Nowadays, we are increasingly bombarded with advertisements promoting the purchase of e-learning courses on the most disparate platforms.
It's the age of 8 seconds . The minimum attention span, studied by modern scientists, of the average user who, for a negligible cost , can purchase their own training with the same ease it takes to identify their favorite aftershave.
Manolo De Agostini, copywriter for the popular tech site Tom's Hardware , reports on his blog about a Microsoft study that interviewed a sample of 112 people, monitoring their electroencephalography (we're talking about the supercalifragiquespiralidous!) and defining, precisely, that now " our attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish . It's technology's fault, or rather the constant flow of information arriving from Twitter, Facebook, and websites. So much, too much news: we try to read it all, and consequently our attention span, the ability to concentrate on a single thing, is lowered."
I recently happened to be looking for an online course that could help me delve deeper into certain topics. Google's algorithm turned against me, invading my day no matter what I was doing just to push something at me to buy.
It could be. We're in the Internet era...
Not finding anything I was looking for and attracted by courses similar to my other passions, I decided to purchase a smartphone photography course.
It has been known for some time that even some directors or aspiring ones are making increasing use of smartphones to produce short films, music videos, and commercials.
Some festivals have even been born such as the Mobile Film Festival French award that rewards the best European content produced by telephone.
But, bringing my attention back to the article, I was able to notice how for 19 euros and 90 , you can have a clearly poorly structured course, devoid of training content where the textual part, the graphics, the multimedia are blotted out in favor of an exponential increase in the video part in which the author, self-filming, explains the module for a time ranging from 8 to 15 minutes.
This very specific timing comes from the YouTubers' formats.
In fact, it's no coincidence that more and more YouTubers are becoming trainers and creators of e-learning courses.
Why? How come?
Because nowadays, companies that sell "training" they want to tap more and more into the target of youtubers.
We will thus find hi-tech bloggers who will advertise advanced courses on how to use cell phones (sigh!) ;
we will find travel bloggers who will advertise courses on how to become videographers and photographers (ari-sigh!) ;
We'll find fashion bloggers advertising how to wear a pair of underwear in style, and so on...
While on the one hand, training has broadened its horizons by offering new topics and integrating new technologies (better quality videos and photos/the ability to access them via smartphone/tablet wherever there is an internet connection), on the other hand, the conversion to SMART has compressed the content, therefore the time of use and consequently the quality.
Not so long ago, an e-learning course could be quite expensive and not accessible to most people, but it made my training more valuable and more marketable in the workplace.
Today, for 2,498,396 euros (These figures are then advertised as a significant discount!) you will be able to purchase many more courses focused on the trivial by leveraging the cost.
It's no coincidence that the advertisements we're served highlight the price and not the content!
It's disarming to see how much approximation there is currently.
The courses, more or less always the same, are offered in the following formats:
- smart;
- enterprise;
- level supersayan.
In the training supermarket, where products are jumbled together, often with discounted quality and frenetic discounting, simply choosing the best product at the right price will be enough to hit the mark.
But, nowadays, when it comes to the 8-second issue, are we ready to take a step back?
Joseph Barbato
Responsible for analyzing training needs and processes.