I just spent three days attending the American Society for Training and Development's Tech Expo for 2001 in Charlotte, NC. I was severely disappointed that not one institution of higher education was in attendence as a vendor. There were a few presenters that were from traditional schools also doing e-Learning, but not one school had a booth. Bummer. I laughed along with one of my co-workers also in attendence when we skimmed through Training Magazine. In it was a full-page ad from Jones International University for a master's in distance education. Now, here's a for-profit school marketing its DL master's degree to trainers, yet doesn't appear at their national convention? A boring three days, unless you are a professional corporate trainer (which I'm). Rich Douglas, who saw ISD re-labeled and presented about 6 different ways. Ho-hum.
Rich, If you drove to Charlotte from Virginia via I-85, and the expo was that boring, you should have left early. You could have stopped in Durham, called John Wetsch in Raleigh, myself in Burlington, and we could have met for lunch--at least we could have told a few degree mill jokes. Next time you are in the area, give us a call. Russell
I traveled I-66, I-81, and I-77, having picked up a co-worker who lives in Front Royal. Also, I was on AT&T's dime; as one of their senior trainers, I was being paid to be there. I was just expressing my disappointment with the utter lack of showing by the DL community, especially by schools that offer web-based and computer-based education. Rich Douglas
Rich, when our company was doing the marketing for the excellent University of Leicester (UK) distance MS in Training, we took a booth each year at the national ASTD convention in the late 90s. Not exactly a marketing success. We thought these people would either have interest themselves, or for "their people." I think we signed up 3 or 4 people over 3 years. One year, there was a forum meeting on how to assess degrees and credentials. They gave it a large room. 4 or 5 top people from ACE and DETC were the presenters. (Not I; I applied and was rejected.) And there must have been 15 or 20 attendees in a room that could have held hundreds, and they were asking questions like, "What exactly is accreditation, anyway." Whassmatta with your colleagues out there?
Everything that follows will sound self-serving, but here it goes: Luddites. This was a tech expo, but the vast majority of attendees had very little understanding of technical issues as applied to training. The whole focus was on e-Learning. It was clear that many companies are trying to do e-Learning, but are doing it for the wrong reasons. (Saving money, improving training, and such. The only reason to do e-Learning is to get past the inability to get people together in the same room. The travel costs, logistics, varied schedules, and the like are what should make e-Learning attractive.) It was also clear that these training professionals were utterly incapable of conducting training in any other fashion than putting people through day-long (or week-long) face-to-face courses. In fact, they often tried to simulate that in the e-Learning environment, missing the whole point about the flexibility and asynchronous aspects of e-Learning. They're not any smarter about higher education issues, I'm sure. But there may have been valuable lessons to be learned from schools that do e-Learning, even if these people wouldn't pursue such a degree. Maybe schools like Jones International don't feel contributing to the field is worth the expense without enrollments resulting from the process. I'm convinced that for many people, they're just doing a job. Don't rock the boat, don't stretch out and try knew things, and for god's sakes don't learn anything new. I attended 10 different sessions in two-and-a-half days. Six of them--despite very attractive titles--turned out to be re-hashing the Instructional Systems Development model, using new names or adding a few tidbits about e-Learning. But nothing of significance has changed in this field since I first became a trainer 20 years ago. The toys are better, but the thinking is the same. Rich Douglas
