E-Learning:
Sept. 1st 2000
By Paul
Stacey
"We
pursue knowledge like a pig pursues truffles." -
David Ogilvy, Founder Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide
"We
can't become an eBusiness on the outside without
becoming eLearning on the inside." Elliot Masie,
The Business of Online Learning
"Our
knowledge and skills are really only adequate for a
period as short as 12 to 18 months, and then we must
replenish them to compete in the global economy."
Jeanne Meister, Corporate Universities
Corporate
Universities
September,
back to school time.
In
the old economy life was divided into the period you
went to school and learned your profession, and the
period after school when you worked and practised your
profession. In the new economy you must continuously
build your knowledge base throughout life. The division
between work and learning is gone.
In
response to this new knowledge-based economy corporate
learning is undergoing a tremendous shift. A growing
number of companies are moving the focus of their
training and education efforts away from one time
training events in a classroom, toward creating a
continuous learning culture using educational
technology. Many organizations are looking toward the
creation of a corporate university to facilitate
management of their intellectual assets strategically.
Corporate
universities are a major phenomenon in the United
States. Over the last ten years corporate universities
have grown from 400 to over 1,000.
And
its not just in the States.
On
June 16, 2000, local firm Sierra Systems http://www.sierrasystems.com
(Trading Symbol: TSE:SSG) launched Sierra Systems
University, a corporate university designed to meet the
career development needs of its 900 staff. Sierra
Systems University is a Web based learning portal on
Sierra's Intranet that provides easy access both to
Sierra Systems in-house courses and to continually
current offerings from over 1,200 training providers.
The portal also includes a fully automated on-line
registration and tracking system that eliminates
Sierra's previously paper-based system.
Sierra
Systems University was developed in partnership with
local training aggregator Thinq.com http://www.thinq.com
(formerly TrainingNet.com). Thinq.com develops custom
"corporate gateways". Thinq powers the site
providing a centralized one-stop method for Sierra
employees to manage their own careers.
"Equipping
our consultants with the right skills to deliver the
best solutions for our clients is of strategic
importance to Sierra Systems," says CEO and
President Mr. Grant Gisel. "Sierra Systems
University represents a quantum improvement in our
capability to do this."
This
corporate university meets e-learning scenario is
dynamite.
Why
aren't there more corporate universities in the lower
mainland? I've spent the last 15 years providing
workplace learning and I can tell you what senior
executives are saying:
- we don't have time for
learning
- small companies can't
afford to invest in learning for employees
- every dollar paid for
training and learning comes off the bottom line
- we are slashing our
training budget not increasing it
- learning is a vacation
from real work
- once the company
invests in training up an employee they leave and go
work for a competitor
- every hour someone is
off learning, the company falls an hour behind on a
project already over budget and behind schedule
- learning is done
on-the-job
There
is a pragmatic bottom-line reality to these views but
also old, conventional beliefs no longer valid.
Companies old and new are always interested in finding
ways to do more learning in less time for more people in
more locations with fewer resources. E-learning does
just that.
Wondering
just what is a corporate university? A corporate
university is a typically centralized, strategic
umbrella for developing and educating employees,
customers, and suppliers. Corporate universities focus
on linking learning programs to real business goals and
strategies. When an organization establishes its own
corporate university it becomes proactively more
involved with, and responsible for, its own intellectual
capital. Corporate Universities bring learning to the
strategic decision-making table of a company.
Who's
got the best corporate university? On July 1 NCR
Corporation won the CIO Award for Best Online Site for
Learning. This award program, sponsored by CIO magazine,
http://www.cio.com,
recognizes the top 50 Internet and top 50 intranet sites
that demonstrate a keen ability to blend technology and
design of their Web site with the needs of their target
audience.
The
NCR corporate university team was recently featured at a
"Creating a Virtual University - E-Learning in the
Dot.Com World" event in San Francisco where they
highlighted five "must-do's" in creating an
award-winning virtual university:
- Have online learning
readily available off-site so NCR employees can
learn any time, any place
- Avoid fancy graphics
and plug-ins-keep it simple, i.e., available through
a web browser
- Change the key metrics
from student days to course completions and
certifications
- Anticipate resistance
from traditionally oriented trainers and offer them
training in web-based course development and account
management
- Personalize the
learning by allowing employees to create their own
curricula maps in their native language; remember
that the biggest winners are the rank and file
employees who live and work in remote locations
Of course Sierra Systems
and NCR are not the only examples of corporate
universities. The Corporate University Xchange http://www.corpu.com
is recognized internationally as the leading expert site
on corporate universities. If you want to find out more
about corporate universities this is definitely a site
to visit. The firm's president, Jeanne C. Meister, is
also the author of the definitive book on this topic,
Corporate Universities (McGraw-Hill, 1998).
I
highly recommend Jeanne Meister's book and particularly
like the section on: Twelve Lessons In Building a World
Class Work Force which are:
- Tie the goals of
education and development to the strategic needs of
the organization
- Involve leaders as
learners and faculty
- Select a Chief
Learning Officer to set the strategic direction for
corporate education
- Consider employee
orientation an ongoing strategic process, rather
than a one-time event
- Design a core
curriculum to stress the three c's: corporate
citizenship, contextual framework, and core
competencies
- Link what employees
earn to what they learn
- Experiment
with technology to measure, track and accelerate
learning
- Extend the corporate
university beyond internal employees to key members
of the customer/supply chain
- Operate the corporate
university as a line of business within the
organization
- Develop a range of
innovative alliances with higher education
- Demonstrate the value
of the corporate university learning infrastructure
- Develop the corporate
university as a branded competitive advantage and
profit center
Where
are corporate universities going? Well Sprint University
of Excellence in Kansas City which offered 3,000
educational programs--both classroom-and
online-based--to Sprint's 78,000 employees last year is
now being approached by a number of outside firms to
become their learning partner of choice. What does this
mean? Many corporate universities may eventually be spun
off as stand-alone profit centers.
