Reviews ASTD Members Only

Element K Management Development
By Dawn Williams

If an “all you can eat” buffet is appealing to you and your organization, then you’ll probably find value in Element K courseware.

The sheer quantity of information, the breadth of topics, and the number of courses are impressive. A single course covers a wide variety of topics, including power dynamics, setting goals, receiving feedback, mentoring relationships, and many more.

With High Performance Management, you get all of that information plus other courses for one flat rate per person because Element K’s pricing for self-paced courses is library-based. Each library can have hundreds of courses. The pricing begs the question, Is more better? Do you come from the table full and satisfied or stuffed but not fulfilled?

Each topic in the course follows a similar pattern:

• a brief description and outline of the topic
• a talking head video introduction with bullet points
• three to five screens of audio narration with bullets
• an exercise in most topics
• a talking head video summary.

The presentation screens are slides with audio narration and bullet text similar to a PowerPoint presentation. The exercises in each topic also follow a standard format. They present a vignette that poses a problem to be addressed using a fictitious company and its employees. The stories use video, audio, and text to describe the situation; information is provided through simulated phone messages, memos, testimonials, profiles, and other means.

The learner studies the information and then answers a few questions about the course of action that should be taken. Each question has two or three answer choices, and there’s limited branching based on the responses to the questions. However, some choices use the same feedback. The learner can follow two main tracks, one that is successful and one that is not.

The scenarios vary in their instructional value. Some effectively underscore key points in the lesson; others introduce concepts not found in the lesson but which are valuable; and others provide less effective practice. In one exercise, all choices lead to the same conclusion. In another, the exercise didn’t load properly and couldn't be completed.

Each topic has supplemental information found in a notes section. Also, links to additional resources appear on many screens. That multiplies the amount of information available to the learner about each topic. However, some of the information in the notes section that I explored essentially repeated what was on the screen. Other information found in the notes section expanded the ideas discussed effectively.

Recommendation
There’s a great deal of information in the course and the exercises are an attempt to provide practical application of the material to the workplace. However, the material presented in the lesson isn’t always clearly linked to success in the exercise. In fact, some of the exercises introduce new ideas, which should have been covered in the presentation.

Most of the content is presented as PowerPoint on the Web using audio narration and text bullets and therefore becomes monotonous over time. The content also has more of an academic or educational tone rather than a practical training one, which isn’t surprising since High Performance Management is based on a course provided by Harvard Business School Publishing E-Learning. It’s doubtful that this course would yield significant behavioral changes to learners on its own but rather delivers some tips and things to think about. The content has instructional value, but it might be better served as a performance support tool rather than as a course.

The objectives for the course are general, and the course wants to enable the learner “to develop frameworks to help make sense of management experiences and utilize feedback” and to be able to “outline the shift from individual contributor to manager and describe misconceptions about managerial work.” The question for organizations to answer is whether these are valid learning objectives for their management training.

	High Performance Management
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