-analysis and review of online learning studies. Mr. Gardner’s lead assertion is that:

Online education has been achieving somewhat better results than classroom education, according to a recent report prepared for the U.S. Department of Education.

Dire news for all of the classrooms! However, when I took a closer look at the study itself, I found so many caveats and conditions placed on this finding that, like the ornaments covering Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, you can no longer clearly delineate the tree itself. Let’s take a few of these ornaments down from the tree for closer inspection:

• The study was not focused on adult learning. The primary focus for the US Department of Education was to measure the effectiveness of learning modalities for K-12 public school students. As an aside, the researchers were chagrined to find so few applicable studies for this population that they found themselves repeatedly admitting that “…caution is required in generalizing to the K–12 population because the results are derived for the most part from studies in other settings.”
• Business skills were only a small part of the curricula studied. Out of nine curricula listed, “business” was mentioned last. While this may not indicate that it was the subject least studied, it does dilute the findings considerably – especially given the importance of curriculum to learning outcomes. “The most common subject matter was medicine or health care. Other content types were computer science, teacher education, mathematics, languages, science, social science, and business.”
• Time on task skews the results in favor of online learning. The studies assumed a huge advantage for learners who were able to spend large chunks of time with online tools materials. “Studies in which learners in the online condition spent more time on task than students in the face-to-face condition found a greater benefit for online learning.” In the business world, the perception that time spent on training – either online or face-to-face - equals lost revenue pushes solutions that include the “benefit” of less employee time off the job.
• The medium is not the message. Time on task, pedagogy, and curriculum are more important conditions than whether the learning was delivered online or in a classroom. “Despite what appears to be strong support for online learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium.”

In my view, the true lead has been buried: Blended learning is more effective than either classroom or online learning by themselves. The researchers found that:

In recent experimental and quasi-experimental studies contrasting blends of online and face-to-face instruction with conventional face-to-face classes, blended instruction has been more effective, providing a rationale for the effort required to design and implement blended approaches.

What do you think? Is blended learning the wave of the future or a passing fad? What impact will social interaction tools like Twitter have on business learning? What will the adult learning landscape look in 2, 5, or 10 years?

What ’s Your Bloatware?

By Craig Perrin

Apple Computer just released a new operating system, “Snow Leopard.” What did they do to improve their already class-leading “Leopard”? They simplified it. They dropped the price. And, as David Pogue points out in the New York Times, they dumped a moldy business model.

To keep buyers buying, many software vendors produce “bloatware” – successive upgrades that contain more features but also eat more memory, run more slowly, and crash more often than earlier versions. “Apple’s release strategy is highly unorthodox,” writes Pogue, who then quotes a fictional Apple marketing genius: “’Instead of adding features for their own sake, let’s just make what we’ve got smaller, faster and more refined.’” The pattern that Apple’s strategy represents – from simple, to complex, to bloatware, to simple – is a very old story.

Consider music:  

Or architecture:

     

The new simple is never the same as the old. Still, this pattern repeats again and again in virtually every arena of human activity, including business. Apple – ever leading the pack – seems to be saying that it’s now time for simple. Even Microsoft, after the bloated disaster of Windows Vista, will release a simpler operating system in October.

What is the bloatware in your business? What can or should you do to simplify?  

Gardening

By Andrew Calvert In writing my most recent blog post I was searching around for something pithy and clever to use as a theme. In vain (as we all know working to a deadline is a killer to creativity...). But then I saw this gem:

If you want to be prosperous for a year, grow grain. If you want to be prosperous for ten years, grow trees. If you want to be prosperous for a lifetime, grow people. –CHINESE PROVERB

Too often in the hectic pace of today’s just-in-time, make-it-now, instant-return world we forget that the development of our people – at all levels of the organization – is a long term investment in the future.

When you grow anything (and I have several years experience as an organic farmer to back me up here) you start by preparing the soil. You create a fertile environment where the all the prerequisites for growth and development are abundant. As plants respond to warmth, light and nutrition so employees respond to respect, collaboration and support. Once the soil is ready, you choose the right seeds to get the plants you want when you want them. So managers need to get the right people into the right positions so as to take advantage of the available conditions. Just as weeds (i.e. a plant in the wrong place) can consume vital resources, so employees in the wrong job can take away from the environment you strive to create. As a gardener prunes and weeds, and manager coaches and develops. Harvesting in the garden is a time of plenty, in the workplace it is a time where matured employees move onto the next suitable role for them in the organization.