An eLearning primer - part II: what works in trucking

Mark Murrell

October 10, 2017

In the first part of this article I reviewed different approaches to eLearning and talked about the ones most commonly used in the corporate world today.

There were five main styles, ranging from very simple to very elaborate. To recap:

• Basic Slides - Primarily text and images, broken up into pages or slides, possibly with a few quiz questions added in.
• CBT-Style - Text, images, video, animation, narration and more variety in quizzes and exercises.
• Flash-based / American Style - audio and video, with limited text in the content sections. Interactive quizzes and exercises throughout.
• Immersive - virtual environments that present content in the context of a simulation of real-world activities.
• Game-Based - quest-style video games with an educational slant so participants learn while collecting points and sharing scores socially.

Each successive model is more elaborate than those that came before, so it probably comes as no surprise that they also take progressively longer to build and have increasing costs as well. While a simple slide-based course can be built in a couple of weeks for a few thousand dollars per finished hour of content (the budgeting metric for all custom eLearning), immersive and game-based courses can take upwards of a year and cost $50-75k per finished hour. Big difference!

It's important to note that one style isn't inherently better than another. They each have strengths and weaknesses, and situations where they're the perfect fit.

In trucking, however, most of them don't work very well. To understand why, we need to look at some of things that constrain an eLearning solution for trucking:

• Regulatory change - one thing I've learned in 12 years of serving this industry is that trucking LOVES to change regulations. Pretty much as soon as a reg comes out there's a concerted effort in some segment to change it. As a result, any eLearning solution needs to be built with the assumption that the content will change, it may change quickly, and the change may be reverted later on.
• Technology usage - the audience in trucking is rarely sitting at a new, fast PC on a fast Internet connection in an office. More often, they're using technology that's a few levels down from the current leading edge, on connections that are either slow, shared, or dedicated to other activities, and they may be using cellular data plans as well.
• Audience characteristics - trucking includes a pretty even mix of different learning styles, along with wide ranges in age, education, literacy, and comfort with technology.
• Price sensitivity - trucking is a low margin industry with little room for new expenses.

Those constraints pretty much immediately rule out some of the different eLearning types noted at the top.

Immersive and game-based courses take too long to develop to keep up with regulatory changes. They also generally rely on newer technology and better connections to deliver the maximum experience, which rules out a lot of the intended audience. Finally, they're expensive to develop in the first place, and ongoing updates would make them even more expensive, resulting in a final product that wouldn't be viable in the market. As a result, it's no surprise that you don't see courses like this in trucking right now.

Flash-based courses are faster and less expensive to develop, but they do generally require better quality equipment and connections, limiting their effectiveness here. As well, the lack of text is a problem for a good chunk of the audience who prefer to learn by reading, or English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) people who tend to do better when they can see and hear the words at the same time.

At the other end of the spectrum, basic slides are cheap and fast to develop, but the bare bones learning experience doesn't work for a good segment of the audience who need more interaction to learn properly. Regulatory training content can be pretty dry, so a simple text-and-images approach will just magnifiy that and make it even harder for people to stay engaged and learn. Plus, if you're just going to use text and images then a PDF that can be printed or shared is a better choice, or maybe an infographic that's more enjoyable and tends to be stickier for learners.

That brings us to CBT style, which actually works really well for trucking. It provides a great combination of learning elements, and fits very nicely inside the constraints noted above:

• The combination of text, images, video, narration, interactions, and quizzes covers the range of learning styles, and supports the needs of ESL participants as well.
• It's relatively quick to develop so it can be updated more easily when the regs change, keeping the resulting product in a reasonable price range.
• It's light on bandwidth and technology, so it works well on older machines and slower connections, and doesn't burn through cellular data plans either.
• It's flexible enough that it can be built to include some of the elements of more elaborate approaches, without committing to them completely, and can still be very user-friendly and welcoming.

It's for those reasons that we use this model for our courses, and that last point is particularly important since we like to incorporate different elements from a variety of styles. For example, one of the benefits of immersive eLearning is that it gives people a chance to simulate real world scenarios, helping them to see how the new content fits into daily routines. We don't create fully immersive experiences, but we do use characters and scenarios to show how the content applies to real world situations. That provides a comparable benefit, but in a much more contained, sustainable package.

So, while I started this two-part piece talking about all the different kinds of eLearning that are common across the corporate education world now, those options narrow once you start considering the requirements for any specific audience. In the case of the trucking industry, and its distinct needs, CBT-style ends up as the best option. Of course, even within that box there's plenty of room for variety, but at that level it's above my pay grade so I'll leave it to Jane to cover in her articles and webinars!