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Learning-on-Demand European Meeting Summary
Enterprise Ireland, Dublin, Ireland
15 October 2003
Author: Eilif Trondsen |
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Best Practice in eLearning Implementation
This European LoD meeting marked our return to Dublin and to the headquarters of Enterprise Ireland, where we also had an LoD meeting in June 2000. Ireland was then, and continues to be today, a key hot spot for eLearning in Europe and is the home of a large number of successful eLearning companies. Dublin, therefore, was an excellent choice for a meeting to discuss "best-practice eLearning implementations." According to Michael Cantwell, who heads the eLearning program for Enterprise Ireland, 30 Irish companies are active in eLearning, and 90% of them are exporting products and services, with a total turnover of some $500 million. A number of these companies—including Agtel, eduTrust, Skillspro, Transware, and WBT Systems—attended the meeting. But the meeting also attracted representatives from companies in other countries, including Finland, Norway, Germany, Scotland, and England and brought together some 60 people to fill the conference room with active discussion throughout the day.
After Michael Cantwell had made his welcoming remarks, Rob Edmonds of the LoD program took over as facilitator for the morning and noted that "best practices" has been a focus of a number of the consulting projects that our SRIC-BI colleagues have engaged in this year. We are also examining best practices in the vertical-industry analyses that we are undertaking as an important part of the LoD research agenda. The first such vertical-industry analysis was written by Rob himself and focused on the oil industry. The second industry for examination was the financial-services industry—where WBT Systems of Ireland has had significant success by focusing on eLearning to meet the industry's compliance needs, for instance—and we are now completing work on the life-sciences industry.
In the opening presentation, I summarized some of our insights and conclusions from our examination of the financial-services and life-sciences industries and organized these insights in seven categories: developing vision and commitment, coordinating across and beyond the enterprise, building knowledge and learning architectures, integrating knowledge and learning systems and processes, deciding who does what (buy, outsource, or make), profiling and mapping knowledge and competency across the enterprise, and deciding on the characteristics of a blended learning model. A few of our findings follow:
- Organizing for better coordination. A number of global companies that we have examined have established new organizational units to coordinate and streamline their learning activities and systems better. Doing so often has involved considerable redundancies. But many banks and pharmaceuticals companies are also using communities of practice as a way to achieve better communication, coordination, and collaboration across the enterprise or the extended enterprise.
- Creating learning architectures to guide eLearning initiatives. At a meeting of the eLearning Forum on the topic of learning architectures, Peg Maddocks, director of Learning Strategy and Development at Cisco, noted that learning architectures typically require a lot of hard work but will help to increase successful eLearning implementations significantly. Although many companies may be reluctant to make the necessary commitment to create such architectures, companies like Bristol Myers Squibb and others are embracing this approach.
- Integrating knowledge and learning systems and processes. Although most organizations are just starting to make some progress on this front we have found that a number of life-sciences companies have recognized the need to gain greater "multiuse" of enterprise content across different applications in the organization (see the LoD Bulletin, Third Quarter 2003).
The second presentation by Mark Stefko on Smith and Nephew's case study of Wound Management University had as one of its objectives to repurpose educational content for cross-market use, illustrating the point in the bullet above about more and more organizations' seeking to leverage digital content for multiple uses. Smith and Nephew—using WBT Topclass platform to enable easy content creation and conversion and the delivery and management of eLearning—has created a repository of employee training materials and thereby introduced greater flexibility for employees' training. Another goal the company has met through its eLearning program has been to shift greater responsibility to employees—for their own learning and training—and away from the command-and control model of the past where the company imposes training. The project is seeing implementation in two phases, with the United States and the United Kingdom as the leaders in the first phase this year, followed by Australia, Japan, Canada, Italy, and the United Kingdom's Hull Manufacturing in the second phase during next year. Given what they have experienced in the pilot project, the result will be a greater amount of training delivered in less time and with great consistency—and with greater flexibility—across Smith and Nephew's different operational units.
