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Adoption is a land mine on the road to e-learning. Other higher profile challenges you can see a mile off: management support, project management, infrastructure,security, vendor selection, system integration. When you’ve dealt successfully with all those—and are beginning to feel invincible—adoption will be waiting, ready to undermine everything you’ve accomplished. For e-learning to succeed, employees need to use what you’ve built; more than use, they have to adopt it as a new way of working that is capable of creating a fundamental shift in learning. So what can you do to defuse the adoption land mine? The single most effective action you can take is to think of your learners as customers, to look at everything you build from their perspective. Is your e-learning offering ergonomic, in other words, is it easy to use? Does it make effective use of learners’ time? Does it deliver what they need when they need it? Does it look attractive and feel comfortable? Successful adoption hinges on the answers to those questions.

There’s a distinction to be made here. Your learners are your only customers but they are not your only stakeholders. Build an e-learning application that delights management but no one uses and you fail management and the learner. Build an e-learning application that delights the learner but does not meet the needs of management and you just plain miss the point. Like any business, the needs of customers and other stakeholders need to be met.

Building e-learning around the learner—that is, having a learner-centric approach to e-learning—is a recurring theme in this article and a critical success factor for your implementation. While learner-centric learning has become a commonplace aspiration for e-learning practitioners, its roots lie elsewhere. Some understanding of the development of learner-centric learning might provide an insight into what it is and how to build it into your e-learning initiative. It begins with the American psychotherapist Carl Rogers who as early as 1940 was developing the concept of ‘‘non-directive counselling’’ for individual and group therapy. Later, Rogers began to call his work ‘‘client-centred therapy’’ to emphasize that it was clients who were at the centre of the process not techniques or methods. Fifty years ago Rogers encapsulated his thinking about a client-centric approach in an if–then statement that can readily be applied to e-learning:

If the individual or group is faced by a problem;
If a catalyst-leader provides a permissive atmosphere;
If responsibility is genuinely placed with the individual or group;
If there is basic respect for the capacity of the individual or group;
Then, responsible and adequate analysis of the problem is made; responsible self-direction occurs; the creativity, productivity, quality of product exhibited are superior to results of other comparable methods; individual and group morale and confidence develop.

Client-centred therapy proved a dramatic success. A university professor as well as a practising therapist, Rogers wondered if the principles underlying client-centric therapy could be transplanted to the university classroom. It turned out they could and ‘‘learner-centric learning’’ enjoyed notable success. In the 1980s Rogers moved his humanistic people-centred approach again—this time to primary and secondary schools as ‘‘child-centred education’’.

In the learning environment, Rogers’ goal was ‘‘significant learning’’; this is how he described it: ‘‘It has a quality of personal involvement—the whole person in both feeling and cognitive aspects being in the learning event. It is self-initiated. Even when the impetus or stimulus comes from the outside, the sense of discovery, of reaching out, of grasping and comprehending, comes from within. It is pervasive. It makes a difference in the behavior, the attitudes, perhaps even the personality of the learner. It is evaluated by the learner. She knows whether it is meeting her need, whether it leads toward what she wants to know, whether it illuminates the dark area of ignorance she is experiencing.’’ Significant learning is what e-learning strives to deliver.

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