🦕 🎏 🎅🏼 Natural development: how to move from e-learning to knowledge management 🙌🏽 👨🏾 ⚗️

There are many types of e-learning courses for employee training in companies. They start with simple presentations and end with interactive courses with elements of gamification and a sophisticated training program that can even be completed on the phone. Regardless of complexity, most corporate courses have one thing in common - they are one-time. This means that they are linear: it is difficult to find a specific block, page or question without completing the entire course, so employees have neither the opportunity nor the desire to take the course a second time. The course could help the employee to update knowledge and gain new ones, be used in the knowledge management system, but it lies dead weight on the server.

Companies spend a lot of resources on corporate courses. Gather information from experts, structure, write a plan, questions, tests, add interactive, animation - all this takes the time and effort of the developers. Naturally, the company expects to get the most out of its investment. But when they do not return to courses after passing, "investments" are not justified.

How to get the most from “investments” and create an e-learning course that will be used many times and will work as a knowledge base, develop, supplement and form an active community around you, Elena Tikhomirova will tell. Elena is the CEO of the eLearning Center, an educational systems architect, pedagogical designer, and the author of the book “Live Learning: How to Make e-learning Work” about the strategy for introducing and developing e-learning.

E-learning problems

Many companies invest in e-learning. Alfa-Capital trains employees to work with stock markets, in METRO Cash and Carry a simulator game teaches you how to monitor shelves and spread goods, and BINBANK has a database of video lessons and lectures on working with banking software.

This is normal and correct. It is difficult for companies with a staff of several dozen to spread knowledge among employees, even when they work in the same office. Organizations with branches scattered across several cities are even more difficult. E-learning is more profitable than traditional seminars or trainings: simpler, cheaper, amenable to standardization, and classes take place without interruption from work. But there's a problem.

They invest a lot in e-learning, but almost everything that is being developed is one-time courses that are almost impossible to take a second time and are difficult to use as a reference.

For example, an employee has been trained, and later he has a question and opens a course to find the answer. In the case of typical corporate e-learning, this task is almost impossible. The course can be re-opened, but to find the same topic, for example, on the 68th slide, you have to go through all over again. In most cases, no one will do this, but a lot of money, time and effort has been invested in the course.

The purpose of e-learning is to preserve and reuse knowledge. But one-time courses do not provide such an opportunity. How is that?

Hard to find information. For example, a company wants to tell employees about internal processes. For this, the developers prepared the materials, structured them, understood how to learn, added pictures and toys. Often there are dialogs in courses: descriptions of the process that are taught are embedded in the replicas of the characters. But, to find this knowledge again, you will have to read all the dialogs again: there is no table of contents, navigation or tagging. The dialogue is spread over several frames, among which no one will look for anything.

It turns out that even if everything is fine, cool and emotional, the course only works once: there are no mechanisms for reuse - the format is one-time on its own .

This is especially noticeable in courses on software. Usually nothing can be found in them, because it is an incoherent set of video screen captures, screenshots and a sheet of text. Where is what located? Close the course, open Google, find what you need, solve the problem.

It is impossible to remember information the first time . Is it possible to remember the first time how a complex process in a company works? No, in our head there is no connector for connecting a cable through which data is received, as in the Matrix. Half of the material is forgotten after an hour, and after 5-7 days almost nothing remains of it (see the Ebbinghaus curve). If you do not repeat regularly, at least every few days, the information will be completely forgotten.

The habit of learning does not form. Repetition, constant interaction with information forms the habit of learning. One-time training does not give the desired result and does not form a habit of using information.

The person took the course, checked the box and believes that he has learned the topic. But, as we have said, this is impossible, information is quickly forgotten. Representing a person to content (and vice versa) does not produce the desired effect. From here the following problem arises.

It is difficult to transfer the theory into real life . After training, it is difficult to understand how to apply the theory in the workflow - there are few practical cases. You can’t say: "I learned this, so now I will apply."

For example, courses on motivation or change of attitude are created in a bright colorful format. In this case, it is likely that the listener will transfer at least some of the scripts to real life. But e-learning also has “workhorses.” They affect daily work tasks: processes, products, procedures, work with software. Such courses are boring: to leave at least some kind of information in your head, you will have to write everything down in a notebook, but you can not mention the transfer to real life.

