AM
5.0Reviewed May 15, 2020
Really informative course... 100 percent worth doing it..
The course was extremely helpful in understanding how to design and assess learning events in a business context. In particular, it was interesting to learn how important the alignment of learner, trainer and the learner's organization (including peers and managers) is for successful learning transfer.
The reasons I am not giving five stars are firstly, the presentation of the material and secondly, gaps in the material itself.
To the first point: the presentation slide design and pacing was at times confusing and distracting. I think this is partly because of the overuse of animations and the wording on the slides not always corresponding to what the speakers say. I ended up not looking at the slides during the video sections and instead studied based on the scripts for the narration (the summaries used in the narration, especially by the female lecturer, were mostly concise and helpful). If I had not been extremely motivated by professional reasons to study learning transfer, I would likely not have completed this course for this reason.
To the second point: There were some omissions in the presentation of the learning transfer system inventory (LTSI). In particular, while the final assessment uses a case study where the 16 factors of the LTSI are evaluated with numerical values, the course does not introduce these numerical values or how to give scores in this model. I would have appreciated practical guidelines for this assessment process. In addition, there was no critical engagement with the LTSI model. Some parts of the model are counterintuitive (e.g. separating manager responses into support and sanctions but having only one score for peer support; and the distinction between positive outcomes when transferring learning and negative personal outcomes when not transferring learning - what about negative consequences when transferring learning or positive outcomes when not transferring learning). In my impression, there seems to be a lot of overlap between the factors in the model which makes it difficult to understand why barriers and enablers were broken down into these specific categories. It would therefore been helpful to get the lecturers' perspective, as practitioners, on why they find this particular model, in contrast to other models, useful in their work and why it does make sense to them. Without additional information, it is difficult to assess the model's utility and research what potential alternatives would be.
I want to thank you for putting together this helpful and practical guide to learning transfer and hope you can further improve the content for future learners.