LASCAUX CAVE PAINTING - A 15,000 to 17,000 year-old painting discovered on Sept. 12, 1940.

Discovered by Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas

Oldest & Most Effective

Instructor-led training (ILT) is the oldest and most effective form of teaching and learning, and worldwide it remains popular to this day because of its ability to enhance learning in a number of critical ways that other forms of training cannot. Even Neanderthals taught one another through ILT using elaborate paintings left on the walls of caves we can see today. Of course, we thankfully don’t live in caves anymore. Our styles of teaching are no longer static and permanent like cave paintings. Today, teaching has evolved to focus on the learner.

Instantaneously Make Changes

We depend on educating our employees so that they are knowledgeable, skilled, and motivated, but each learner has different needs. Each employee may have different questions about achieving their best in doing their job. Focusing on learners brings up the question, who is “on the spot” and better to instantaneously make whatever changes to personalize the material being taught than the instructor?

The State of Instructor-Led Training

So why, as Sharon Boller, President of Bottom-Line Performance online magazine says, “If you just focus on what gets published and written about, you’d swear there wasn’t a stand-up instructor left in corporate America.” Is instructor-led training dead? Don’t bet your life on that being true. Compare the 2013 ASTD State of the Industry Report to Training’s Top 125 Respondent Survey results. You’ll see and determine for yourself if ITL is dead.

Value of Instructor-Led Training

James Manktelow, CEO of Mind Tools, a major U.S. eLearning and corporate training company annually coaching over 15 million people says that “Instructor-led training is particularly beneficial when the material is new or particularly complex: here, having an instructor on-hand to answer questions and demonstrate concepts can greatly enhance a training.”

Affordability

Cost is the issue most professionals considered problematic for ILT. Onetime single courses taught by an instructor will prove to be the least expensive most of the time. However, should a course need to be offered to many learners and more than once a year companies will find that a single payment for eLearning software or an annual subscription to an eLearning website is more cost-effective. Cost for course preparation, materials, and instructional time reduces eLearning cost per student. The problem for ILT affordability is scalability. SMV solves the scalability and cost issue.

ILT + SMV = Personalized, Better Transfer Rate and ILT Scalability

Strategic Interaction Video is a new, affordable interactive technology designed to create, personalize, make scalable and strengthen online instructor-led training. Successful training companies, their training designers, subject matter experts, and instructors can anticipate what their learners and clients’ employees will ask and prepare accordingly. Find out more about how Strategic Interaction Video helps training designers, subject matter experts, and instructors meet learners’ needs. SMV is a real plus for instructor-led training.

EAGLE NEBULA - A 5.5 million year-old nebula part of active star formation 7000 light-years in distance.

Hubble Space Telescope image taken by Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen (1995).

Most Critical Measurements

Learning transfer and retention rates are the most critical measurements of corporate training effectiveness. Transfer rates are simply the rates at which knowledge transfers from the training to the learners. It is normally exhibited by how well and quickly the learners can apply what knowledge or skills they learned during the training directly to their jobs. Learning retention rates reference the period of time learners maintain whatever knowledge or skills they learned during the training.

Values of Transfer & Retention Rates

Here is an excerpt of what the ASTD published in an article by Roy Pollock, DVM, PhD, and Andy Jefferson, JD, about ensuring learning transfer in august 2012.

Ensuring learning transfer is the greatest and most important challenge facing workplace learning professional today. But this challenge is nothing new. More than 50 years ago, James N. Mosel (1957) pointed to “mounting evidence that shows that very often the training makes little or no difference in job behavior.” This is a real problem, because it is only on-the-job behavior that matters; the business benefits only when learning is transferred and applied to the trainee’s work in a way that positively impacts performance.

Measuring Learning Transfer Rates Still a Mystery

Enough said about the value of learning transfer rates. Retention rates are equally valuable. With as valuable as these rates are, it is surprising that the industry has not gotten a better handle on precise measures of learning transfer and retention rates since the 1959 Mosel study. It’s not that no one has studied the issues, it’s that no complete study of the issues has been conducted let alone having theorized a solution. Nor has there existed a mechanism to directly measure the learning transfer rates of the learners who take corporate training courses. A survey study titled “An investigation of training activities and transfer of training,” conducted by Alan Saks and Monica Belcourt in 2006, and published by Wiley Periodicals’ Human Resource Management report maybe the latest and most definitive study addressing transfer rates.

