Executive Insight - Michael Frank on E-Learning

In late April, i4cp interviewed Michael Frank, Dean, Graduate School of Management & Technology at the University of Maryland University College, about e-Learning. Michael says that e-learning will play an important role in stimulating learning and creativity in organizations worldwide and that these areas will increasingly add to the strategic intelligence of organizations.

You spoke at i4cp's 2010 conference about how crucial a "seamless transition between learning management systems and new technologies," is - can you tell us more about that?

When organizations make enhancements to their learning systems they need to make sure that they know that what they're introducing will actually work.

People who use technology a lot tend to overestimate the technological sophistication of people that don't and overestimate their willingness to spend the time necessary to master new technology. It's not coincidental that Microsoft has new releases fairly infrequently - once people have mastered a certain level, to deploy something that's disruptive to their productivity is not a help to anybody - and it doesn't surprise me at all that a lot of corporations haven't figured that out.

And when you deploy to as many people as we do [at the University of Maryland University College] which is around 90,000 people, you have to understand that you can't deploy to the top-end because you're not going to be deploying to everybody who can use what you want, so you deploy to that level of sophistication that you can reasonably expect 95% of the people to have, otherwise you kill your product or you kill your productivity, it really is that straightforward.

Read the rest of the interview (you must be an i4cp member to proceed)