Excerpts

Chapter 1.0 The Business Calculations and Business Objectives of e-Learning For more than a decade, e-learning has been touted as the next big thing in training. Yet most organizations are still trying to figure out how to make it work. Perhaps part of the problem is that e-learning is a type of training or learning in which instructors and students interact at different times and in different spaces, with technology bridging the timespace gap and allowing learners to access training at their own pace and with methods that are convenient for them. A lot of companies have spent a lot of money creating a lot of projects--but they have not gotten what they thought they would get out of their investment in this still new technology. Meanwhile, corporate training organizations are looking for better returns than they are currently receiving from their e-learning investment. While department-level personnel wait for executives to provide vision and goals, executives want trainers to develop a business plan to move training into the twenty-first century. Along the way, corporations spend billions of dollars on solutions selected on an ambiguous direction that is provided primarily by product vendors. Specifically, corporations decide on an initiative to move to a new technology or methodology without understanding its implications for workers or without being able to measure the effectiveness of its implementation. When employees choose solutions, they tend to solve only their short-term needs--like, "How do I get this deliverable off of my desk?" What organizations need are clear visions, focused goals, and a better way to measure their learning objectives. By the end of this chapter, you should be able to: • Understand the goal of training. • Review sample ROI calculations. • Understand how to measure and evaluate training. • Identify your audience. • Understand the biggest mistakes in top-down commands and bottom-up implementations. • Understand communication within an organization. • Learn how to get buy-in from trainers, employees, and SMEs. • Understand where e-learning fits in. 1.1 The Goal of Training This book takes a realistic and pragmatic look at e-learning. Over the last ten years, having worked with hundreds of organizations that are incorporating e-learning into their business practices, I have found that most training organizations have failed to achieve the expected returns on investment. I have seen department-level personnel waiting for their executives to provide vision and goals, while their executives, who have no practical experience with training, expect the trainers to develop a business plan to modernize the organization's training. This gap in expectations is fertile ground for vendors to dictate solutions, tactics, and strategies, which tend to benefit the product providers much more than their customers. Executive-level personnel go along with the vendor-provided solutions because they can present such solutions as "progress" to management, and contributor- level employees are happy just to get the tasks completed so that their managers stop asking about them. This cozy arrangement leaves employee training and productivity enhancement as an afterthought on the priority list. This book speaks to this current state of e-learning practices, identifying what is effective and what is counterproductive, and my theories and recommendations are illustrated by real-world case studies. The irony of this commonplace approach to e-learning is that providing training over the Web, rather than as classroom training, creates more opportunities than people initially think. Many organizations initially look at moving training on-line to cut travel costs, to ease trainer schedules, or to provide training where it has not been available in the past. However,Web-based training is based on a different model than classroom training. A real benefit of moving training to an intranet/Internet-delivered model is that it provides an organization with availability and repetition. • The always-on availability of the intranet/Internet subtly changes training. What was once a one-time training event can now be a corporate resource. Once implemented, e-learning provides homogeneous training, which is the same training, on the same day, for all employees. • From a learning retention point-of-view, an on-line training event does not need to achieve as high a level of knowledge retention as classroom training because e-learning can be accessed at any time as a just-in-time resource. An effective e-learning model supports just-in-time training so that employees can refresh their memory when they need to carry out a procedure or when they run into an unexpected situation. With e-learning, employees can search a key word and access a course unit instead of simply having to remember each unit's content from top to bottom. In effect, employees learn how to find and access the information they need. Before the Internet, with its inherently easy access to corporate repositories of information, employees found that the hard part of performing their jobs was finding where the procedures were spelled out. The benefit of using e-courses over other methods of providing information, such as wikis or on-line Word or PowerPoint documents, is that e-learning, when developed properly, explains concepts and presents the same information multiple ways, making it easier for employees to understand new information or to follow new procedures. E-learning also enables organizations to tailor their training to meet their specific goals. In a manufacturing organization, for example, the goal is to ensure that each employee is efficient at the handful of tasks he or she performs. In a service organization, the goal is to increase productivity by ensuring that employees are knowledgeable about organizational offerings and that they provide a consistent experience. Managers undergo training to be able to properly handle relationships and manage unexpected situations within the confines of the organization's culture. Training and, by extension, e-learning provide management with a tool to create a more flexible workforce. Employees can be trained to become intelligent workers who know where to find information rather than to simply memorize procedures. Of course, all these benefits cost money, but the return on investment is there if you know how to calculate it. 1.2 A Simple Example of Return-on-Investment (ROI) Calculations E-learning is relatively new to most organizations. With any new technology, service, or change in business practices, management wants to quantify the cost and savings. Most organizations look at return on investment (ROI) as the first step in justifying the cost of a new service. The ROI calculation for e-learning tends to be very simple. In most situations an e-learning course replaces classroom training or training workbooks. The ROI calculation identifies the current cost to create and roll out a classroom course and compares it with the cost of creating an e-learning course and purchasing e-learning infrastructure. For example, the Division of Development and Training in the Bureau of Human Resources is the organization in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry that is responsible for managing compliance training and benefits for all 6,000 agency employees. Employees must receive training on a variety of mandated topics, including the State Employees Assistance Program, HIV/AIDS, bomb threats, and the like. Originally, all of this training was classroom based, delivered throughout the state for agency employees at various county, regional, and other local facilities. With tight travel budgets, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was looking for alternative ways to deliver training. The Development and Training Division believed that migrating some of their courses to e-learning would lower training costs while providing agency employees with effective just-in-time training. They looked at their records and identified that, on average, the cost to roll out one training course was $85,000. This total took into account all the costs for travel, room, material, and food for both trainers and students. Having decided that not all courses were going to go on-line, they figured out how many courses they would convert to e-learning. For example, if they rolled out five classroom courses in a year, the real cost would be $425,000. If these courses were moved to an e-learning infrastructure, the cost would be about $200,000 for the year. Their savings for the year would be $425,000 - $200,000 = $225,000); their return on investment would be $225,000  $200,000 = 1.125, or 11.25%. However, cost varies. Some organizations find that they need large, centralized databases to handle their training needs, whereas other organizations find that simpler solutions meet their needs. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania went with a simple solution: With ReadyGo WCB and ReadyGo SST, for an outlay of $2,500, they saved their department over $400,000 in training costs. Excerpted from e-Learning 2.0:   Proven Practices and Emerging Technologies to Achieve Results by Anita Rosen . Copyright (c) 2009 Anita Rosen. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission. All rights reserved. http://www.amacombooks.org. Excerpted from e-Learning 2.0: Proven Practices and Emerging Technologies to Achieve Real Results by Anita Rosen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.