The world is changing at breathtaking speed. The explosion of the Internet and technology has touched each one of us in staff education. It makes it much easier to find answers to questions immediately with a search engine. We can consult the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention within minutes. It is truly amazing.

There is also a push to move all education to high-tech learning. Three years ago at the American Society of Training and Development (ASTD) conference, the exhibit hall was filled with companies promising that their approach to high-tech learning was the end all and be all. I watched a demonstration where the salesperson promised you could design a course and have it ready for learners in less than 60 seconds (He had a stopwatch and someone standing by to use it.) I watched with great interest to learn how technology could cut my course development time to less than a minute. This is what I saw: He opened up a document that had notes he had taken on the topic, single-spaced and about 20 pages long. He moved that document into his learning software and shouted, "Stop the clock. The course is done!" Some watching the demonstration "oohed" and "ahhed." I just shook my head and knew that he had no idea what constituted a good learning experience. How many people find reading someone else's notes as the most effective way to learn? Can we teach skills effectively if someone just reads the procedure to us? I don't think so. To me, bad education and training is bad education and training whether it is live or on the Internet. Some are presenting online courses that are no more than dumping their notes onto Web sites. Whether live or in the virtual world, good learning happens when learners are involved actively. This involvement can happen live or on-line.

Here is an idea you can use to involve learners at the start of a class. Ask the learners to find two coins of any denomination. They are to find the year the coins were minted (printed on the side with the person's profile). They then choose one of the two years and share how their memory of the topic you are teaching has changed since then. For example, if I had a penny from 1978 and the topic of the class were fetal monitoring, I would share my memory of what I remember about monitoring back in 1978. I remember external monitoring; some of the physicians did not trust it at all. There was one physician who would let us use and document fetal heart tones every 15 minutes with a headset only. He said monitors needlessly increased his performance of Cesarean sections. This exercise opens the discussion for the educator to talk about recent developments and fundamentals that have and have not changed. This idea can be used live or in an Internet course with each person posting answers on a message board asynchronously so that he/she connects with others in the course. Sometimes the on-line world seems so isolated. This activity connects learners and helps them to understand the important focus on how practice has changed.

Creating opportunities for learner involvement is the key to successful learning, whether live or virtual. Three years later, there are only one fifth as many companies at ASTD touting technology as the answer to learning. Technology will change certain parts of learning, but the key elements for success will not change. Strive to excel in the critical ones and let go of the others.