On Demand: The Googlization of Learning

Just a decade or two ago, people thought of learning as a one-way communication, typically held in a classroom setting. Employees would leave their jobs for a while to attend training. Today, of course, most learning organizations realize that instructor-led training is no longer enough. Numerous studies have pointed to the shortcomings of traditional classroom settings for gaining and retaining knowledge. According to a report by the Research Institute of America, 33 minutes after completion of a live course, students retain only 58 percent of covered information. By the second day, only 33 percent is retained, and by day 30, all but 13 percent of the information covered in the course is lost.

To combat this problem, many organizations have invested in libraries of training materials. However, these are of little use, unless they are easy to locate and even easier to consume. Regrettably, as a learning industry, this is one area where not enough has yet been done.

Faced with a dearth of easily accessible learning assets, employees may turn to traditional algorithmic search engines to glean the information they need to perform day-to-day tasks. These are the same search engines we use on Friday night to look up the telephone number of the local pizza joint. However, since consumer search engines sometimes do not distinguish good content from bad, accurate content from flawed or serious content from satirical, relying on consumer search engines can lead to an inordinate amount of time spent sifting through irrelevant information before ever finding useful data. Is someone searching for “Java” and “Ajax” in need of information on coffee and cleanser or programming techniques?

Not only is this a waste of time, it offers endless distractions for employees, who are easily pulled from the task at hand by links to advertisements and irrelevant content. And worse, the learning organization has no visibility, no data and no opportunity to intervene with trusted, relevant training assets.

In fact, employees spend 12 hours a week on information-gathering tasks — often to no avail. According to a study by Accenture, managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information, and half of what they find is of no value to them. IDC research shows that knowledge workers spend 15 percent to 30 percent of their time gathering information, but these searches are successful less than 50 percent of the time. Moreover, the sheer volume of information is overwhelming. The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years.