Consider
the latest research from Corporate University Xchange's
soon-to-be published report, "The Chief Learning
Officer: Operating Education As A Business" (a
survey of 175 corporate university directors):
- 11 percent of
corporate universities are currently self-funded and
a full 31 percent plan to operate as a profit center
by 2003
- Chief Learning
Officer's identify financial management and pricing
as key skills they need to hone in order to move
their education department from a cost center to a
profit center
- Funding for education
is being de-centralized into the business units,
creating a pay for services model for the central
corporate education area
Dell
is pursuing a self-funding strategy for Dell Learning.
Cisco is already running their corporate university,
Cisco Education, as a business.
Are
corporate universities just for big companies? Is the
reason we see so few corporate universities here in the
lower mainland because our companies are too small? I
have always wondered whether British Columbia's high
tech community would benefit if lets say the Advanced
Systems Institute (ASI) http://www.asi.bc.ca/asi
or the British Columbia Technology Industry Association
(BCTIA) http://www.bctia.org
established a corporate university to serve the entire
high tech community. What would ASI/BCTIA-U do? Well I
think it could:
- be a physical and
web-based clearinghouse for high tech corporate
education and training
- allow local high tech
companies to share content between and among
themselves
- maximize
participation. If one company is conducting a
learning program for twenty people and only ten have
signed up, the remaining ten spots can be brokered
to other potentially interested companies. Companies
who do not have sufficient numbers of employees to
justify a particular learning program can seek out
others with similar needs and pool their
requirements to create sufficient demand
- match learning needs
to existing modules, courses, or programs from
participating educational institutions and industry
partners. Learning needs, which cannot be fulfilled
via off-the-shelf offerings, could be developed as
joint ventures
- handle scheduling,
registration, tracking and reporting
- provide a career and
learning management system that serves the needs of
all participants
Wishful
thinking? Perhaps. But I believe more local high tech
providers would benefit by following the Sierra Systems
lead.
Schools
back. Don't you wish your company had a corporate
university?
Reader
Feedback From Last Month's Free E-Learning Column
WOW!!!
I've got mixed feelings about this. I truly believe that
the best model for e-learning is to provide it free. As
time goes on and everyone gets better at building online
courses, they will become commodities. Once the
development costs for a course are spent, there are
virtually no variable costs associated with its
delivery. That means aggressive (or progressive?)
providers of courses will continually price them lower
and lower, to get the market, until they are essentially
free! Here's where the mixed feelings come in. If we're
going to give away our product, how will we stay in
business? One thing we're considering is the ancillary
services that accompany a course. Will a learner pay
admin fees to maintain a record of their courses? Will
they pay for online tutoring or face-to-face exam
prep's? Will they (or their employers)pay a membership
or subscription fee to allow unlimited access to our
course library? Will we be able to secure advertisers
who will want to reach our market? There are still a lot
of unanswered questions, but I do believe that we will
have to compete on price (possibly down to a price of
zero) because we'll have competitors that will.
Bruce
Weir, Learning Dividends
Bruce:
Now
that I've expressed my idealistic yearnings for
"free" learning in my July column I feel
somewhat compelled to temper it with practical business
realities. If I'm a private sector provider of
e-learning I ought to be generating revenues
immediately, and have a realistic road map to breaking
even and earning profits within three years. We may be
in a new economy but even the new economy has a bottom
line reality. The reason we are having dot-com fall out
right now is because to many dot-com companies lack a
sustainable business model.
That
said I still think there is room for tremendous
innovation. One notion I keep coming back to is the idea
of bundling learning with something else that is the
real revenue earner. Is "learning" the product
being bought and sold, or is learning an enabler of some
other transaction or commodity? This gets to the root of
the business model and I happen to believe there are
many many yet unexplored methods for having learning be
an enabler of a sale rather than the sale item itself.
The
notHarvard.com example I described is a great example.
Since writing the July column I have learned that Barnes
& Noble - the big U.S. bookstore chain, has used
notharvard.com to create Barnes and Noble's on-line
"university" offering free learning. Anthony
Astarita, VP Corporate Finance, who devised Barnes&Noble.com's
"online university" with notHarvard.com, sees
it as a way to build on a traditional branded business
with online educational experiences that synergistically
grow sales and foot traffic. Check it out for yourself
at http://www.barnesandnoble.com
I
also feel compelled to address your statement that once
a course is developed there are no variable costs and
that pricing should approach zero. I'm not so sure. The
big advantage of e-learning over other forms of learning
is the social interaction between learners and between
learners and the instructor. There are variable costs
associated with facilitating this social interaction.
Other variable costs will be incurred when maintaining
the currency and validity of the learning content. From
working on software engineering projects I know that the
upfront costs to create the product really only
represent thirty percent of the total costs. Seventy
percent of the costs go to maintaining and updating the
software over its life cycle. If we consider e-learning
to be a software product this may also hold true for it.
Ultimately
I think we will see a broad range of pricing for
e-learning from zero to tens of thousands of dollars. I
believe people will pay top dollar for big name learning
(authors, gurus, experts, famous people), leading edge
learning (new innovations, paradigm shifts, …), and
up-to-the-minute learning (the very latest knowledge
nuggets that have catalytic potential or the ability to
be applied immediately and converted into a tangible
return greater than the purchasing price).
Paul
Paul
Stacey is the Director of Corporate Education and
Training at the Technical University of British
Columbia, a long time education professional in the high
tech private sector, and an e-learner.
Contact: Paul
Stacey
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