The Transware presentation by Alastair Kerr addressed a key issue facing a growing number of large companies with multinational operations: How can eLearning be effective for employees in different countries and with different cultures and needs? Many of the companies we interviewed for our research on financial services and the life sciences recognized that that they will need to deal with this issue—and should have addressed it already—but they are struggling with the costs associated with translation or localization. Transware is the leading full-service localization company with more than 200 employees and has gained considerable experience as a result of having localized more than 4000 courses since the company began in 1996 (the LoD report eLearning and Culture described some of the work that Transware has done and also provided in-depth analysis of various localization issues). As companies struggle with time-to-market issues, localization is often an afterthought and typically results in higher-than-necessary costs compared to what costs would have been if the companies had addressed the issues from the start of the eLearning production process. Best-practice solutions based on Transware's experience follow:
- Create visibility for the need to localize.
- Work directly and early with clients and partner content developers.
- Retrofit localization design stage to early development stage.
- Insist on development standards (including SCORM).
- Organize and metatag all media assets.
- Insist on glossary maintenance.
- Move to multilingual knowledge and content development.
Peter O'Sullivan of IBM Learning Solutions in the United Kingdom focused on how best practice in learning today must necessarily be an on-demand paradigm—which of course we in SRIC-BI's Learning-on-Demand program have argued for since we launched our program in 1997—to align with the increasingly on-demand business world that we are all part of. This necessity requires technology to be part of learning across the board, from elementary school to higher education, corporate learning and training, and the government sector. Peter referred to several examples where schools are embracing eLearning and increasingly seeing eLearning as a way to deliver learning effectively not only to their own students but—as in the case of the Thomas Telford School (near Birmingham, England)—also to partner schools that use curriculum materials developed by Thomas Telford's staff. (A recent project that an SRI International researcher participated in examined 174 case studies in 26 countries of innovative uses of technology in learning in kindergarten through the twelfth grade and found widespread and innovative use of technology). Peter also referred to governments now designing careful eLearning strategies and pointed to both what is happening in Wales and to the document by the U.K. Department for Education and Skills that has put out a report—Towards a Unified e-Learning Strategy—that is now out for comments. This document discusses existing government strategies, the need for eLearning strategy, benefits of eLearning, the vision, and other issues. The report states that "This is a consultation exercise to help us shape an e-learning strategy for all learners and potential learners and all sectors of education and training from early years through to Higher Education and lifelong learning."
IBM uses eLearning extensively to meet its own learning needs, and nearly 50% of all training in IBM now takes place through eLearning, but the company also wants to serve all sectors and industries with its own eLearning products and services, assisting organizations with learning strategy, content services, learning delivery, learning technologies, learning integration, and learning outsourcing. The last is an area that will see growing attention as companies, schools, and higher-education institutions decide that they want specialist firms to handle at least a part of their eLearning operations.
The first presentation after lunch transitioned well from the IBM presentation as Atle Lokken and his colleagues from the University College of Stavanger (HiS), Norway, presented a very interesting case study of what their institution has gone through and where they are now heading with their eLearning program. They made clear that they are very advanced in their thinking and have a strong and dedicated team. Atle characterized the period up to now as one of "high tolerance" (by both students and the administration) but said that they now are moving into a period of "low or no tolerance." This shift is driven in part by the Quality Reform of Higher Education in Norway (which Atle and researchers at the University of Oslo believe can only come about through the use of eLearning) but also by the fact that students coming into their university will demand greater use and quality of eLearning. Issues that Atle and his team will now have to address include:
- Interactive, adaptive solutions—requiring a higher level of content and course design
- Reuse and content repositories—emphasizing the point early in this summary that increasing numbers of organizations are now focusing on content reuse or multiuse and creating repositories of content objects
- Digital rights and management of digital rights—a topic that the LoD program addressed last year in the report Learning Objects: Key Issues for Future Growth.
