Forget the 80:20 and 90:9:1 Rules. For Online Training, It's 50:50.

Comment

Comment by Henry Brown on March 9, 2013 at 2:52pm

Although discussing E-Learning could have some relevance to webinars....

From The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning:

On-the-job e-learning: Workers' attitudes and perceptions
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Abstract:
The use of e-learning for on-the-job training has grown exponentially in the last decade due to it being accepted by people in charge of businesses. Few papers have explored virtual training from the workers’ standpoint, that is, the perception they have about the different training methodologies (face-to-face vs. virtual) and the attitudes they have towards on-the-job learning. Training, in this context, is an investment for both the two participating agents: businesses and workers. It seems logical that knowing the perceptions and attitudes shown by the targets of the training is, at least, as important as knowing the advantages for the companies.

To analyse workers’ perceptions and attitudes we conducted an online survey of 2,000 employees of the leading European savings bank, CaixaBank (http://www.caixabank.com/index_en.html), on training habits, perceptions, motivations, and disincentives of undertaking face-to-face or online instruction.

The results reveal that workers perceive e-learning as a more flexible and up-to-date training methodology. On the other hand, face-to-face training continues to be perceived as a more motivating methodology compared to virtuality and with better explanations from the course trainers. As regards motivations given by the workers when it comes to training, there are three main groups of attitudes: those which are more affective and social, those which reveal poor adaptability or fear of the new training requirements, and, finally, those linked to the knowledge society.

Such results state that while the benefits of distance methodology can be clearly identified from the company’s point of view (i.e., as a flexible and efficient methodology to develop the employees’ skills and knowledge), from the employees’ standpoint, the advantages of virtual training are not so clear and depend to a great extent on their attitude towards the use of virtuality.
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Comment by Andrew Krzmarzick on March 4, 2013 at 11:48am

Thanks for the input, Walker. We are actually running a pilot "social learning" course with OPM right now and are doing Kirkpatrick Level 1-3 evaluations both during and after the course to ascertain learning and behavior change. The course includes the weekly webinars, combined with required readings (blogs), a live group discussion in our virtual classroom (a private GovLoop group) and a 1-to-1 weekly reflection with an assigned course partner by email. I'm excited to see what we can find out about overall impact and effectiveness of online, blended learning.

Comment by Walker Hardy on March 4, 2013 at 10:29am

Andrew - I certainly agree with your 50% turnout rates, and have seen simliar for the couple of webinars that I've done. But I think the turnout rate isn't the important number, and needs a qualifier in order to be compared with the 80:20 or 90:9:1 rules.  Those group behavior and online community statistics are really indicating the value added (or impact) as you stated.  Just turning up isn't adding value or necessarily gaining value as a student.  The measurement that is needed is whether those 50% of participants who did show up to the webinar actually learn or gain anything.   We need to (I certainly admit that our organization can also measure this better) run well-designed Kirkpatrick-based Level 1 and 2 evaluations of those webinars to measure learning/knowledge gain.  Eventually we should also run a Level 3 behavior-change based evaluation as well, but first we have to make sure the Level 1&2 evals consistenly show good results.  

I suggest a number for webinars that actually mimics the group behavior and online communities statisitics.  For webinars the ratio might be 50:20, where the 50% is the turnout rate as you stated, but more importantly the 20% is the percentage of people who actually learn or gain from attending.  The other persons probably just have the webinar on in the background while performing other work (or getting coffee or checking facebook or maybe govloop.)