eLearning That Sucks

January 31, 2008

WARNING: this post contains the use of the possibly-offensive and certainly-unprofessional words suck, sucky, and suckiness. If you feel a strong aversion to any of these words, please turn away now.

No? Onward then.

Several years ago, I was at a corporate Web communications conference in Chicago. While registering for the event, a man with wild, straggly gray hair wearing ratty sweatpants and an “I don’t care what you think of me” look on his face came sauntering in. I assumed he was a transient, wandering the hotel to bum change for “bus fare.” To my great surprise, he approached the conference registration desk and proceeded to register.

“Who is this clown,” I thought, “and who is the clown that employs him?”

I quickly finished the registration process and retreated to my room for the evening. Before the man could approach me asking for “bus fare.”

Imagine my shock the next day when, sitting in the ballroom awaiting one of the keynote presentations, I saw the shaggily-maned stranger take the platform and approach the podium!

At this point I suddenly feared the conference to be a very big mistake.

To my unexpected delight, however, the man turned out to be Vincent Flanders of Web Pages That Suck fame, and he proceeded to give us a wildly entertaining hour examining the dank bowels of horrific website design. And in those days, there was plenty of fuel to feed his flames. It was, frankly, the highlight of the conference for me.

The interesting thing about Vincent Flanders was that his own website completely sucked. And still does (hey, it was designed by Free CSS Templates. I’m not kidding.). Of course, this design suckiness was conveniently labeled as satire. After all, what better way to showcase sucky websites than via a sucky website of your own? Indeed.

Are you starting to see the beauty of the plan?

Per the site:

My method is to show you bad design techniques so you’ll realize what they are and not use them.

Uh huh. It all started to make sense now. Vincent had managed to pull off the ultimate feat of entrepreneurship - he made money skewering the work of others, while having no notable skills (or product) of his own.

Just like a movie critic. Or a politician.

Lest you believe I think unkindly of Mr. Flanders, know that I do not. His business is a perfect example of head-slapping “Why Didn’t I Think of That?” genius. My hat, if only I wore one, would be off to the man. Respect and admiration, sir. Seriously.

Now, the first path to a successful business, as I understand it, is to come up with a great “Why Didn’t I Think of That?” idea.

Lacking that, I must proceed on the second path to a successful business, which is to figure out how to rip off the guy who came up with the “Why Didn’t I Think of That?” idea.

This imagined scheme of quitting my day job and making sweet loads of cash by mocking sucky eLearning, however, comes with a couple of serious complications.

First (and this is the big one): 99% of sucky eLearning is safely hidden from public view behind corporate firewalls (carefully guarded by sadistic, lonely, and resentful IT Nazis); firewalls that do not allow us to gaze upon the vast suckiness lurking within. Alas, the lack of a victim hinders the potential victimization.

Second: sucky eLearning is so prevalent, so homogeneous, and so painfully personal (based on one’s own suffering of said sucky eLearning over countless corporate “training” hours), the joke just wouldn’t be funny for more than a couple of minutes. If that. And I don’t think I can bank enough cash for a house on the beach in that much time.

Sigh. Back to the drawing board…

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