Four A’s to Better Adoption
By Michael Grant
 Our regular readers know
that we place a great deal of emphasis on adoption as the value
foundation for eLearning. It seems self evident, but it is
amazing how much attention is paid to the details of eLearning
design and development without any strategy based on the target
audience.
We have developed what we call the “Four A” model
of adoption to help people understand and, more importantly, manage
those things that ultimately lead to higher adoption. The four
A’s are as follows:
1. Accessibility: how easy is it for the
target learners to access and use technology?
2. Attitudes: what level of comfort do the
target learners have with technology that would position them to
learn through technology?
3. Ability: how competent are people with
technology and with learning through technology?
4. Appropriateness: do people have a
preference for accessing learning through technology?
Very few training programs are actually command
and control. Rather they involve drawing people into training
based on their motivations and attitudes.
The management of adoption is really about
reaching people who are not particularly self motivated
learners. The thing that generally hurts eLearning adoption
rates is that it represents a change in the way training is
delivered. This gives unmotivated learners an excuse not to
adopt eLearning. We hear things like “I can’t access it”, “I
don’t like to learn on the computer etc.”. The Four A’s are a
way of addressing these types of resistance head-on and to develop
strategies for managing them.
One has only to look at overall eLearning
adoption rates to know that most people have not taken an eLearning
course. So it is pointless to use existing eLearning
experience as a departure point. Rather one must build out to
eLearning by understanding how people use technology today in
learning-like ways.
That is what we effectively do in the 4A
approach, we explore the ways that people are comfortable with using
information and communication technology and then introduce learning
design into these things.
In many ways this is much more of a marketing
approach than has been typically used by trainers. Many of the
people I speak to in human resources think that marketing is just a
matter of providing incentives for people to try eLearning (eg.
Coffee mugs!). But in this approach, we want the design and
development of the eLearning product to be driven by the target
learners general comfort with technology, their ability to access
technology and their competency. This makes it much easier to
develop a systematic approach to adoption rates because the starting
point is the user and all the subsequent design, development and
roll out is based on this understanding of the users. We have
hardwired adoption into everything we do.
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