| This article appeared in the May 2002 issue of Ziff Davis Smart Business magazine as a 2,000-word feature with two sidebars (totaling another 1,000 words.) Only one of the sidebars is included here. (The other is just a chart of companies.) The text printed here is the unedited version as submitted. |
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Your company is ready to roll out a new software package that will transform the way you manage more than 4,000 pickups and deliveries by truck and rail every month. There's a lot of money riding on this program's success, and 100 employees in 34 different locations have to learn how to use it—fast, thoroughly, and without busting your budget. Sure, you could fly a trainer out to all 34 locations and make your employees sit—or sleep—through two days of classroom lectures, but that's slow and expensive. So, got a better idea? For Dawn Potter, director of training and development at Safety-Kleen, the nation's largest industrial and hazardous waste management company, the better idea was live collaboration software. Live collaboration programs use videoconferencing, voice-over-IP, text-based chat, application sharing and other techniques to bring teachers and students together in online virtual classrooms. Using collaboration software from a company called Centra, Potter stayed in Safety-Kleen's Columbia, South Carolina headquarters and taught classes on the company's new transportation system to employees who were sitting at their own computers all around the country. "We went with live collaboration," Potter says, "because it gives our employees a chance to interact with subject matter experts, to ask questions, and to learn from each other, all in real-time." The results were dramatic. Safety-Kleen's staff got up to speed on the new system in six weeks instead of the four months it would have taken with traditional physical classrooms, and the company saved $65,000 on travel costs and travel-related lost productivity. Partly because of emerging technologies like virtual classrooms, e-learning is booming. American companies spent $4.2 billion on e-learning products and services in 2001, and that figure will grow more than 50% annually to almost $15 billion by 2004, according to estimates made by IDC. So many companies are investing in e-learning because, compared to traditional classroom training, it promises big savings from reduced travel, faster roll out of new training programs, and content that's available anytime, from anywhere. And with so many organizations cutting back on travel in the wake of last September's terrorist attacks, e-learning is more attractive than ever. It all looks good on paper, but if you're thinking about getting on the e-learning bandwagon, or improving the system you already have, you'll run into a fog of hype generated by hundreds of e-learning vendors. Some of that hype does check out: many companies are both training their employees faster and saving money—in some cases, millions of dollars. But some companies have had problems with their e-learning programs, including a shortage of content that doesn't bore people stiff and headaches trying to get disparate technologies to work together. We'll tell you what's been working well, what's new and promising, and how to avoid those migraines. Safety-Kleen is just one of many companies giving live collaboration rave reviews. "Unlike any of the other e-learning stuff, when you put it into an organization, it's viral in terms of the rate of spread — people love it," says Elliott Masie, president of The MASIE Center, a respected learning and technology think tank. Virtual classrooms aren't new, but the technology is a bandwidth hog, so it was being held back by slow networks and even slower Internet connections. As those things have improved, so has the effectiveness of live collaboration, and it's now e-learning's hottest technology. Centra is the largest of the virtual classroom vendors, but other important suppliers include PlaceWare and Interwise. Safety-Kleen's Potter says her company is now training more employees more often than ever before, and those employees like the virtual classrooms as much as the training department does. "Overall, the reaction has been incredibly favorable. We're a sales-oriented organization, and we have a lot of extroverted employees who like interacting with other people." IT training, as a general content category, continues to be another of e-learning's undisputed success stories. Unisys, one of the world's largest IT systems integrators, now does most of its internal IT training through an e-learning system set-up and managed by SmartForce, the largest of the e-learning vendors. Unisys uses every major e-learning teaching method, including live collaboration, self-paced online courses, and instructor-led asynchronous classes, the e-learning term for classes that have human teachers but are conducted through online threaded discussions or e-mail, rather than in real-time. The company leans so much on e-learning because of its speed. "The organization that learns the fastest should prevail," explains Steve Trehern, vice president of Unisys University. "Business moves too rapidly for us to do a couple of pilots, then roll out [a traditional classroom program] in six to nine months, because the market has already passed us by." Relying heavily on off-the-shelf, self-paced content from SmartForce, Unisys has raised its employees' IT certification pass rate from 78% in the old days of instructor-led classroom training to 95% now. Underscoring Unisys's experience, training product buyers from a wide variety of corporations and other institutions reported high satisfaction levels with all categories of IT training delivered by e-learning methods, with average scores exceeding 4 on a 5-point scale, in a recent joint survey by IDC and Online Learning magazine. Good quality content is crucial if you want to duplicate Unisys's success. Boring material can lead to low course completion rates, low student satisfaction, and lower student retention of the course materials. Since the e-learning industry is so young and high-tech you might think most e-learning content is pretty engaging, but, unless you're the kind of person who likes to read accounting text books in your free time, you'd be wrong. "We have a lot more air and hype than awesome high-end titles," says e-learning expert Masie. "A disproportionate amount of the dollars raised in this field have gone for marketing rather than for the development of breakthrough content." Nobody has a magic formula for separating the good stuff from the bad, but you can look for certain clues. "If I can print it out and get the same thing as if I looked on the screen, that's the first bad sign," says Michael Brennan, senior analyst at IDC. "It's e-reading as opposed to e-learning." Signs of good content, on the other hand, include interactivity, animation, humor, and