01 May 2009
Dr Dave Merchant

In last month's HSW we introduced some of the ways technology, computers and the web can assist and streamline your health and safety management and training, pointing out along the way that it doesn't have to be a scary, big-budget affair.

Now it's time to step in and get our feet wet, and look at e-learning. To start with, if you're responsible for safety or induction training in a small company, or you're self-employed, none of this matters, because e-learning is something only big multinational corporations do.

Right? Wrong. It used to be - back in the 80s, if you wanted to show a video screen to someone in the next building, never mind the next city, you'd better have a full-blown IT crowd in the basement, and a forgiving chequebook.

These days, it's often cheaper, faster and easier to "do it with a computer" than not, and the equipment and skills required are commonplace. Your mobile phones can videoconference quite happily, without tech set-up and support. Twenty minutes on the web and you can download more training courses, presentations and handouts than you'll ever need, mostly without ever straying towards a credit card or purchase form.

To start with, the phrase "e-learning" isn't actually all that helpful, as it covers almost anything where electronics are used to deliver some form of education. If you tell someone on the phone how to turn on a kettle, you've delivered e-learning. What we're really interested in this month is computer-assisted learning (CAL) and remote learning (RL). The two merge into each other, but feel far less scary when viewed separately.

Computer-assisted learning is, of course, learning on a computer, such as showing your induction slides on your website. But it's also learning with the aid of a computer; showing your induction slides on Microsoft PowerPoint to a room full of in-the-flesh victims, for instance. We all do CAL to some extent, even if it's just making stuff on Word or PowerPoint and printing it out, but that's rather like getting your car out of the garage, then walking to work.

Once something is in an electronic format it has almost unlimited potential to save you time and work, if you'll only let it loose. There's nothing in CAL about the instructor "not being there", and most of it is still supporting a human standing in front of a group of people and talking at them. In that context, CAL is important at increasing what we call engagement, or that mysterious ability to stop the guy at the back falling asleep.

As we said last month, the coming workforce of Generation Ys do not see a black-on-white PowerPoint bullet list as worth the effort of holding their eyelids up, but with a little planning we can capture even their interest. Briefly. The trick is not to include "screen fluff" for the sake of it, but to try and do things which are genuinely valuable. Animating your company logo is fluff, unless you're a movie studio, but including a video clip showing the evacuation routes will be far more memorable and engaging than a hand-wave towards the car park.

If you're talking about inspecting a forklift, show them photos or videos of real faults on real trucks or, possibly even better, show them 3D models of the trucks so they can see through the casing as you explain where the batteries are. As you'll see in a later article, getting your hands on a 3D model of a forklift is about 20 minutes' work and a few quid at most.

CAL takes in many of the things we touched on last month, such as sending content to phones via QR codes on notice boards, and so forth, but we're still only halfway there; the instructor is still in the building. Remote learning is CAL with longer wires. If the trainer and student are in different places, that's RL.

Remotely interested

A company podcast is RL (assuming the podcast is teaching something!). So is anything you put on a website. The real benefit of RL is that your student can be anywhere they want to be. If the podcast is only available on the computers in your office, it's a little less remote, but in some cases you'll want to restrict where the material can be accessed. Securing data in the wild isn't that hard either.

Many of you will have seen RL from the student side, during NEBOSH courses, for example, and they weren't bothered about cheating. But it does create an obvious problem. You've emailed your PowerPoint file to the new engineer. You've saved a 250-mile drive to the Isle of Stringer Vestney, but there's a niggling question: are your engineers reading it? Are they even there?

Here's the crux of the issue: we're talking about learning, and not reading. To learn means someone else is teaching, and to teach means more than just throwing someone an attachment. There has to be some feedback, interaction and connection between the student and the teacher, even if the teacher is just a computer screen.

Without that bit of interaction we might as well just tell them to Google "handling detonators" and leave them to it. (Good job they're 250 miles away.) This is where a lot of people give up on RL. Sending someone a file is easy, but getting that file to somehow be "as good as being there" is daunting and far from obvious. It's not technically difficult, just not something you're used to. We'll try to fix that. Let's think back a bit; what is it about being there that makes your training good?

1. You know who's there and if they're paying attention.
2. They can ask you questions.
3. You can ask them questions.
4. You can show them "things" and they can handle them. Occasionally break them.
5. They may possibly have those pink wafer biscuits on the coffee trolley.

Apart from that, what you actually teach is identical. Your slides, handouts and so on are as they were when you typed them, and you're you. Item one can be solved through passwords, or in extreme cases (like when you sit your driving theory test) by putting you in a room with the computer screen, and watching you.

If the student is doing the course at home, they could log in and let their little brother complete the exam, but they should realise there's no point. Promote the course as beneficial to them, and maybe hint there'll be pop quizzes at work next week. Items two and three can be handled externally (by email or phone) or within the training software itself - see below - but it's important to have the ability in place. You don't have to stand next to the student, but they still need to be able to ask you questions.

Almost every piece of RL has to include some form of exam - a quiz at the end - so you can measure their learning, and show they bothered to do it in the first place. But the fourth item on our list, the hands-on element, is in need of a little attention. A skill such as welding or rope access cannot possibly be taught without practical sessions and face-to-face instruction, no matter how hard you try, just as you can't learn to drive by watching the TV. There is, however, an important and overlooked role for RL even in these intensely practical subjects.

