Over the last several years I have watched a number of “training” modules for various groups I am involved in. What has surprised me is the amount of time, money, and effort people spend to teach you almost nothing. I think this is a trend that we need to fight back against.

Let me start out by saying that this is not a problem strictly with online training, nor is all online training bad. However, there is a bad sort of online training that is proliferating due to fear and laziness. It is a training which says nothing, teaches nothing, yet helps you satisfy a “requirement” to “do something.” Occasionally the training will have a good nugget of information, but it will spend a half an hour delivering an important one-sentence instruction.

My most recent encounter with this sort of training has been as a requirement to be a volunteer tennis coach. I did not get an exact count of the time spent, but I think it was somewhere between 8 and 10 hours. Let me tell you the entirety of what the training consisted of: (1) Don’t yell at kids, (2) don’t abuse kids (sexually or otherwise), (3) kids are more likely to want to be involved if they are enjoying themselves, (4) the mental game is as important as the physical game, (5) if someone collapses on the field, start CPR and get an AED device, and (6) if someone has a hit to the head and starts acting strange, take them off the field and get them to a doctor to be checked for a concussion. 

Now, some of these are important points, but none of them take fifteen minutes to make, even if you are being highly repetitive. The only possible reasons for these trainings are fear and laziness. For instance, a very large portion of the training was about “abuse prevention.” However, none of the training actually included any details on how to prevent abuse. No specific cases were presented of what actually happens in an abuse prevention scenario. It was clear that the point of this training was mere liability avoidance. The organization was fearful that someone would sue them for abuse, so they can point back to this video and say, “We have training in place to prevent abuse, so, we’re sorry for what happened, but we did what we could.” But such videos do nothing to actually prevent abuse, but only waste everyone’s time so that the organization can cover itself.

Having the training online generally makes the problem worse. First of all, it prevents feedback. Since the instructor is not present with the learners, the instructor can’t even see how they need to change their presentation for the future. In fact, the goal for the instructor is literally to only have to teach it once and be done. However, this misses the opportunity for the instructor to learn how they can teach the subject better. Second, it prevents the ability for the learner to ask questions or have a discussion. Real people receiving new, actionable information tend to have questions on how to implement this in their specific setting. If there is no way to ask these questions, the value of the training is negligible for most people.

In some cases, I was convinced that the goal of the training was to pretend to convey information while not actually doing so.  For instance, any actual training in how to take care of injuries on the field could be accused of being medical training, and thus cause the organization to be more liable for causing people to be practicing medicine unlicensed, especially after only receiving online training. So, instead, it mostly includes “awareness” training that simply says to “send players to a doctor if you think they might have a problem.” Okay, thanks, but that isn’t really “first aid training.” Again, you can see where the lawyers have stepped in to simply cause people to waste time — they don’t want to be sued by an injured player for having untrained coaches, and they don’t want to be sued by the state for providing medical training without a license. They especially don’t want to be sued by an injured player for a coach having performed first aid incorrectly. What’s the answer?  Meaningless “awareness” training that lets the organization say they did their job, but in fact does the job in the most timidly vacuous way.

So, what’s the answer?

First of all, I think we should stop looking to technology as a band-aid to all of our problems. Rather than deciding whether X, Y, or Z is a real issue and be intentional about solving it, technology is making it easy for people to substitute in halfhearted gestures for proactive measures. Proactive measures might include technology, but just throwing a website at a problem doesn’t automatically fix it.

Secondly, if you are going to do online training, be sure that the training delivers actionable information. What are several non-obvious scenarios, and what should you do in each one? For instance, in an online training about first aid, giving the proper procedure for a wound incurred from a fall would help far more people than simply saying, “If someone collapses on the field for no reason, call 9-1-1.” How about a list of the most common types of injuries for each sport and how to identify them? How about even going through the list of everything in a typical first aid kit and how to use it?

So, if you decide to deliver content through online training, please take a moment and answer these questions:

• Do you actually want to help people improve using this content, or are you merely using it as a filler to say that you did “something”?
• Is the intent of the content informational, formational, or transformational (see my previous article). If it is formational or transformational, then online learning is probably not the most effective method for delivering the content.
• Are you intending to deliver actionable content or self-evident, hollow platitudes (such as it’s better to be nice than to be mean)? Note that this is often what happens when you try to deliver formational or transformational content as informational.
• Can you identify some clear actions that you hope the person taking the training will be able to do?
• Does the length of the training match the complexity of what is being taught? Some repetition is helpful, but the advantage of online learning is that the user themselves can request that content be repeated.
• Do you have the ability for a learner to ask questions from an expert? If not, how do you anticipate the learner getting their questions answered? If the learner is not likely to have questions, is the content delivering actual information?
• Do you have a way to measure the learner’s understanding of the content? Have you checked to see how well people who have not taken the course do on the measurement? If most people pass without taking the content, either the measurement doesn’t measure or there isn’t worthwhile content in the course.

I’m all for online delivery of good content (if you want an excellent example, Khan Academy does a great job). But let’s stop using online learning as a cheap way to pretend to be training someone by just going through the motions.