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PC Conversations November 1999 • Vol.10 Issue 11 |
Online Learning Take The Travel Out Of Training | ||
Expert training delivered exactly when you need it. Students and business partners who are always in touch. Less time and money spent on travel. These are the advantages promised by online learning, which lets companies train employees and contact business partners in a live conference setting via standard PCs. Today's products let users interact in group settings while sitting at their PCs. They can talk with one another, ask questions of the instructor, and even write notes to each other by typing messages. This month we discuss the major issues in online training with executives from Centra software, a leader in the online training market thanks to its Centra and Symposium products.
Navickas: Broadly speaking, it's engaging people online in knowledge transfer and doing it in a very high-order, human, and interactive kind of way. It's combining the world's content, wrapping it in a set of tools, and making those easy to use and ubiquitously accessible anywhere in the world and at any time. What are some examples of how online learning tools are being applied? Finn: In the traditional sense, it's a situation where someone is transferring knowledge to a group of people. That can be a passive situation where people are listening or being asked questions and responding to the questions; it is very similar to the traditional instructor-led training environment. The environment where we really find students taking ownership of the learning process is using the application's tools to be involved with other students as part of the live learning process. We do that with collaborative learning groups. Students can explain things to each other using techniques similar to those in a classroom but in an online environment. Can you give us examples of what the trainees might be doing in that situation? Navickas: We've learned through our experience that people like to interact. There's a high value you get out of online learning when you can enable interactivity among people. That interactivity comes in many forms. People must be able to talk to each other. Our software does voice over the Internet, and we're able to engage large groups of people in online environments where they can all speak to one another. The other really important thing is that you integrate dynamic content; that's content that kind of shows up on the slides. It could be a whiteboard drawing, a marking or gesture on the whiteboard, or a set of PowerPoint slides. Then there are the sets of tools and capabilities that keep order in this online environment. You need them because you don't have facial protocol or the kind of visual cues you might get in a physical environment to understand how people are doing. There's even a set of software capabilities to enable that kind of environmental sense. You get the highest productivity, and you get what's missing when people are not seeing one another. What are the benefits for a company that engages in these types of applications, whether it be communicating with business partners or with employees? Navickas: I think it's in a number of dimensions. The easiest ones to justify are cost reduction and expense avoidance. That's where you can basically keep people off airplanes and reduce expenses of videoconferencing and other things and leverage existing investments in Internet software and connectivity. The other one is revenue generating. We've seen some companies and some universities thinking about opening up their colleges beyond the geographic boundaries of the people who can commute there. In reaching this broader audience, they're able to engage new customers. Some, like the University of Tennessee, are able to create programs such as the physician's MBA that were not possible without distance education capabilities. With live collaborative learning systems like ours, doctors are able to stay home while still engaging in group-oriented, case-based instruction and get their MBAs. It's some really powerful stuff. The final advantage is just what people get out of it: increased retention, the convenience of not having to go anywhere to be a part of a collaborative environment. Finn: One of the tremendous benefits we have seen is the ability to get information to people in a just-in-time fashion. We can pull people into a collaborative learning session in a short time period. The paradigm of the instructor-led training classroom was an event that involved a lot of planning and a lot of conceptual tasks that needed to be done. We can also reinforce the learning that people have had so we structure our sessions a little differently than a classroom situation. We don't do eight-hour sessions. We modularize the learning so they can apply it immediately in their job situation. Then we can come back and do another session where they can have that learning reinforced or added to. What are the benefits of this type of technology for a very small office of 20 or 10 people? Navickas: I think anyone can benefit from collaborative learning technology because the problems of training your workforce and getting closer to your customers are problems every business has. It's expensive to put people on airplanes and hold videoconferences, and there are other options. You can do manuals and CD-ROMs, but it's proven that most of the time people don't look at those. Learning online is the only way to do it. What are the factors that make videoconferencing more costly? Navickas: Videoconferencing over the Internet is not of sufficient quality yet to be broad-reaching, but it is still a popular way to get people together. The systems