graphical richness. Simulations are the hottest new form of e-learning content. Proponents of simulation-based learning say that, compared to both classroom instruction and other e-learning content forms, it works faster while increasing understanding and information retention. Companies such as KnowledgeNet, Accenture, and Indeliq specialize in creating computer simulations of real-world work environments where your employees can learn and practice new skills and their mistakes only cost you virtual money. A little more than a year ago, EMC, the world's largest data storage solutions company, moved nearly all of its technical and IT training to an online e-learning system from KnowledgeNet. In one training program that EMC will finish later this year, the company is teaching 4,000 of its technical support personnel how a new software package will integrate with customers' existing hardware. The program, which will save EMC more than $3 million this year, uses KnowledgeNet's "virtual lab" simulations where learners, on their computer screens, can "pick up" a virtual hardware component like a storage server, install it in a simulated network, and then watch the way the network's behavior changes. "It's very engaging. It's the opposite of e-reading," says Bill Dacier, EMC's vice president of global technical training. Simulations are an important part of another big e-learning trend, the aggressive marketing and strong sales growth of so-called "soft skills" content. Soft skills is the loose label given to business and management training, and course topics can range from seemingly straightforward business skills (Fundamentals of Professional Selling) to titles that wouldn't look out of place next to the incense in a new-age bookstore (Influencing Others Positively.) Soft skills accounted for 32% of total e-learning content purchases in 2001 but—at a projected $7.5 billion—it will amount to just over 50% of the total by 2004, according to IDC. One company that has already made a big investment in soft skills e-learning is Atlanta-based telecommunications giant BellSouth. In an effort to improve the sales and service performance of its customer call center personnel, BellSouth hired Accenture to design a training program using Accenture's business skills simulation technology. In this program, BellSouth's customer service representatives spend 16-24 hours handling simulated customer calls designed to let them practice their sales techniques, sharpen their judgment, and improve their communications skills. BellSouth says that the program has cut average training time by 13% and reduced its call center employees' error rate enough to cut total call volume by 3%. Overall, the program will save BellSouth as much as $52 million dollars in its first five years, according to the company's estimates. The BellSouth story shows that if the content is good then e-learning works for at least some soft skills. Overall, though, companies are reporting mixed results with this category of training. Satisfaction levels for business and management skills training categories were mediocre—at or below 3 on a 5-point scale—in the same IDC/Online Learning survey that revealed such high satisfaction numbers for IT content. Many experts just don't buy the idea that e-learning, especially if used by itself, is appropriate for the really difficult skills like teamwork or leadership. To teach those subjects effectively "you're really talking about creating a learning event that's as rich as possible, and sometimes e-learning won't offer that," says Ray Jackson, associate dean of the Leadership School at Unisys University. "Once there's a technology out there that can create an environment like Robin Williams created in Dead Poet's Society, then I'll be sold that e-learning can do everything." As the e-learning industry makes its content better, it's also trying to resolve another source of aggravation. Almost any large e-learning system must use technologies and content from several different vendors—there's no one-stop shop yet—and it's often a long and costly programming nightmare to get those products to work properly together. "Many of the so-called problems that people are reluctant to talk about are primarily because they cannot get that integration to happen," acknowledges Kevin Oakes, CEO of Click2Learn, a top e-learning vendor. Often, the only solution is to test products and avoid the ones that aren't compatible with the rest of your e-learning system—or grit your teeth and pony up the bucks to rewrite them. Oakes says that a compatibility standards initiative called SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) should put an end to those problems. "It's the first time that all the different competing standards are now working cooperatively," he explains. Most top e-learning products are already SCORM-compliant. The rest of them should be within the next 12-24 months, but double-check before you sign the dotted line. If you can get all your e-learning technologies working together and keep your content fresh and engaging, e-learning's speed, convenience, and potential cost savings can yield big payoffs. Cisco discovered just how big when it moved the technical training of its field sales and support personnel entirely online three years ago. "We were doing a lot of instructor-led classroom training, and we realized it just wouldn't scale," says Michael Metz, Cisco's director of marketing, Internet Learning Solutions Group. "Until recently Cisco was buying a new company about every two-and-a-half weeks. There was just an enormous amount of new information that had to be disseminated to 10,000 employees in 76 countries." And the payoff? In its first year, Cisco's system saved the company enough money just on new hire training to pay for their entire investment in e-learning technology and content development—a total of about $2 million dollars, Metz says. Saving $2 million is all the justification a company needs, but your employees just might prefer e-learning, too. In a recent survey of 5,000 employees of Fortune 500 companies, almost 50% said they would be excited if told they would be taught something online, and 19% said they actually prefer e-learning over any other method of instruction. As Elliott Masie puts it, "People are now thinking, 'I have to learn something. Hey, can I learn it online?'" In more and more companies, the answer is yes. |
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Tomorrow's Training Grounds
How will your employees be learning two years from now? Or
five years? Or ten? Virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and true
"anytime anywhere" access are big themes in e-learning's future. Here
are five technologies that promise to make a big impact on corporate
training, ranging from what's on our doorstep to others that are still
years from practical use.
© 2002 Eamon Hickey
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