By
Glen Mohr, 
Chief Operating Officer
The Otter Group

 


Designing Collaborative E-learning For Results

The technologies that enable us to teach and learn online paradoxically increase our isolation.

Because we can communicate by email and over the web, we no longer need
to meet face to face. The more connected we are, the more isolated we
are. The connectivity/isolation paradox is manifesting itself in many
aspects of our professional and personal lives and is a fundamental
reason why e-learning programs can be unsatisfying to teachers and
learners. 

This paper will explore how to design e-learning programs to overcome
the connectivity/isolation paradox. Using a case study of a program
that we adapted from a lunch seminar and then re-engineered for
synchronous online delivery, we will demonstrate strategies for
building connection, interactivity, and relationships via learning
online.

Our case study involves CDM, a global consulting, engineering,
construction, and operations firm headquartered in Cambridge,
Massachusetts with over 3,000 employees in 90 offices. With project
managers responsible for both large, complex projects and small but
numerous ones, and with the daily client demands always increasing, the
need for better conflict resolution and management became evident. To
begin to address this need, the firm developed an internal two-hour
lunch seminar on conflict management. However, to reach several hundred
managers dispersed globally, and to save time and expense, we wanted to
try an online approach.

The Otter Group was called in because we had developed successful
conflict management e-learning programs and because of our emphasis on
the social aspects of learning in our programs. Our initial review of
the lunch seminar found it lacking in a number of critical factors.
Participants met once briefly and spent almost no time engaging with
one another. There was little meaningful interaction among
participants, and no opportunity for participants to practice or
discuss applying the ideas they were learning. Participants left the
class without a clear understanding of what their next steps should be
and without any sense of a learning community.

Our proposed e-learning solution had to maintain the high touch level
of the face-to-face seminar within the constraints imposed by the
physical separation of the participants and the technologies used to
connect them. Our re-design converted the lunchtime seminar into six
synchronous online sessions of 75 minutes each delivered over
VisionCast (a version of Microsoft LiveMeeting provided by Premiere
Conferencing) and a phone conference.
We incorporated the following design elements:

- We solicited numerous case examples from participants and their coworkers for use throughout the course.
- We included a well-respected assessment tool and a
survey designed especially for the course to generate rich profiles of
the participants from which they could learn about themselves and their
coworkers. The resulting data was woven throughout the course to
connect theory with practical reality.
- We designed a team project that engaged
participants in applying new tactics and strategies to a real case
example provided by senior management.
- We invited senior executives in the company to join
the course at the beginning and end to reinforce the importance of the
course to the company and to critique students’ work and motivate them
to integrate what they learned into their daily practice.
- Throughout the sessions we made extensive use of
interactive features of the technology including polling and breakout
sessions.

Our re-design proved successful in overcoming the constraints of
physical separation and the limitations of distance learning
technology. In the most recent cohort to complete the re-designed
conflict management program, one hundred percent of the participants
rated it as valuable to highly valuable. One hundred percent of the
participants found that the course helped them recognize and deal with
their own and other conflict styles. Participants cited as an advantage
the flexibility in scheduling that comes from an online delivery
platform, but they also valued the interactive communications that were
built into the program design. One participant told us, “I am the last
person normally to be impressed with computer technology, but I have to
admit the technology was extremely impressive and effective.”

CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
In dealing with the connectivity/isolation paradox we have defined a
number of critical success factors. We have summarized them in the
sidebar and describe some in more detail below.

1.    Manage Expectations
Participant expectations must be managed on a number of levels. First
and foremost, participants need to know what the company expects them
to achieve in the course as well as more specifically what the
instructor expects from them. On a practical note, participants need to
know what the technology can do and what it cannot, and this should be
reinforced periodically to make sure that if a particular interactive
feature, for example, typing in a question privately, has not been used
in a while, participants do not forget it is available. Lastly but very
important, they need to know how much time everything is going to take
before they commit. This is possibly the most common complaint – “no
one told me how much time it was going to take.”

We needed to educate participants that this course was of great
importance to senior management and to the company’s bottom line. We
considered that crucial to setting participants’ expectations from the
outset. It was not enough to include a welcome letter in the front of
the materials packet. We invited a senior manager in the company (in
one cohort an EVP and in another cohort the President) to introduce the
course during the first session.

We coached the senior executive on both the content of his presentation
and the most effective style. For example, we encouraged him to
identify people in the class he knew by name and thank them personally
for participating. He spoke from his own experience and gave specific
examples of when the skills covered in the course were instrumental to
successful resolution of a serious problem. He also gave at least one
example of an unsuccessful conflict resolution, which led to a
discussion of what strategies would have been useful. The senior
manager also supplied the case studies used for the team project and he
attended the final session of the course and critiqued the
participants’ work.  It raised the stakes for participants by an order of magnitude when
they learned that a senior manager cared enough about the outcome of
the program to make time in his schedule to participate in person. This
is more easily accomplished with an e-learning offering, as the senior
manager can participate from any location.