are called room systems, which are conference rooms set up with video equipment in a point-to-point kind of way that connects people in two locations. You still have to bring people to the location; so travel is involved even if it's down the hall. That really eats into the opportunity cost part of the equation. The other part of the equation is you need to buy bandwidth if you're doing videoconferencing, and that's expensive. You don't have those costs when bringing collaborative learning to the desktop, whether it's in the office or the home over the Internet, which is ubiquitous and extremely low-cost. Adding collaboration to Internet use is a value-added application that gives you more return on your investment without the inconvenience of going somewhere and losing opportunity. How do bandwidth limitations affect what's possible with collaborative learning and training, and what changes do you foresee for these products as broadband availability spreads? Navickas: We can do a lot with the available bandwidth out there today. We can create a full audio/ graphic conferencing environment with shared content and applications and a lot of interactivity over the available infrastructure on the corporate intranet, extranet, and the Internet, even on bandwidth as low as 28.8. What bandwidth means is just "better and faster." From that standpoint, we'll be able to accommodate richer media like streaming technologies. We'll be able to add video in a way that makes it really useful, gives you a view of participants, and gives more than just point-to-point, two-location connectivity but engages groups of people with cameras. Finn: We've had the opportunity over the last few years to train literally thousands of people using this technology. Many of them are coming in over dial-up. Many are coming in over 28.8 connections, sometimes lower than that. The existing bandwidth situation today has not in any way, shape, or form, caused a problem. It's been an enhancement for our ability to reach more people in isolated situations that maybe would never have a chance to attend training before. What are some examples of the most innovative ways your products are put to use? Navickas: We have more than 175 customers putting the product to use in a lot of different ways. They're creating virtual classrooms, doing distributed teamwork, rolling out new products and services, doing sales training, engaging channel partners, and transferring knowledge more effectively. But specifically. . .let me pass that baton to Ellen. Ellen Slaby, Centra public relations: PSINet, one of the largest ISPs in the country, decided that rather than consolidating everything into a corporate headquarters, it wanted to create field offices in all the major metropolitan areas it covers. Then it had an issue in trying to train all these people and keep them up to speed on the new happenings with the company. So they bought Symposium from Centra to help them facilitate this knowledge transfer and learning on a regular basis. How do trainees or students adjust to learning at their computer rather than in a classroom? Finn: We have found that people become so immersed in the learning that they forget they're even using an online learning tool. A lot of the feedback we get is from people who are just incredibly enthusiastic about learning this way. They went into their first learning experience thinking, "I've always learned in a classroom. I need to go to a classroom." And they are almost immediately converted to this technology. What's the next area you expect this type of technology to expand into, maybe the next horizon for online training and collaboration? Navickas: You can imagine that all the world's live events where groups of people gather could have an equivalent in cyberspace. It ranges from one-to-one interaction to one-to-many presentations and broadcasting to small virtual classrooms to large environment things where there are large groups of people gathered. All the world's live events will someday be in cyberspace. Do you think online training and interaction could ultimately replace live events such as conferences? Navickas: The world will become a real hybrid of physical, traditional events, as well as virtual interaction. You're never going to replace the need for people to get together. You can't teach someone swimming, for example, if you can't hold them in the water on their first try. But there's a whole other class of learning and collaboration that really could benefit by being available in smaller chunks—frequently, whenever people want it, on demand. We're supporting sales forces getting together on a regular basis to do planning, budgeting, forecasting, product line reviews, and so forth. But it will never replace the physical company meeting. Instead of monthly, however, the meeting might happen quarterly. Isn't this technology available in enough formats to be viable for even small organizations that don't have a dedicated information technology (IT) staff? Navickas: That's right. A lot of organizations will find it attractive to go to our Web site to try out Centra 99's capabilities and learn about its benefits, then buy the services from us and pay as they go, pay as they grow. So as they add more business partners and add more employees, they can add more subscribers. Finn: If you go to the Centra Web site (http://www.centra.com) today you'll have access to join one of the free training sessions that Centra offers. The class teaches you about the Centra 99 product. I think we are one of the only, if not the only, company that makes that service available to people today. We do training on our own product using our own product. 
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