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January 1, 2001

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Innovators And Influencers 2001

E-Learning's Straight Shooter

Elliott Masie says learning is a social event, and E-learning is headed for a convergence with knowledge management

By Diane Rezendes Khirallah

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sociologist by education, New Yorker Elliott Masie calls himself a "techno-nerd" who got started as a consultant to IBM in the 1970s, specializing in training. Today, he's director of the Masie Group, an E-learning think tank, and holds a White House appointment in technology through 2002. He spoke with InformationWeek senior editor Diane Rezendes Khirallah about the challenges the industry will face during the next few years at a recent E-learning conference.

Q: How did you get started in E-learning?

A: A lot of what I saw in CBT [computer-based training] felt like I was in a behavioral Skinner box. The whole model was: show you a screen, make you read a page, test you if you remembered the page. If you got it, it said, "Good job, Elliott." If not, you were sent to a remedial screen to re-teach it.

I used to be so turned off by it that when they ask you for your name I'd type in a couple of curse words. So when it went to reinforce me, it would say "Good job, blankety-blank."

Q: Why were you so turned-off by it?

A: CBT was limited, in that it was not only self-paced learning, it was lonely learning. The research shows, and people intuitively know, that learning is a social event.

Elliot Masie Photo by Tsar Fedorsky I just got back from London where I saw a store called Easy Everything, an Internet cafe with 200 terminals where people pay a pound an hour. I talked with people --they have Internet connections at home, but they want a social environment with rock music, cappuccino, and people of their generation around them.

There's a fundamental shift that I think is going to occur in the IT world, where we move from viewing data as numbers and letters to where we view it in a richer format, where we view data as things that are created out of community.

Q: How so?

A: We need to recognize that a lot of what knowledge represents will never be written, but is in the oral and dynamic experience. We've got to pretty rapidly find a way to capture, catalog, reuse, and dispose of dynamically created content. It means creating whole new systems.

Say Joan decides she's leaving her company. The day she says she's leaving, good or bad, her job changes to capturing what she knows so that the organization and her successor know what she's doing. Maybe we put her in a simulator where she continues to do what she does.

Q: That sounds like the convergence of E-learning and knowledge management.

A: It totally is. The dilemma is that knowledge management is, by definition, a very high-theory area, usually accompanied by consultants, usually [paid in] seven figures.

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E-learning and knowledge management are sold into different parts of the organization. Knowledge management is sold into the staff level of the CEO, on the golf course, and usually a mutliyear, theoretical, top-down piece.

E-learning is being sold at the operational level, to solve immediate problems, mapped to specific lines of business or to the training function. While there's CEO support, that's not where the decision resides.

Q: What's the scariest question, the one no one wants to ask? A: Does it work? It's a really scary question. If I invite 50 people onto a session, is there learning? If it's well-structured, there's the right content, we've taken care of who we invite, and there's a payoff at the end, they'll probably learn as well as [they would] in the classroom, which isn't very well.

Q: So it depends on the individual student and how motivated he or she is, right?

A: If they're all commissioned salespeople, and they're going to learn about how to sell a product that triples their commissions, you bet that they'll learn � but they would've learned [even] if I sent out a mimeographed sheet with smudges on it.

Q: Is the IT structure an enemy of E-learning?

A: Yes. You hear statements like, "Bandwidth? That size? Not on my network, not in this lifetime."

If you go to Fidelity, its IT dept is held accountable for uptime. Along comes someone who says, "I'd like to have 2,000 people at their leisure this afternoon go and listen to Elliott Masie's talk." Well, where are you going to get that kind of bandwidth? There's something appropriately skeptical in the DNA of IT.

IT knows how to process print and text data. As you start to add audio, video, and spontaneously created stuff, it's a brave new world. None of our models or infrastructures are appropriate to that model, which is why 80% to 90% of all E-learning is outsourced, because people don't want their IT department to say no.

Q: What will people be talking about in 6 months?

A: Once we get beyond how to build an E-learning infrastructure, the advanced conversation is about becoming very sophisticated at discovering the range of communications that occur under different circumstances: How do you face your customer pre-sale? Post-sale? When he's pissed off? Do you do an E-learning session? Send a video? Dispatch a van to the site? Suddenly, there are a ton of events going on.

I'm betting we'll see Readers Digest versions of meetings. I could go to a three-hour meeting online for learning, but if I'm willing to wait until the next day, I could go just to relevant segments, or get a playback summary.

Q: You've said before that the term E-learning has a footprint of about two years. What will E-leaning look like in two years?

A: An IV drip, a continuous feed of knowledge, coaching, assimilation, and background. By IV drip, I mean it's not something you have to register for; it's not something you're conscious of. It probably will contain some things where you're individually learning, some things where you're in a community of practice, and some things where you're in a coaching situation.

Q: How will it change how we work?

A: What's intriguing now is the question of how much I need to know as a worker. I recently had a very provocative argument with someone from Cisco about this. When do we distinguish [between] someone's ability to fix something because they know how to use reference materials vs. what they can remember? I'm not suggesting we have nonskilled, certified Cisco pros, [but] if he knows where the knowledge is, it's less important to know it in detail.

When I was an IT manager, more projects failed because people had poor listening skills than bad tech skills. So do we certify that they can remember how to create a routing chart, or that they can communicate when the chart isn't right?

Q: What risks does the industry face?

A: That price points won't sustain. If we get to products too fast, we won't be taken seriously: Content that's two bucks a course will be thought of as a two-buck course. Related to that is that we will oversell and under-deliver. I want to do the opposite. The fear is that it will be hype, hype, hype.

Q: Do you foresee any legal or policy implications?

A: Oh, sure. One drug company [I talked to] wants to know if everything has to be recorded. The process of Food and Drug Administration approval says that training is part of the discovery record. We know that instructors have always said things in class that aren't part of the curriculum, but that help [students] do their job. So now just because I can record, do I have a legal obligation to record? We need to create digital water coolers that are off the public record.