| Complete Learning
| | | In traditional eLearning, the first step involves courseware, content and a final assessment at the end of the course. The learner passes the course, it’s marked as complete, and they get a certificate. Step Two is for everything learned in the course to be applied in the workplace. Then Step Three, inevitably, is for there to be much rejoicing at the superior on‐the‐job performance by the employee.
Unfortunately, things rarely get to step three. In step two, a miracle has to happen for employee to take everything they learned and apply it. In reality, the employee immediately begins to forget what they learned in their eLearning course. They don’t reflect on it, it’s over and done and in the past. “Been there, done that, got the certificate.” They don’t experiment with the concepts from the course. Why would they? They don’t immerse themselves in the beliefs presented in the course to live the examples, and so they don’t adopt the behaviors that that were the whole point of the training. As such, they never integrate those behaviors into their core, a process that we like to refer to as “embedding.” The net result is that their poor performance – that the training was supposed to address – remains largely unchanged.
The Apprentice Model
Before there were teachers and students, you had masters and apprentices. Apprentices learned on the job, through trial and error under the watchful eye of their master.
LCMX applies the Apprentice Model to eLearning. In step one there’s the familiar content delivery, with a lot of demonstrations included. A lot of learning goes on here.
But in Step Two, we see something else. The apprentice is encouraged to experiment, and to begin to actually do it on their own. To be sure, there are a lot of failures during this phase – but the master is there to provide the encouragement and reinforcement as they take their first few unsteady steps.
Failures are followed by successes, and then a great deal of practice ultimately results in perfection. As these concepts are carefully applied, under the watchful supervision of the master, a whole lot MORE learning is occurring. And then, once the apprentice has proven that not only have they learned the subject of the lesson, but that they can actually DO IT – then they produce the desired on‐the‐job performance.
This is no surprise, as they have ALREADY been doing the desired on‐the‐job behaviors
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