Employees ready for e-learning revolution
Employees ready for e-learning revolution
Keywords: Learning styles, Internet
The Campaign for Learning has teamed up with KPMG, Ufi Ltd and Peter Honey Learning to explore attitudes to e-learning among providers and consumers. The survey, carried out with individual e-learners, providers of e-learning and organisational users of e-learning, found that employers may be underestimating how positive e-learners are about the experience.
Campaign for Learning Policy and Information Director, Tony Greany, said:"E-learning evidently offers a wealth of potential for increasing participation and motivation, and current users appear to be making great use of it at work and at home. It is interesting that even among employers and individual early adopters of the technology there is a healthy scepticism about the limits of e-learning and we need to be wary of much of the hype. That said,it is clear that e-learning is already revolutionising the face of learning".
Other findings include the following.
The majority of e-learners learn at work, although nearly a third of e-learners learn from home.
Informal e-learning, particularly surfing the Internet (95 per cent), is the most common type of e-learning.
Almost all (96 per cent) of individual e-learners want support for their e-learning, but 37 per cent of employers do not offer support for employees'e-learning.
Two in five employers do not know how many employees are e-learning in their organisation.
The majority of e-learners (86 per cent) have positive associations with e-learning, although 56 per cent have negative associations.
Six out of ten e-learners think it is possible to learn as effectively through e-learning as other means.
A third of individual e-learners think that employers use e-learning to make them undertake learning in their own time.
Fifty-five per cent of employers say the proportion of training budget spent on e-learning is increasing.
Sixty per cent of purchases from e-learning providers are made by individuals.
Forty-six per cent of employers and 36 per cent of e-learning providers believe e-learning is more cost-effective than traditional methods.
Employers believe the most effective application for e-learning is developing new technical skills.
Fifty-eight per cent of e-learning providers believe that e-learning is not well developed enough to replace other forms of learning/teaching.
Employers believe the main benefit of e-learning is that learning can be accessed at the workplace, reducing time spent "off the job". Almost as important is the ability to structure learning into "chunks" that meet learners' needs.
Providers believe the main benefit of e-learning is that it can be accessed from anywhere, reducing the need for direct contact time with tutors/lecturers.
Individuals believe that the main benefits of e-learning are that it is convenient with fast access to information and an ability to work at their own pace. Paradoxically, the main disadvantage of e-learning is that it is easy to waste time.
An executive summary of the report is available on www.campaign-for-learning.org.uk
The full report, Attitudes to E-learning: A National Survey, is available from Southgate Publishers, The Square, Sanford, Devon EX17 4LW, Tel:01363 776888, price £6.95.
