Which is best – classroom training or e-learning?
It’s not a new question, but it often remains an unanswered one: which form of learning works best?
The problem with a question like this is that it begs its own questions before you can provide an answer: for example, what does ‘best’ mean? Cheapest? Fastest? Most readily available? Most information retained?
When considering how to learn, what’s especially interesting is that none of those measurement factors remains constant. What’s cheapest depends on many factors – for example, the cost of developing e-learning courses is high, so for small numbers of people it’s expensive – while the cost of deploying e-learning is cheap, so for large numbers of people it makes much more sense.
Another example: off-the-shelf training courses are readily available, so if you’re scoring against availability, then they’ll come out well. But, since they have to be prepared in advance, and cover every situation, they often have to teach topics which aren’t needed – so they can be time-consuming and not as relevant as a bespoke course.
And another one: learning from books is about as cheap as it gets, they don’t need electricity or a PC to be used, and they can be passed around between many people – to be used as and when required. But there’s a limit to how engaging learning can be by a book and the amount of depth you can cover – you can’t learn karate from a book, for example.
Many of us have a belief that classroom training is more effective – and it’s not an unreasonable belief. It’s the form of learning that we’re most familiar with (having each spent many years at school) – and all parents would be horrified if the government were to replace teachers with e-learning cubicles.
The classroom does provide an excellent learning environment. Learning is facilitated, the course can be adapted on-the-fly and several people can learn at the same time. But it’s not all upside. Classroom training doesn’t scale well – as costs increase proportionally with the number of people learning. It also has to take place at set times – often in a place which you need to travel to, which may dictate overnight accommodation. But if you want to learn a subject in depth, from an expert, it’s a great option.
E-learning can bring the cost of large training programmes right down, assuming there are enough people. Geography becomes irrelevant and people can learn at any time. However, it’s much harder to track people’s progress and the learning can’t be facilitated as closely (if at all, in some cases).
It might seem that there isn’t an answer to the question ‘which is the best form of learning?’ other than ‘it depends’. Thankfully, learning has moved beyond choosing between different types of learning to incorporating different learning media into the same learning programme. Known as ‘blended learning’, these programmes pick and choose the best of each method of training for a given situation. For example, you might top-and-tail a shorter classroom session (thereby saving costs) with self-paced learning or e-learning – then adding in at-desk support to cope with the ‘what if’ questions which only arise when back in the workplace.
There’s an almost infinite number of ways in which you can arrange learning programmes when you work in this way, and it usually leads to a wonderful win/win: reduced costs, better training effectiveness, less time spent away from the office and a more scalable learning solution.
So the answer to the question ‘which is the best form of learning?’ has to be: ‘all of them’.
