(From Workforce) -- How do we sustain what we teach? That’s the most frequent question I hear when it comes to workplace learning on civility, inclusion and compliance.

Cost and productivity are constantly being balanced against the urgent need to deliver key messages that result in lasting behavioral change. There are three main issues.

First, it’s clear that many organizations just don’t have time for traditional classroom training. For some audiences and topics, live deliveries are useful and necessary. For many others, it isn’t practical.

The good news is that online learning—delivered via either prepackaged programs or webinar lectures by talented instructors—can reach huge numbers of people quickly without pulling them from their jobs.

But delivering great content, while vital, is not enough. Mark Edmundson, a distinguished professor at the University of Virginia, points to a problem with online lecture learning when it’s viewed as the only means of instruction: usually, there is no meaningful interaction between the teacher and students. Instead, the teacher lectures and it’s assumed that invisible students will magically absorb information.

Edmundson’s point is that the teacher can’t respond to the needs of the students, and the students can’t ask questions and discuss what they’ve learned with one another. In many ways, the experience is not much different than reading. While new technologies allow some interaction via white-boarding, polls, chats and live questions, Edmundson is still largely right.

Second, for content to start the process of changing behavior, it must be remembered and applied. It’s not enough for students to get information, pass a test and then forget it. They need to take in key points, remember them and apply them routinely.

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