Barriers to E-Learning

Today companies are spending enormous sums of money to train & retrain their employees. Employees have an extensive range of training programs delivered in multiple ways. The competitive pressures and market forces are driving companies to keep their cost of training low. Note that training costs should also include the loss of productivity during the training period

The need for having a wide range of training programs and the pressures to manage costs and also increase employee satisfaction has led to rapid growth in E-learning.

E-Learning emerged a decade ago – in late 1990’s and has grown significantly since then. However the success of E-learning has been mostly limited to USA. In rest of the world E-learning is yet to succeed.

The barriers to success of e-learning in other countries are as follows:

• Language barriers: Most of E-learning content was developed for US audience, hence the language & accent is in American English. E-learning content has to be localized to account for local languages.
• Mindset barriers: For many people, learning has to be face-to-face – i.e., person to person contact is essential. E-learning is seen as too synthetic and impersonal. The general perception is that e-learning is not true learning.

However, employees do not find any technical barriers to e-learning in the organizational level. This is mainly because employees today broadly have the same level of computer skills.