Online Learning without Learning Science Principles Doesn’t Fly at Boeing-Webinar Recording

With corporate offices in Chicago, Boeing employs more than 170,000 people across the United States and in 70 countries. This represents one of the most diverse, talented and innovative workforces anywhere. In 2011; Boeing invested over eight million hours per year in training its 172,000 employees, with an increasing percentage (40%) of classes being delivered online.

The Learning, Training, and Development organization (LTD) consists of 560 people who are responsible for training Boeing employees in workplace skills ranging from aircraft production to engineering and management. A foundational objective of LTD is to provide high quality learning experiences for employees at any time.

One of the goals of LTD is to develop an evidence-based design methodology for creating effective online learning experiences based on learning science principles and standardized development processes. Their approach involves analyzing, experimenting, and evaluating existing online courses to understand how to improve them. One course that was the focus on this improvement methodology was an introductory course on Boeing’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) ENOVIA system that is taken by every engineer. Their initial analysis revealed several issues with the course. Addressing those issues, LTD created a new and better version of the online course. The new course stressed differences with the control course with respect to assessment, level of activity, modular resources which minimized cognitive load, leveraged formative and summative assessments and the use of a open LMS to provide detailed data and support student interaction.