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School's Out
Wednesday, May 1, 2002
The Internet has changed so many facets of our day-to-day lives, and e-learning is one area where its impact has been tremendous, particularly post 9/11. Corporations no longer consider travel for training an attractive option, and training programs for individual employees are often canceled because of tight day-to-day workplace schedules. Corporations have turned to e-learning for help in quickly and systematically re-training their employees.

Besides saving on travel, corporations realize an additional bonus from the fact that, unlike traditional face-to-face training, e-learning does not require employees to be away from the workplace during work hours. This enables corporate managers to provide effective training with little loss of workplace productivity.

E-learning technology

The architecture of today’s e-learning system provides tremendous flexibility, allowing corporate information system (IS) and training managers to quickly set up a training environment, and rapidly scale it to accommodate a larger number of users or course offerings. An e-learning system can consist of up to four elements: an online classroom, virtual lab, learning management system (LMS), and the training content. The online classroom and virtual lab allow employees to participate in learning theory and hands-on practice sessions. The LMS enrolls a student and tracks their compliance with a pre-set training program, which helps to gauge a student’s competency level and customizes the student’s training curriculum. To ensure that each of these elements of the classroom — virtual lab, LMS and content — integrate seamlessly with one another, they are usually designed to comply with industry standards such as the Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model Initiative (SCORM). Corporate IS managers leverage this compliance to put together systems where each of the elements may be supplied by a variety of vendors, providing effective e-learning infrastructure for a diversity of training needs.

The e-learning market

and its trends
Data from industry analyst firm IDC shows that corporate marketplaces for e-learning are expected to grow from $2 billion in 2001 to $4 billion in 2002. In 2000, this market was predominantly based on “CBT,” or computer-based training, but the adoption of e-learning using the Internet is rapidly becoming the predominant training method today, just after traditional face-to-face training. The American Society of Training and Development has reported a 10-percent increase in e-learning training expenditure in 2001, despite the economic downturn.

During 2001, automation of training management has been the significant achievement for most companies. To achieve this, corporations have deployed learning management systems to automate their corporate training systems, track employee training requirements, and ensure that employees are provided continuous training, consistent with their job roles, now and into the future. Typical installations of LMS-based training systems in large corporations cost approximately $1 million to $5 million. In 2002 and beyond, the trend to automate training management is expected to percolate to mid-size companies training 200 to 1,000 employees, with a cost of ownership in the $100,000 to $500,000 range. Small companies training about 100 employees will find it convenient and cheaper to turn to application service providers for e-learning solutions, rather than deploying internal Intranet-based training systems.

Providing training content for e-learning is an attractive business, with large companies earning content revenues of around $50 million to $200 million. The primary market for training content is the self-paced learning environment. However, self-paced learning is predominantly simulations-based, and companies are increasingly adopting instructor-led, live online training using virtual labs to increase the training’s effectiveness. Many times, the preliminary training is provided using self-paced simulations while the advanced training is provided using live online instruction and a virtual computer lab.

Another major emerging corporate trend is the “mapping” of employee skill sets to job requirements. Corporations now have e-learning tools to define the skill sets that are required for nearly every kind of standard job. By pre-testing their employees, corporations are able to do a skills gap analysis and chalk out customized training programs for individuals. This results in a scientific and systematic way to train employees for current and future job responsibilities.

Finally, because companies want significant return on their training investments, we can expect to see collaborative knowledge-management systems integrate with current e-learning systems to provide collaborative document sharing and work-flow integration between diverse and geographically dispersed project groups intent on implementing what they learned during training.

Blended and self-paced e-learning

Blended learning methods of training delivery closely approximate traditional instructor-led face-to-face classes. One popular method is click-and-mortar delivery, which is a combination of instructor-led, Internet-delivered training sessions combined with traditional face-to-face classes. This delivery format gives a student the advantage of relatively commute-free, any-time learning, along with the comfort and community of a traditional face-to-face classroom. For technology courses, for example, the click-and-mortar delivery is used to teach the “theory” of a subject in the Internet classroom, while students get “hands-on-practice” in face-to-face labs. A variation of the click-and-mortar training delivery is the click-and-click method, where the training is a combination of an instructor-led Internet classroom for theory and a live instructor-led virtual lab over the Internet for hands-on practice.

Self-paced learning gives students ultimate flexibility. Students can study by themselves and do interactive exercises in the form of simulations. A mentor is available to answer questions online. However, students have no personal relationship with the mentor, as a different person may act as mentor and answer questions at different times of the day. Computers are often used to generate answers to questions, by searching a database of frequently asked questions.

Self-paced learning demands a high degree of self-motivation and discipline, and the student must be prepared for a learning experience with no one-on-one personal rapport with a mentor. Also, a student must be comfortable with a complete lack of interaction with other students. These classes are popular among professionals, savvy computer users, and students with advanced skills who can study relatively independently.

Set-up time and ROI

E-learning provides rapid return on investment, and with careful selection of vendors, the initial functional training systems can generally be set up and operational within two to four months for midsize to large multi-location corporations. Commute-free training, with little or no time away from work, enhances current-quarter corporate performances, while at the same time ensuring that individual productivity ramps up rapidly in future quarters.

Arjun Raman is President and CEO of eWebUniversity, an e-learning software platform and content developer that provides e-learning, knowledge management and online content to the continuing education, higher education, and corporate markets.

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