Any Time, Any Place Learning

August 1, 2001

By now you’ve probably noticed that the half-life of formal education has grown quite a bit shorter.  The fast pace of technology, the constant changes in business, the increasingly dynamic and global nature of businesses of every size and type all mean that what you learned in college or graduate school won’t be enough to carry you through a 30 year career.  Some of us wonder if it’s even worth acquiring in the first place and come to our first jobs without much formal training at all.

In the days when the workplace provided extensive training through formal apprenticeships and dense hierarchies of white collar workers much training could be gleaned on-the-job.  Today, that’s much harder.  Companies find it difficult to provide in-house training.  Expertise marches out of the company, never to return, with every business cycle.  The expense of hiring trainers and sending employees to internal or external training classes is astronomical.

E-Learning Is Hot

Perhaps you have noticed that some companies are taking a different approach.  Smiling like Cheshire cats, they talk about reduced training and travel budgets, re-skilled workers, and better rates of retention – no one wants to leave a company where you’re always being trained to be smarter and better paid. 

They have discovered the joy of e-learning.  The newest branch of distance learning, e-learning takes advantage of the Internet to provide any kind of training, generic or specialized, academic or business, work or personal, at any level of expertise.  Its training that can be delivered to employees at their desktops, as part of a classroom learning experience, or to road warriors, and employees at their leisure in their homes. 

There are so many possibilities that it would not be possible to cover them all in a newsletter article, so here we’ll offer an overview and – of course – some opinions – as well as some references to good places to look for more.  Later this year, we’ll be back with a much more detailed White Paper on the subject.  In the meantime, we’d like to tell you about some of the things we’ve discovered and ask you to share your experiences with us.

Last semester, I taught a graduate level seminar about e-Learning in the Organizational Dynamics program at the University of Pennsylvania.  Interestingly, the basic learning technique wasn’t e-Learning, since the department wouldn’t allow that.  They use a seminar technique for their classes and said all classes must be taught using some version of their method.  We got around that by incorporating e-Learning into the classes, using site tours, interactive e-Learning demonstrations, and an e-Learning class built and demonstrated by the students as part of the class.  This program attracts mainly mid-career professionals and managers.  Two of my students were actively engaged in designing and pitching e-Learning systems to their management during the time period the class ran.  Two others were thinking of introducing e-Learning in their organizations.  Another had e-Learning as a major tool in his company and was refining the way it is used.

In the talks, presentations, and keynotes I give to audiences in the U.S. and abroad on new technologies and how to exploit them, e-Learning is the technology that excites the most attention and action.  Members of the audience want more on the topic and then they want to know how to move ahead.  Often, a speech that includes e-Learning is followed by many emails and phone calls looking for consulting, recommendations, or just more information.

E-Learning Is About Markets And Products

There are two good ways to think about the e-Learning marketplace. 

-- First, you can segment it by customer focus.  There are vendors who are mainly interested in the corporate training market and others who focus on academic learning, usually in either the K-12 or Higher Education markets.  There is also a burgeoning market in personal e-Learning, where individuals strive to acquire new knowledge, not necessarily for a degree, but rather for personal achievement or pleasure.  A few vendors cross several or all of these markets; most specialize. 

For business purposes, we are more interested in the corporate training aspects of e-Learning.  As we’ve noted, it can represent considerable savings in instructor and travel budgets.  

--It can also offer new ways to train students that may sometimes be superior, depending on the students and the course topics.  Technical material, for example, is often better taught in an on-line, interactive environment where the system can provide immediate feedback to the student and provide additional learning experiences to students who need extra time or attention.

--E-Learning has interesting JIT (Just In Time) aspects; rather than sending someone to a three-day class to learn everything they might need to know about, for example, repairing a systems unit, e-Learning can provide basics up-front and then provide specific modules just when the student is addressing a particular problem.  This avoids “insurance” learning (just in case you’ll need it) and avoids the problem of forgetting what you’ve learned before you use try to use it – perhaps months later.

Some corporations also use e-Learning to support desired changes in the corporate culture (diversity programs, changes in management style, the changes in work practices needed to support a knowledge management system), to meet government regulations about required training, or to change the skills of workers to meet changes in organizational needs.  Corporations may also assist students in meeting their business and personal goals in formal academic education by paying for e-Learning courses and degrees (some very prestigious universities are now involved in this process) or even by sponsoring specific courses and programs customized for their own employees.

