November 20, 2000

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New Schools Of Thought

More companies are taking notice of the cost savings, specialized training, and flexibility E-learning provides

By Diane Rezendes Khirallah and Sandra Swanson

More on E-learning:

sidebar: Hosted Learning-Management Systems Provide Flexibility Get Ready For New Training Push: E-Business (11/13/00) Oracle Pushes Customer Training Program Online (11/6/00) Internet Week: CORPORATE TRAINING (11/6/00)

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here was plenty of grumbling when 200 newly appointed partners at Deloitte & Touche LLP heard that their customary two-day orientation, informally known as "charm school," was going online. No trip to New York, no meeting all the other partners in person, no partying. The company turned the orientation, which had cost $1 million in years past, into a 4-1/2-hour Web event, at a bargain-basement price of $30,000.

Certain obligations, expectations, and perquisites come with having equity in the firm--all of which were covered in the online curriculum. And although the group didn't gather en masse, new partners from the same office did get together for some fun. When the dust settled, says Jim Wall, Deloitte & Touche's managing national partner of HR, the feedback was encouraging. While the new partners, who travel extensively on the job, initially were upset about not having an on-site session, they were relieved not to have to get on yet another airplane.

It's just one example of how E-learning is changing business, many of which surfaced last week at TechLearn 2000 in Orlando, Fla., a conference that drew more than 3,000 attendees.

The market for third-party business E-learning content, software, and services is growing. It will jump from $2.2 billion this year to $11.4 billion in 2003, according to International Data Corp.

Several trends are spurring the momentum: Human-resources and training departments are relinquishing control over E-learning as individual departments take over their own training programs. That lets content experts--be they salespeople or IT managers--share knowledge quickly. What's more, the old classroom model, with relatively long lectures, is moving to "just-in-time" or "just-enough" learning, which is a system of easy-to-access video, audio, text, and multimedia files, called learning objects, on a narrow topic.

But the trend that may have the most sweeping impact is that E-learning is moving outside the firewall, as companies use it to educate their partners, customers, and suppliers.

"By next year, companies will be doing twice as much training for customers as for employees," predicts Elliott Masie, president of the Masie Center, which studies E-learning trends. The advantage: Companies can educate distributors, dealers, and customers about their products and services faster.

Nortel Networks Corp.'s E-business Solutions division recently began including online instruction with its customer-relationship management software. While Nortel has always offered training for system administrators, its customers wanted their users--sales and call-center reps--to get training as well. The new program, developed by Knowledge Impact, lets those users access bits of information from broad E-learning courses. If someone in a call center needs to know how to handle a customer return, for example, that person can quickly access the relevant information online. "It gets them up and running faster," says Stephanie Porter, Nortel's director of services marketing.

Domino's Pizza LLC uses E-learning with its ad agency to educate the creative team on Domino's strategy. The applications cross the boundaries between E-learning and workgroup collaboration, says Harrison Withers, director of technology and training for the Ann Arbor, Mich., pizza chain. For example, Domino's marketing department uses E-learning infrastructure tools from Centra for brainstorming with the agency on marketing campaigns.

When Cliff Purington arrived as head of learning development at Rockwell Collins, the communications and aviation electronics division of Rockwell International Corp. in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he turned his trainers into learning consultants. As such, they only perform needs analysis; content is driven by individual business units. "The pull comes from each organization," says learning consultant Steve Junion. When other employees see the success of grassroots efforts, he says, it inspires them to create their own content.

Learning initiatives are also spreading throughout Cisco Systems. Cisco's E-learning content comes from the people who understand a given topic best, whether they're in the technical documentation group or the marketing department. That represents a huge shift from the company's previous strategy, in which all training had to originate from the training group, says Tom Kelly, VP of worldwide training. Today, Cisco's sales force gets about 80% of its job-related information through its Field E-learning Connection training portal. More than 40 divisions deliver content to the portal.

Domino's Pizza sees a similar trend, says Paul Messink, director of intranet development. While the company's focus is on selling pizza, employee training goes well beyond how to make a pie. At distribution centers, it includes Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulation awareness and driver training. At its 6,500 stores, it involves food preparation, sanitation, and store operations. At headquarters, it's about building employees' computer skills.

In all cases, the content must originate with the most-knowledgeable people in the company. Messink predicts Domino's training organization will disappear within two years. "It'll be integrated into each business function, and learning will be integrated into key initiatives," he says. "The whole structure will change."

E-learning is changing in other ways, too. Companies are realizing that E-learning offers opportunities to teach not just different things, but in different ways. They're moving beyond online lectures to just-in-time learning, through which people can access "modules" of information that relate directly to what they need to know, when they need to know it. Time was, "we'd rely on the phone, library, dial a friend, or poll the audience," says Deloitte & Touche's Wall. "Now it's point-and-click for the information."

Rockwell Collins will soon roll out a course on new HR benefits to its 14,500 employees. The two-hour online course will be divided into 20-minute segments by topic. Junion says 20 minutes is "just the right amount of time, forcing courseware developers to focus on the message" and keeping users' attention.

Charles Schwab & Co., which handles about 7.2 million brokerage accounts, needed training to keep pace with its rapid growth and product introductions. But pulling call-center reps off the job for a day of classroom training, or even several hours, wasn't an option. So Schwab worked with Mindlever.com Inc. to develop online courses, broken into a series of five-to 10-minute modules. The system lets call-center reps access training during brief periods of downtime between calls or get a real-time response to a customer's question online.

So what's next? While it's easy enough to take a learning session and index it by topic, companies are a long way from creating customized, on-demand learning from a database of reusable online multimedia objects, Domino's Withers says. "Everyone is talking about it. Let me know if you find a company who's actually doing it."

Indeed, while companies such as Schwab are using learning objects to build customized courses, that only taps a small part of their potential value. The greatest benefit will come from learning objects that are tagged using a metadata framework, which will provide dynamically generated learning geared toward employees' specific needs and job functions, says Cisco's Kelly. "Without that," he says, "personalization will never work."

Cisco is working extensively with learning objects, and metadata tagging is a high priority for Kelly. His vision: By next year, tagged content will be delivered to employees' personal home pages. That way, a salesperson in Germany with a health-care customer base won't receive updates on health-care developments in China. "The problem with training is that we make people go search for what's important to them," Kelly says.

User acceptance is another roadblock. When E-procurement software vendor ICG Commerce Inc. rolled out online training two months ago, the company assumed its customers would log on and be self-sufficient learners. Not so. "We found out that some of our users were technologically less sophisticated than we thought," says Wayne Pridgen, manager of real training. So ICG, which is using Global Knowledge Network Inc.'s Knowledge Pathways that combines tracking, reporting, and authoring capabilities, had to send reps to some of its larger clients and walk them through the training.

Pridgen's advice: Do a technological assessment of who will be using the tool before rolling it out. ICG has learned its lesson in time for its supplier training program, which is scheduled to come out this month.

Is E-learning the killer app proponents think it is? "Not yet," says Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and a professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University. "Too many questions remain: What is the precise software? What standards will catch on? Who will be the major players?"

Deloitte & Touche's Wall agrees. "Technology is the great enabler, but it's not the answer," he says. "Be careful not to take it to extremes. Learning is an engaging process. To think it will replace face-to-face is flawed."

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