We're on the cusp of a dramatic revolution in education and training. With the emergence of online learning, the next generation of students may never again settle for sitting in a corporate classroom while an instructor attempts to impart skills or knowledge as if one size fits all.
Online learning in its many forms has steadily gained ground each year. Corporations, especially those with far-flung offices, use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to educate new hires on company policy or to teach basic skills through self-paced learning modules. Even small companies are adding product tutorials to their sites.
In the case of general knowledge, subscription or for-fee courses designed by others can provide immediate savings. Even if designing specialized courses exceeds the price tag for face-to-face training, there may be economies if the course can be used repeatedly with minimal updating. Moreover, in an uncertain economy with employees who may be reluctant to travel, offering people flexible opportunities to learn at their own pace, at work or at home, can be a benefit.
However, whether online learning succeeds or fails may ultimately depend on how well Web designers and developers address the four Cs: cost, customization, communication, and community.
Cost
Obviously, cost is the most important consideration when you're deciding whether to build or buy an online learning program. If the challenge is relatively simple or common—maybe you want a course that lets administrative assistants upgrade their word processing skills—you will likely find several excellent, affordable, online options available for a one-time fee or subscription.
The question then becomes how much flexibility you want and need. Which is ultimately better for you: to continue shopping for a course that you can tailor to include only the new skills your employees need to learn, or to settle for a standardized course in which your employees will be forced to review material they've already mastered?
When designing your own courses, clarifying your definition of success is essential in determining budgets. Are these crucial skills that must be learned quickly and perfectly? How soon must the training be ready? Is it preferable to pre-test or to launch the course now and tweak it later? What percentage of those who take the course can be allowed to repeat the material, if necessary, before doing so becomes cost prohibitive? You don't want to waste money, but you also don't want to trim development and facilitation budgets to the point where the courses miss their mark.
Cost issues also include:
Testing and knowledge tracking. If you plan to purchase or subscribe to an online learning program, there are many from which to choose. A recent post to a course developer listserv asked for a list of good testing and knowledge-tracking software options in the $2000 range. I suspect a listwide chuckle went up as people chimed in, "We'd like one too."
On one end of the spectrum are freebies with potentially hidden costs (including outright disaster if the company goes broke in the middle of a course). On the other end are high-ticket solutions that are only affordable to large corporations. In between, are ever-shifting pricing schemes for which you can pay on a per-pupil or per-class basis.
Among the well-known names in the field, those that offer a variety of options are: Blackboard, Docent, Click2Learn, Plato, Socrates, Softskills, NetG, Netop, and WebCT.
For example, Dreamweaver's free download, CourseBuilder, lets you create a variety of sophisticated test questions. The expense accrues when you need to score and capture the results, especially if you need to maintain cumulative employee records over time. CourseBuilder works well with programs like Access, but only if you're willing to accept the time and expense of designing a system to meet your specific needs. Macromedia once marketed the compatible Pathware knowledge-tracking system (version 3.0 started at $35,000), but the product has since been sold to IBM's Lotus. Lotus has revised and renamed it LearningSpace 5.0, and offers it with three different pricing structures.
Security. To prevent cheating, you can have your employees take exams in a proctored room where they must show a picture ID as they enter and exit. Some companies are beginning to offer proctoring services for businesses that use this testing method. However, this type of testing not only raises costs, it also defeats one of the Web's main advantages, which is that online classes can be taken anywhere. Another solution is to have students fill out extensive questionnaires about their personal history, and then use those to screen out impostors.
The day will no doubt arrive when a retinal or fingerprint scanner will be affordable and available for use in testing situations. But for now, ensuring that the student completing the course and taking the test is the one who registered for it depends on how much you're willing to spend—or require—to be sure.
Standards and regulation. Reggie Smith and Trude K. Diamond covered standards well in their article, "Web-Based Training," in the December 2000 issue of Web Techniques. However, Federal Standard 508 deserves special mention. This standard was issued to ensure that Web sites were accessible by a broad range of people, including the disabled. As with all rules created by committee, it isn't perfect. However, compliance is a cost that you must factor in if your project receives federal dollars. For example, you'll need to offer a text transcript of any video clip, and your budget will suffer if you don't know that up front.
Customization
Customization involves two challenges: harnessing the Web's unique potential as an instructive tool, and tailoring the material to each employee's specific needs.
About the former, whether you're creating a new course or tutorial, or converting an existing one, you should focus on implementing strategies that make the most of the Web's attributes—hyperlinking, interactivity, and the opportunity to update material as quickly as you can make the changes. When time and money are tight, it may be tempting to take an existing course or CBT module and move it directly onto the Web. After all, how bad can that be? The short answer is, deadly. People expect online learning programs to look like other Web sites they've used. Give them an experience that fails to match up, and online learning takes a serious hit.
In time, the number of opportunities to customize courses to an individual's needs will only increase. Style sheets already make it easy to let employees choose their preferred font size and color scheme. Employees also like to be referred to by name. So for example, your system might greet a student with, "Hi Bonnie, here's what you'll learn today."
The real power of customization results from hooking a database to the Web site to create dynamic content. As you build courses out of reusable and revisable learning bricks, you can give employees a pretest and then use their scores on each section to serve up the easy, basic, or advanced version of a unit or module, based on the employee's demonstrated proficiency in that area.
You can even create different versions of the same course that are tailored to an employee's individual learning style, based on the his or her aptitude for left-brain or right-brain, solitary or collaborative, holistic or analytic, and visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learning. As we learn more about the different ways that people learn, dynamic content portends a future in which left-brain, solitary, word-learner Bonnie will receive modules that look nothing like the ones offered to right-brain, collaborative, image-learner Clyde.
