Big news! Nashville’s bytes of knowledge has acquired Duthie Learning’s e-learning development business. Full story on Venture Nashville Connections.

Our work often gets called “video,” although we’ve never thought of it that way.

In the past we’d push back and try to explain what’s different between interactive and video. Why? Well, in 1989, video was a competing technology — you could make a videotape-based training course, or you could spend a lot less money and build an interactive, computer-based training course.

Video has gotten much less expensive since then, and it works just fine on modern computers and through online delivery. From our perspective, it’s just one more type of asset we can use when developing online training.

Still, it always feels a bit weird when someone introduces us by saying we make “training videos.” Any suggestions on how better to explain the difference, or do you think we should just let it stand?

For most of our nearly twenty years in business, we at Duthie Learning have considered training and marketing to be practically the same. Some folks get this immediately, while others raise an eyebrow. Let me explain:

Employee training is a form of communication whose basic purpose is to change behavior. Sometimes this requires teaching the audience something new, like how to use a new piece of equipment or follow a revised business process. Regardless, the end goal is to have the employees start doing something new or different.

Marketing is really the same: Its purpose is to change the behavior of those who receive the message. Usually, the desired behavior is to make a specific buying decision, but that’s still a behavior. The biggest difference is that, unlike employee training, you can’t force anyone to sit still for a marketing message.

Where do you stand on the topic? Are we wrong, or have you been saying this all along as well?

In her blog today, Hannah Paramore at Paramore|Redd writes, “People Only Buy What They Understand.” Maybe that’s obvious, but she does a great job explaining how online advertising hasn’t figured this out yet, whereas print advertising keeps things simple, making it very easy to buy.

This highlights something we come across in our work: you can’t fix a bad system by throwing more training at it. We occasionally play business consultants to our clients, pointing out where a particular system appears to be too complicated. As an example, imagine a timesheet entry process that takes 20 seconds per entry. No one uses it, because it’s a pain. Threaten everyone with pay cuts if they don’t fill them in, and nothing changes. Fix the system so it only takes 5 seconds per entry, and suddenly everyone’s doing timesheets every day.

If the product or service in question is well-designed, but there’s still a little learning curve, that’s when it’s appropriate to look at developing a short educational presentation on how it works. If it’s geared to your prospects, they can understand the service in 2-3 minutes — at which point they’re ready to make an informed decision to buy.

By the way, as much as we’d love to get paid to create training for that 20-second timesheet process, we’d rather see the process improved. Then we’ll have time to create training on something far more interesting.

(Update 3:01pm: fixed the link to Hannah’s article in the first paragraph.)

Warning: This article has nothing to do with Second Life. We’re talking about avatars and how they apply to e-learning courses.

In the past, they’ve been called “agents,” thanks perhaps to Microsoft Agent, which provided a way to embed little animated character-helper-guys, for example into web pages and courses developed with Authorware.

Some months ago, we approached professors Rick Moffett and Mike Hein Middle Tennessee State University about working together on some e-learning research projects. They queried their graduate students for proposals, and the winning contender Jaclyn Cremisi Pritchett, who wanted to determine whether avatars improve learning. Jaclyn’s role was to define the study, run the study, and do all the complicated statistical analysis. Our role was to provide content and development. Read the rest of this entry »