--Second, one can think about e-Learning as a collection of tools and content and classify vendors (and potential problems and their solutions) by the tools they provide or require.  The landscape is very broad and varied.  Here are some landmarks to help guide the way.

E-Learning Platforms are environments on which to load e-Learning content or which support the building of custom e-Learning content.  Content isn’t just formal courseware (lecture notes, readings, reference materials, videos of speakers and demonstrations, tours or other visual effects), but may also include quizzes, tests, schedules, outlines, and a framework for supporting on-line live chat, email, and live classrooms.  

Some are software products which you may buy and install in your Intranet environment :

IBM Mindspan/Lotus Learning Space, http://www-3.ibm.com/software/mindspan /distlrng.nsf/home/ overview? OpenDocument

Quelsys SocratEASE, www.quelsys.com

Others are web sites where you may create and access content, both your own and others, for a fee (ASP-style) or free: 

Blackboard  www.Blackboard.com

Click2Learn  www.Click2Learn.com

Conferencing:  Many e-Learning users employ Conferencing ASPs for on-line training (as well as customer seminars and PR events).  This is a kind of e-Learning, usually focused on a presenter, a presentation (typically PowerPoint slides), the ability to share an application or tour the Web together, and perhaps support for on-line chat for questions.  Two popular vendors are Placeware and WebEX.

Courseware:  Some vendors are mainly in the courseware (content) business, offering vast libraries of content.  Typically, the more you use (users and/or courses), the less expensive each user or course becomes.  Nearly anyone who’s ever presented on any subject could be a courseware vendor, but several popular ones include: 

Lotus Learning Space catalog http://www.lotus.com/home.nsf/welcome/lscatalog

SmartForce www.smartforce.com

Zoologic www.zoologic.com (content for financial professionals)

We find, perhaps not surprisingly, that the largest amount of existing content is focused on IT training.  Much of this is re-purposed CBT (computer-based training), designed to be used on terminals or PC’s.  It has the content, but it doesn’t do much to exploit the web environment.  Over time, we’d expect this to be replaced with content designed from a web point of view.

Some of this IT training is free!  Get a feel from e-Learning at Metrowerks Code Warrior University www.codewarrioru.com.  (ZDU or Ziff-Davis University, another popular IT training site used to be famous for its free or inexpensive courses; now it’s a corporate ASP at http://learn.elementk.com/login/login.asp and only available to students enabled by their corporate administrators and budgets.

E-Learning Consulting:  Many consulting firms exist to help assess needs, design systems, and create custom software, In fact, most platform companies, such as IBM’s Mindspan, will be happy to help you create your own courseware.  It isn’t cheap.  Estimates vary, but plan on spending $15,000 to 50,000 per course hour. If you want famous guest lecturers, lots of custom video, or special effects it may cost more.

On the other hand, if it’s reusable for a reasonable period of time for a reasonable number of students it could be a very good investment. 

Other companies roll their own courseware, using existing training presentations or creating their own with PowerPoint slides, simple videos, and straightforward quizzes and assignments.  These cost mainly the acquisition of authoring software (if none is included in the platform purchase) and the time of your authors and/or trainers – or on-staff course creators if you have enough volume to justify them). 

Administration/Management:  An important part of the picture is administration and management software.  You need to know which students need to take which courses and where they are in their program.  Administrators must enable access to courses and other privileges.  Course content must be cataloged and presented (but perhaps protected if it’s in a confidential area – new product launches, personnel policies, etc.)This may be built into the platform system or purchased separately.

In Summary:  E-Learning is a technology whose time has come.  The e-Learning marketplace, however, is still relatively immature.  Many vendors offer e-Learning platforms, content libraries, management tools and systems, and custom consulting.  No single vendor dominates the market.  No solution is complete in itself.

But with hundreds of very large organizations, including the federal government, who already have billions of dollars to spend on training each year (and thousands of smaller organizations as well), this disorganization is unlikely to continue.  We’d bet on consolidation, complete solution offerings, more courseware libraries, lessening the need for costly custom solutions, and many refinements in the way e-Learning is blended with other learning experiences to get just the right combination of face-to-face and virtual experiences to optimize cost, student, and organizational benefits.