What is e-learning really?

Preservation of expert knowledge . E-learning is part of the knowledge management subsystem in which we transfer the knowledge and experience of internal experts to the course. This is a huge array of work: to find an expert, to convince him to share (this is often difficult), to systematize, describe and structure knowledge. When the listener cannot reuse the course, this enormous work depreciates.

Transfer and preservation of knowledge . E-learning is also an exchange of knowledge between the expert and the course developer, when the expert provides knowledge, and the developer writes the course or vice versa - the expert writes, and the developer processes and prepares. This is part of the system, it is logical. But here the task of confirming the acquaintance arises. From the point of view of knowledge management, e-learning has the opportunity to confirm familiarization with the specific element that it should see.

Involvement and habit . These are important things in knowledge management and e-learning. An expert will not share knowledge without the habit of sharing it. It is difficult to tear him from his affairs by the suddenly arisen task of sharing knowledge. An expert needs to form a habit of sharing knowledge. This requires constancy and regularity of exchange.

How to combine e-learning and knowledge management in a single process?

In this process, e-learning serves as a platform on which knowledge management processes work smoothly and efficiently in terms of engagement and habit.

The process of creating an electronic course is the extraction of knowledge from an expert and the contact of a person with the necessary knowledge through the course. To do this, add 3 tools .

Reusable courses

To preserve and use corporate knowledge, we need reusable courses. They are created on the basis of knowledge bases, experience, reference and search . The search and the table of contents help in this - at least they should be.

Recently, together with a Russian vendor, I was working on an interesting project - a knowledge base that automatically generates a course. How it works: go to the editor, find the necessary parts of the knowledge base, combine it into the course materials, attach testing and practical tasks. It turns out a reusable course based on a knowledge base.

Such courses can be used repeatedly because they are convenient .

They are easy to navigate and look for materials.
The student gets acquainted with the material with which he will have to work.

But there are a couple of nuances.

Use documentation and pictures that are close to real . In the electronic course, all materials are attractive: the pictures are beautiful, and the texts are edited. But when an employee will work with a client or colleagues, he will need the source: technical documentation, requirements, corporate portals or website. Instead of a beautiful document in pictures, this is Regulation No. 142/3 for 50 pages of short, unstructured, illogical text in the style of the protocol of the meeting of the Central Committee of the CPSU of 1985.

Do not use the site as a source for courses. Often for electronic courses, information about the company's products is taken from the site. I checked websites and courses based on them many times - the information is the same. Sites are designed and developed by design agencies: everything is well-made with beautiful illustrations and graphics. But all this is not in the know - bare text, sometimes pictures. It turns out a miserable parody. What for?!

If you take all the information from the site, courses are not needed. Send people to the site, and then give test assignments to understand how they learned the information. This will save money on unnecessary work and teach the employee to use the site. When a client or partner comes to him with a question that is on the site, the employee will quickly find the answer. The same applies to corporate portals with corporate knowledge bases. Why duplicate? Work for work.

A classic good e-course is only for practice.

There are no practical components in the knowledge base, on the site and in the documents. If the course is initially focused on practice, then we take information from an expert and pack it for re-training, for convenient searching or answering questions.

Storytelling

This is a set of cases from real practice, scenarios and examples for the development of course content . The tool works both for knowledge management and for e-learning. Storytelling is the only way to collect good cases inside the company and to teach people to talk about their experiences, how they did something and why. KnowledgeConf

organizers sent all speakers a presentation template with specific questions. A template is a list of items that you just need to answer. The result will be a beautiful story: problem, reason, solution, result. This is a good example of implementing storytelling ideas, especially for speakers with little experience. Template description for storytelling is not difficult to do. But with it, experts will learn to use this tool.

Supervised Content

Filling with external and internal sources, ongoing awareness support. This is an important versatile tool that I fell in love with many years ago. It happened like this. On one site, I found great presentation design tips that helped me. The site had contacts for communication, on which I wrote a letter of thanks.

This is how curated content works. There is a course - content that is described by an expert. There are internal resources - expert communities and external resources: mail, social networks, channels for those who study the content. Those who study the course communicate with each other and with the expert, and constantly exchange information about the course: add links, opinions, additional materials. The expert can add new materials, comments about the course, answers to questions in social networks and communities.