What We Know from Saks & Belcourt

Most notably the training professionals from 150 organizations that were surveyed reported that 62%, 44%, and 34% of employees apply training material on the job immediately, six months, and one year after training. In addition, their organizations were significantly more likely to use training activities to facilitate transfer during training than either before or after training.

As to how these activities effected transfer, the study reported that training activities before, during, and after training were significantly related to the transfer of training; however, activities in the work environment before and after training were more strongly related to transfer than activities during training. These results bring up a logical question… “What happened during the training?”

Before we answer that question let’s address the reported transfer rates and how these rates reflect on the investments U.S. companies make in corporate training. Industry estimates report that U.S. companies invest $70 billion in corporate training annually. If the initial transfer rate is 62% then collectively companies are losing about $26.6 billion immediately. If after six months the transfer rate has dropped to 44% then the lost is now $39.2 billion and after one year the transfer rate is at 34% then the real number is a loss of $46.2 billion.

Personalization Using ILT

So, “What happened during the training?” This is very complicated question. However, the industry and technology has been addressing it using a cornucopia of theories and in applying many different training methods. If the 1957 Mosel study is right when it shows that very often the training makes little or no difference in job behavior, we have come a long way. Everything being done chips away at the problem with transfer and retention rates. But, there is so much more yet to be done.

• Much is being talked about and tried in personalizing learning. Strategic Interaction Video begins with the premise that “transfer rates will significantly improve when each individual leaner’s needs are part of the teaching.” Therefore to teach to improve transfer and retention rates the learning structure itself must account for the needs of each individual learner.
• Secondly, ILT has proven to have the most flexibility because instructors interact with individual learners in real-time so they can adjust their presentation based on learner interaction that will result in improved understanding and transfer rates. SMV is interactive allowing instructors and learners to interact and can “on-the-fly” make changes that adapt to the knowledge base of the learner.

Micro-Modules & Micro-Casting

The latest effort to nail down transfer rates is TransferLogix developed by by LTSGlobal and Dale Carnegie. TransferLogix is a broad based Seven Step Change Process guide for before, during and after training activities to help companies organize their entire training efforts. It’s an organizational tool. However, it does not address the actual training structure to train for improved transfer rates based on the individual learner. Significantly different, SMV addresses the training structure with micro-modules and micro-casting techniques.

NASA'S MAVEN - Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission is closing in on the Red Planet.

MAVEN will reach Mars and slip into orbit on Sept. 21, 2014 U.S. EST.

Scalability Advantage

Measuring costs is a wonderful way to examine which learning systems instructor-led training (ILT) or web-based training (WBT) is best applied to a company’s learning needs. In a July 19, 2011 article for Chief Learning Officer, David Vance, former president of Caterpillar University pointed out the following:

“There are two components to explore to answer the question. First, for the given target audience what is the budget cost for ILT versus WBT? Often, WBT will have higher development costs than ILT but these are quickly offset by savings in delivery as the audience size grows. For large audiences WBT is almost always less expensive.”

“The second component is the reduction in opportunity cost from deploying WBT in place of ILT. Opportunity cost is a great economic concept with direct relevance to L&D. Simply put, opportunity cost is the value of the participants’ time spent on the learning.”

Clearly the advantage of WBT over ILT is scalability. However, ILT has its advantages that cannot be duplicated by WBT. Instructors can have personal dialog with learners and can in real-time adjust the training content to better suite the individual learner’s needs. In other words, in real-time ILT can “personalize” the content.

When Video Talks Back

Imagine, what if the distribution of ILT was equally scalable to WBT. The playing field for ILT would change greatly. Fundamentally the budgets cost and opportunity costs for ILT would dramatically drop. All the while, greatly increasing the intrinsic opportunity and value of personalized training.

Is this possible? YES, when video talks back. Strategic Interaction Video is a disruptive technology that will change they way the training industry uses video and evaluates ILT and WBT… redefining Corporate Training.