It can provide pre-course material for new students, showing the skills they will learn, the types of work they will do, and so forth, just as a university student gets a reading list before starting term. They'll arrive knowing basic concepts and, more importantly, knowing what to expect. I've had students "sent on a course" who only realised part way through that it was actually useful. Others ran away when they saw they'd have to climb a ladder because they hadn't thought their vertigo would be an issue.

It'd be nice if they knew beforehand, for all our sakes, and a well-aimed bit of remote learning will do that perfectly. Continuing professional development (CPD) is another area where CAL and RL can excel. Even a practical subject can have non-practical CPD, and we'll be looking into that in detail in a later article.

There are many subjects taught in the OSH field which don't have any practical skills at all, in which case planting someone with a clipboard in front of a room of employees for half a day can be a terrible idea. Notwithstanding the time and cost, getting everyone in the same room on the same day can be impossible, so you end up repeating the lecture umpteen times in different local offices, each one being slightly less exciting to the audience than watching someone wash socks.

Being talked at is not engaging, even if the instructor has a funny hat. CAL can't make a boring subject any less boring, but it can make the process of being told something more effective. Ideas will stick. By turning the course entirely into remote learning, the instructor only needs to "teach" their course once, and every student will see the exact same thing, even if they're viewing it at home on a Sunday morning.

Beyond PowerPoint

Instructors often scamper into trees at this point, shouting about  "competence" and the need always to be in the room to ensure it. Well, sorry, that's no longer true. Take a course on inspecting stepladders, for example. Is there any benefit in a student touching a real stepladder? Most people will say yes, but think about it. How many ladders do they actually have to touch to be competent?

With CAL and RL you can easily show them every possible make and model, with every possible fault, and quiz them about it in as much detail as you wish. They can keep the material as a reference when they're doing the job. They're as competent as if you'd been there. So how do you "do" all this audited, question-asking, video-showing software stuff?

This isn't PowerPoint anymore, Toto. We find ourselves in the world of ELMS (electronic learning management systems). At this point, the IT crowd from the basement will be using words such as "SCORM compliant architecture", and a flipchart will seem sexy again. Fear not, it's easier than it sounds.

Think of an ELMS as a glorified website, a-la Myspace or Facebook, where you can upload content (in this case a course) and people can access it based on your lists of who's who. As the creator, you can see who looked at what, when, and how they scored. A "course" to an ELMS is a package of quizzes, slides, videos and anything that teaches something.

It also has a list of students, and it knows which students are supposed to do which course. It knows what they scored, and even which slides they looked at and for how long. Normally students access the ELMS through their web browser, so they don't need to install anything, and can do their learning at home, in the office, or even on their phone.

Historically ELMS were complicated to install and run, but these days we've tried to make them as simple as possible, as it's the instructors who are using them. It's pointless if the only person who can add a course is the IT geek, but he doesn't have a clue how to inspect a stepladder!

Package deal

The ELMS needs to understand how to handle your course (How many slides? Where are the quiz questions? Which one is right?) and that's where those strange words come in. SCORM (sharable content object reference model) and AICC (Aviation Industry CBT Committee) are the two standard ways of packaging a course into a bundle, just like a Word document is a standard way of packaging up text and graphics. Almost every bit of software that can create courses will save them out in one of these formats. The really big advantage of standard packaging is that you can take courses from other people and import them too - a lot of companies selling pre-written material supply it in SCORM format, and the biggest free ELMS software system (OpenELMS) reads it. The web has a huge selection of free courses to download, written by other users, and you can share your own if you want to (or sell them!). If you're expecting loads of courses on computery-stuff and nothing on health and safety, then you'll be surprised - the vast majority of ELMS material is about health and safety, so when Adobe wanted to mock up a course to demonstrate their ELMS system (Connect Pro) they chose safety induction and PPE.

Still think this isn't relevant? We do, however, need to address this "creating" thing. It's fine to download a pre-written course from a website, but in 90% of cases it won't be really what you wanted. It might have been written for a different market (OSHA, for example) or it might simply talk about the wrong brand of gloves. How do you change what you've got, or write a new one?

Well, at a basic level most ELMS courses are PowerPoint-style slide shows with a quiz nailed on the end, and so it'll come as no surprise they're built like a PowerPoint presentation. You can't make them without a bit of extra software, but if you install an ELMS system, it includes a course authoring program too.

Most will open a normal PowerPoint file, and just let you nail on the quizzes, add audio narration, etc. Adobe Presenter (part of Acrobat Professional) also builds SCORM courses within PowerPoint, and in this month's online tutorial I'll show you the process of creating a course, and what it feels like to be the student.

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Online tutorial

The online tutorial that accompanies this article is at http://www1.lexisnexis.co.uk/2008/magazines/HSP_Newsletter/Remote%20learning/ In this month's audiovisual presentation, Dave Merchant takes you through the process of making a computer-aided or remote training package using an ELMS (electronic learning management system). The tutorial includes:

• common software packages used in ELMS, including Adobe Presenter and Connect Pro
• how to organise live e-seminars
• how to create online quizzes to test students' e-learning.

Next month, we'll be looking at content for your slides, from where to find legal graphics on the web to making your own 3D models and video clips.

Categories:
Health, Safety, Professional Skills, Article, Features

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