After the HiS presentation focusing on higher education, we returned to corporate eLearning and heard a case study of Amersham Health, a health-care company that formed in 1997 from a merger of Amersham International, Nycomed of Norway, and Pharmacia Biotech—a company with 80% of its products in the X-ray diagnostic imaging arena. The presentation was by Liam Connolly of Amersham and Joe Aherne of the Leading Edge Group (a United Kingdom–based firm providing consulting solutions in supply-chain management that designed the learning program for Amersham) and discussed the results of an eLearning pilot program that developed to train staff in supply-chain management. The pilot included logistics personnel from Amersham's plants in Cork, Ireland, and Oslo, Norway, and came to the following conclusions:
- The participants learned the curriculum although they believed that a more "blended model" with some face-to-face interaction would have been useful.
- The mentoring part of the program was an important element, and even more frequent feedback from the mentor would have improved the program.
- Linking the program to formal accreditation in supply-chain management would have given participants greater motivation to participate.
The final presentation of the meeting by Ronan Harris gave the results of the reengineering of computer-literacy training in the Essex police department in the England. Police personnel now use information and communication technology extensively in their work, but insufficient training has led to inefficient use of the technology. The Essex case demonstrated strong support by most managers (although some did not see the need for the program) and learners for the eLearning program, and a strong business case developed before the program started, based on a survey that showed the need for the program and what the return on investment would be from the program. The end result was very high participation and completion of the courses, with participants receiving their European Computer Driving License certification. Although the program involved prescriptive learning, it also provided the ability to customize the learning experience to meet the needs of individual learners.
The final session of the day was an open discussion of a variety of topics and issues among all the participants, facilitated by Stephen Taylor of the LoD program. One topic was content granularity. Because many of the participants deal primarily with courses, they were somewhat skeptical of really granular content. But they agreed that courses are increasingly becoming disaggregated into smaller units, to give learners the opportunity to navigate the curriculum to the content they need. Discussion also arose about the semantics of whether we were really talking about learning or training or knowledge management when we talk about delivery of information or knowledge on demand.
The topic of content commoditization was of interest, with some participants seeing content becoming increasingly commoditized and with growing amount of free content. The group recognized that initiatives like the Open Courseware initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would add to the amount of free content available on the Web (see the LoD Bulletin, Second Quarter 2003, which addressed the topic of Open Source eLearning). But the consensus in the room seemed to be that demand for high-value content would always exist and that the key to success was in ensuring that the supplied content met specific, high-value needs of the customer in specific markets.
Other topics included accessibility of eLearning to people with disabilities (complying with Section 508 in the United States and similar legislation to emerge in Europe), outsourcing (a topic gaining growing attention as organizations are searching for ways to reduce costs and simplify their operations by having specialists take over at least part of their training operations), return on investment, edu-gaming, communities of practice, digital-rights management, marketing of eLearning, learning organizations, and eLearning standards.
Presentations:
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Best and Next-Generation eLearning Practices in Financial Services and Life
Sciences (0.5 MB)
Eilif Trondsen, SRIC-BI |
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Smith and Nephew's Wound Management University: A WBT Systems TopClass
Case Study (5.3 MB)
Mark Stefko, Smith and Nephew |
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Transware: A New Multi-Lingual Paradigm (0.5 MB)
Alastair Kerr, Transware plc |
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An "On Demand" World Needs "On Demand" Learning (1.75 MB)
Peter O'Sullivan, IBM Learning Solutions |
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e-Learning, a day at college: That's one small step for mankind, one giant leap
for a man. (1.0 MB)
Atle Løkken, NettOp-HiS and Borge Brattabo, NettOp-HiS |
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eLearning in the Health Care Industry: A Case Study (2.25 MB)
Joe Aherne, The Leading Edge Group and Liam Connolly, Amersham Health |
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Building a Value Proposition for e-Learning — Presenting the Essex Police
Case Study (0.5 MB)
Ronan Harris, SkillsPro |
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(Korean Inquiries)
(Japanese site)