Bonnie works through prioritized readings, while Clyde watches a video clip to prepare for a discussion with his email workgroup. Customization can also extend to testing, allowing Bonnie to demonstrate her proficiency by writing an essay, while Clyde solves a problem with his team. Yet if the course is well designed, by the end, both Bonnie and Clyde will understand the concepts of finance and both will be equally skilled at robbing banks.
Until you can provide sophisticated course customization, your courses should at least offer optional learning methods (such as video clips, images, animation, charts, collaborative workgroups with whiteboards, and personalized coaching), so that different types of learners can choose courses that best suit their learning styles.
To re-invent education and training for an online environment, you must bring content and technical experts together to form a course design team. Team members will learn from each other throughout the course creation and implementation process. Have this group brainstorm ways in which various technical options might support the company's educational goals and course objectives. Make pilot testing and usability studies an integral part of this process.
Communication
Research suggests that online courses fail most often because of technical problems, minimal or "not timely" feedback, and ambiguous instructions on the Web site and in email. Imagine the frustration of a night-shift employee—someone who is thrilled
that the Web's flexibility lets him or her access a course at 3 a.m. When the link doesn't work, the video clip fails to play, or the instructions on what to do next don't make sense. The frustration can turn to outright anger if there's nowhere to turn for answers.
For the Web to succeed, it must do as well as or better than real world training.
Corporate courses sometimes benefit from being able to reduce or eliminate technical problems by dictating the hardware, software, browsers, and plug-ins that will be used. (With far-flung or independent offices or divisions, however, that may not be the case.) But the tougher challenge is often to address the communications issues.
Here's where usability testing is essential. A good course design process includes a step in which you observe participants as they work their way through the material. Even when the course is updated on the fly, IT team members should pick apart new email instructions to uncover any areas of potential confusion before sending the messages to students.
Research suggests that most people hesitate to send a second questioning email if they're still confused after the response to their first email. Virtually no one sends a third, particularly if they don't want to look stupid to the bosses.
In a classroom, instructors can see the furrowed brows and perplexed looks when participants don't understand the material. For the Web to outperform its real-world competition, you must provide answers to even the dumbest questions; and you won't know what those are unless you study how real people work their way through the material and observe where they fumble.
It's easy to blame the course taker, when the real problem lies in the design. It isn't good enough to argue that the information is already available in the instructions or the FAQ—if the students don't go there or don't understand the instructions when they do, the course fails. Designers need usability testing to identify where the bottlenecks are and where the misunderstandings occur. Then, they need to experiment with the best ways to address them.
Professor Clifford Nass of Stanford University's Department of Communication notes that sites like Buy.com have dramatically boosted the effectiveness of their FAQs by adding a photo of a real person who offers to help visitors. Each click to a new section brings up a different photo of the person, making it appear as if the person is taking the visitors' problems seriously and is talking just to that individual visitor.
At the design level, sidebars in which some information is split out from the core article can also help employees work their way through the material. You might put an instructor avatar into a box with a different background color to identify this as a recognizable place where participants can find the teaching points they're supposed to glean from the material. It's also helpful if you provide links to even more detailed information or assistance.
However, Nass warns us that we should learn from Microsoft's Clippy, the much-loathed helper with the big eyes, endless intrusions, and less-than-intuitive advice on how to use Word. If you offer a cartoon or photo help avatar, make sure the assistance is truly useful.
Community
Clifford Nass also says, "The Web is a lonely place." I can attest that whenever I give a speech about the wonders of online learning, someone in the audience inevitably says, "I want to interact with my instructor and the other students in ways that only face-to-face classes allow."
To compete with real-world classes, your courses must build a sense of community through interactivity with, for example, message boards, email workgroups, chat, and video conferencing. In addition, requiring employees to make at least one original posting to a discussion group ensures the participation of the shy or distracted student who would typically sit in the back of a classroom to avoid being called on. In physical classes, this person is consistently overlooked, and thus, rarely makes a comment.
Web learning specialists, Greg Kearsley and Ben Shneiderman, offer engagement theory as a framework to demonstrate how technology can promote class involvement in ways that cannot be achieved otherwise. They summarize their theory as one that harnesses technology to encourage students to relate, create, and donate:
Relate. The modern workplace values collaboration, and courses can use email, forums and live chat to let people interact. An online coach can assign team members a problem to solve based on a real-world scenario. The team can work together asynchronously or in real time to craft solutions, with feedback, encouragement, and critiques from the coach.
Create. Adult learning theory proposes that understanding is enhanced when people work together on a project that deals with real problems or situations. Even if employees aren't allowed to select the project topic, the opportunity to make choices about how to resolve the challenge builds community.
Donate. Whenever possible, let participants use their new skills to help others. Let the team collaborate on a project or problem that will benefit their peers. Or, you can structure the course so that their work benefits a local charity.
Ground rules for interaction are important, and asking online groups to develop their own can be a good first assignment. You can also assign neutral screen names to address issues of diversity. For example, a name like Bobo implies no gender, no age, no race, and no rank. Using such names, participants can be truly judged on the quality of their contributions.
Success
We live in a world in which today's knowledge makes us obsolete tomorrow. The goal for course developers and designers is to explore ways to make e-learning an affordable, effective option for companies large and small. Containing costs, while improving communication, harnessing the power of community, and increasing opportunities for customization will help your employees get the most out of online learning.
Bonnie (bucquero@msu.edu) creates online courses as coordinator of the Victims and the Media Program at Michigan State University's School of Journalism, where she also co-hosts the local chapter of Webgrrls (www.victims.jrn.msu.edu). Bonnie is also a consultant developing Web-based training and education through her firm Digital-training.net.
