I have been managing education products for 25 years. First as a consultant for other firms and then as a product management team lead for several educational providers. At only one of the firms I have worked did we take shared responsibility for the success of our students. Most learning firms seek to maximize customer satisfaction as measured by feedback ratings and NPS scores. Oddly, learning buyers don’t seem to demand any sort of measurable effectiveness/impact scoring for the courses they buy.
The Wanamaker adage about advertising seems to be the approach to workforce learning procurement also. Buy courses that appear to have a quality design, cover the right topics, and students enjoy…..hope that they are having the desired effect.
HR and learning professionals who approve the workforce learning purchases should be pushing for more value per spend. They should expect their learning providers to partner with them to measure that value. If your learning provider can’t/won’t do that, maybe its a factor to consider.
Switching to a measurement model is easier said than done so here are two concrete recommendations to get started down the path
- How much time/effort does each course spend on the APPLICATION of the content to the work that the student will be returning to. In the case of K-12 and higher ed, how much effort is spent on helping the students understand the “WHY” of what they are learning.
- Does the learning provider measure retention some time AFTER the course completes? Do they provide content/support to fill any gaps that show up in each learner’s knowledge at that time? It’s one thing to enjoy a course, its another to have internalized all the content well by the last day of the course……it is yet another to have internalized the content into long-term memory months after the course completes.
These feel like “no-brainer” learning evolutions to me, but I have discovered the hard way as a product manager to seek to understand the market directly rather than projecting my personal impressions. This blog post may have skewed your opinions on extended learning. It would be really helpful if you could post the link to a four minute survey (without the blog post). I am happy to share the survey results with anyone who comments on LinkedIn, on this blog, or by leaving their email in the survey.
Survey Link for sharing: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/F8LX9LZ
Future Business 