The advantages of curated content.

People get used to the topic, plunge, awareness increases .
Based on sources, posts, discussions, you can update the course , increasing the content of the knowledge base. These are external and internal sources of constant attraction and accumulation of the base.
All internal communications are retained . The idea of solving a problem was born - I propose a solution in a short message - it is going to a single track on the topic.
A habit is formed to consume and share knowledge.
Understanding and observation is accumulating .

Knowledge Management and E-Learning Scheme

Based on everything we talked about, we get a scheme in which everything starts with the idea of reusable courses.

Reusable courses (01) . Directories, easy navigation, search, practice system and confirmation of acquaintance. These courses were originally designed so that they could be reused.

Convenient tagging is important here. For example, Evernote is a good example. It has an easy and convenient tag system, and filtering, they are quickly introduced, no need to start new ones.

Supervised content (02) . Involvement of experts and students, the habit of sharing knowledge, building a knowledge base. We add supervised content to the courses: first in training, and then it gradually envelops the topic for which we are learning.

Transforming a listener into an expert (03). Development of knowledge management and existing base, nurturing new experts. We build the knowledge and experience of the listener not with one-time training, but with multiple approaches so that he gradually becomes an expert. Those who are interested in this topic may well become (and become) active participants in the professional community. A person invests something, and the distribution becomes much wider.

The accumulation of knowledge (04) . Development of a knowledge base and training materials through the accumulation of a database of internal and external cases. We are developing the base with small investments - inviting people to share links, posts and resources.

You can combine different tools. For example, start with Telegram. Starting on a comfortable and understandable tool, even with a possible loss of content, is not as scary as without it.

People easily learn and get into work when there is a comfortable tool at hand.

No one will post links to the resource that you need to go to, log in, find the section, the form in it, add material to it and wait for the approval of the moderator. With a tool similar to Telegram, people turn on for 1.5-2 months.

The habit of learning and sharing (05) . Ecosystem of exchange and learning through a single set of tools. As a result, all this is fueled by the habit of learning and sharing. When people share links through a simple tool, it works: I found interesting information and then sent it to the rest. Social approval works here: everyone shares, and he shares, waiting for praise and approval.

It's hard to get people involved, but the mechanics are similar to Facebook groups. Facebook is a feed of your personal curated content. The curators here are friends, colleagues, people in friends whom you do not know. While we share content on social networks, this needs to be activated - so we get a good influx within the system.

We used this scheme in one of the projects from the beauty industry. The main sales channel of the company is sales representatives. Therefore, initially I was skeptical: it seems that sales representatives come, pick up their presentations and materials, and leave. But after a few weeks, the scheme worked: we filled the community with interesting content first, ourselves, and later curators from employees appeared.

Now there are 400 people in the community. The system is built in such a way that by clicking on the “Drug N” button people receive both formal training, formal quiz, and the entire selection of information that their colleagues collected. According to user reviews, information from colleagues is the most valuable: it is classified clearly and clearly. Experienced employees who work for years with one brand or in one direction understand what resources are useful.

One of the effects of the system is the ease of updating.

The biggest problem is the cases. As soon as the system starts working, it itself generates cases: I tried it this way, it didn’t work out for me, here's a case for you; and I tried it this way, I succeeded - another case. If you sort them, filter them, the material for the next training cycle is immediately ready. Each course needs to be updated, but we already have what.

It works. Is always

Invest in courses so that they can be used many times.

To do this, build a scheme in which the same tools are used for different tasks .

Build up the initial material of the course, which was taken from an expert.
For the center course, for which they started in e-learning, apply additional internal and external sources.
Gradually build a community that will work already outside the learning context.

Use the scheme as a basis to build your system on its basis. Remember that knowledge management and e-learning cannot work effectively separately from each other . In many ways they are similar, and when they work separately they require double efforts and investments.

The first step to building a knowledge management system. Often in companies everything is so organized that the employees who are responsible for e-learning do not overlap with knowledge management managers. Some laid up courses and laid out, while others think how to get knowledge from experts. An excellent reason to start building a system and organize joint work is to get knowledge from an expert and solve a business problem for developing a specific course.

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Natural development: how to move from e-learning to knowledge management