2.    Make synchronous sessions highly interactive
Successful interactivity in a synchronous distance learning session
results from a combination of the instructor’s skill at managing the
class and keeping participants engaged, a curriculum design that
emphasizes student input and feedback, and technology that makes it
seamless and fluid.

We have found that a two-person team of moderator and subject matter
expert or faculty is highly effective. The moderator focuses on
maximizing interaction by calling on participants, filtering/answering
text chat questions, and operating polls while the subject matter
expert focuses on the content.

In this course we made use of multiple means of connecting the
participants with one another:  polling, discussion, participant
feedback (ratings/ranking), simulations and breakout sessions.
Throughout the synchronous sessions, the moderator made frequent use of
the platform’s polling capability. Poll questions stimulated
participants’ thinking and showed them whether their classmates were
thinking the same way. They provided a quick way to assess the group’s
experience after a breakout session and also enabled us to record
participant perceptions at the beginning of class and compare them to
answers at the end of class.

We provided options for asking questions publicly and privately both
during and in between sessions. We explained when participants could
volunteer examples and how we would use them. We also regularly
redirected interaction from between instructor and participant to
between participants.

We wanted the environment to approximate the flexible and dynamic
qualities of a live classroom and so we pre-arranged with the
conference call vendor to rapidly shift participants into breakout
sessions and then back to the full group on the instructor’s cue. Using
this technology, the instructor could give participants a role-play
scenario, send them off to work in pairs, visit the pairs to coach them
and answer questions, and then bring everyone back for a group
discussion. It was the virtual equivalent of “turn to the person next
to you and take the role of….” It also gave us the advantage of
pre-determining the pairings so that we could ensure that participants
got to meet and work with nearly every other member of the class.

3.    Use student-generated data
The lunchtime seminar had participants complete a conflict style survey
but only included limited use of the data collected. Participant
evaluations of the program confirmed that learning about their conflict
style was the part of the course they liked best and wanted expanded.
In the re-designed course we asked participants to take the Thomas
Kilman instrument (TKI, http://www.cpp-db.com/products/tki/index.asp)
before the first session. We also gave them a specially designed survey
eliciting perceptions of how conflict occurs and is managed in the
company.

We summarized the results of the TKI profiles and presented these
results in a series of graphs, sometimes polling the participants about
their perceptions before revealing the data. Participants gained a
richer view of their learning community and were able to compare their
individual results to the aggregate. We also summarized the results of
the conflict survey to give a picture of conflict management across the
company. Finally we correlated the results and wove the two sets of
data throughout the course as a means of connecting theory to
individual and group practice.
As part of the re-design we conducted interviews with company employees
in the same position as the participants and also with others in the
company with whom they were most likely to share conflict. From these
interviews we generated a number of mini-cases rich in detail. These
scenarios generated much discussion and engaged the participants
encouraging them to volunteer their own examples. Hearing the breadth
of examples from across the company emphasized the importance that even
small changes in conflict management behavior could make when
multiplied across the company.

Combining the profile and survey data with detailed personal examples
demonstrated for participants that their peers with very different
profiles were addressing similar problems to their own and that
sometimes one approach was more effective than another. This reinforced
in the strongest way possible the core lesson of the class: that it is
possible to consciously choose a strategic approach to dealing with
conflict.

6.    Closure and Next Steps
Because the course was designed to be conducted entirely in a distance
learning format, we developed a closing online session that gave
participants the greatest opportunity for interaction with one another
and with senior management. We used the review of team projects as a
starting point for discussion. We also asked the senior manager to
comment on the profile data and to reinforce, through discussion, the
point that incremental improvement in conflict resolution skills across
the company could result in large improvement to the bottom line.

We asked participants for examples of current situations in which they
could envision applying what they learned in the class. This brought
current issues into the discussion and, with the presence of the senior
manager, gave participants the sense that they were experiencing a
unique opportunity to talk about the company rather than just taking a
course.


CONCLUSION
By applying all of the techniques outlined in this paper, we have been
able to achieve a dynamic, interactive learning environment where
participants can achieve mastery of the material while building
relationships with one another and with their firm.  As part of
ongoing skills development within this company, participants are
tracked six months out to see how well they are doing.  Past
participants continue to cite great value from the program.  The
company views it as a great investment in time and resources and a
model for e-learning initiatives.