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| Going the distance to train employees |
March 5, 2002 |
By Jason Rodham
YOU DON’T HAVE TO SELL BRANT MYERS, NATIONAL SOLUTIONS manager for Cisco Canada, on the value of e-learning. During a recent round of sales training Cisco put 10,000 reps from North America to Asia through their paces in a matter of weeks.
In the process, the company reduced overall training costs from the US$24 million traditional training would have cost to a paltry US$1.3 million, and lowered the average expense per employee from US$2,400 to US$130.
“Before, we would put about 20 of them in a class and we would have to pay for time and expenses, and it would take months to train all those people,” said Myers, who was interviewed for Backbone while receiving his own round of professional development in Denver, Colo.
Using Cisco’s learning management system (LMS) he did the first half of the course online and then flew to Denver to firm up the information and work on group activities, such as role-playing, that don’t translate well to the online world. He claims to have showed up with much of the basic knowledge already in his head and “instead of spending a week out in the field, I’m spending two days.”
To a typical user, the LMS system looks like any other business-place portal. Tied directly to the company’s top-to-bottom training strategy, employees can access the LMS to take any single course or complete a formal curriculum.
Employees can also use LMS as a vast information resource library, accessing short tutorials and sharpening up on particular subjects before diving in.
Bruce Stewart, president of Serebra Learning Corporation of Surrey, B.C., said this type of informal courseware more accurately reflects the way companies and people operate today.
Technicians preparing to upgrade a server, for example, can download step-by-step instructions onto a laptop or PDA, refresh their memory and take the information in when they do the work.
Alternately, a manager who has to fire an employee may want to bring up a two- or three-screen PowerPoint-based reminder on what to say—and what not to say—before the stressful moment arrives.
Stewart said customers are increasingly making e-learning vendors responsible for meeting business results and milestones, rather than simply ensuring employees complete courses. They’re also tasking e-learning suppliers to bring the information together and develop search engines that can sort through a dizzying array of course content. Pay-as-you-go options are also coming to the forefront, as are e-commerce capabilities that will allow students to purchase low-cost support material.
“There’s an evolution going on in the business. Today customers can take just what they need when they need it,” Stewart said.
Back in class
This is all great stuff, but Deirdre Pickerell, director of corporate trainers The Joslin Group of White Rock, B.C., said e-learning will never be a complete substitute for good old-fashioned classroom education.
E-learning is an important complement to instructor-led learning, she said, or for people who already work in a particular field and can’t afford to be away from their desks. “Although the e-learning environment may be interactive, it is limited to what the program is programmed to do.”
Joslin, whose classroom-based organization is being driven into the e-learning marketplace by customer demand, doesn’t just focus on teaching skills, but also on critical thinking. In other words, she doesn’t want students simply “regurgitating information” but to possess the knowledge to look at a problem, analyze it and come up with the right solution.
“That’s where I see the missing piece. It may be ever so slight, but it’s still missing: how do you implement what you know or what you think you’ve learned (online)?”
As technology and bandwidth improve to allow for live chats, real-time messaging and videoconferencing, Joslin said this “interactive crisis”may be coming to a close.
“Once the customer gets the infrastructure in place, which can have an incredible cost, the sky is really the limit.”
Web e-learning
Cisco Canada http://www.cisco.com/ca
Joslin Group http://www.joslingroup.com
Serebra http://www.serebra.com
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