Report from Online Learning & Tight Rations

Report from eLearning Forum, October 2001

Our October meeting in Menlo Park was the largest in our history, with sixty people attending in person and another dozen valiantly trying to participate remotely.

Online Learning 2001

At least a dozen of us had attended Online Learning 2001 in Los Angeles two weeks before, and this provided the focus of the first hour of our meeting.

Jay kicked things off with an abbreviated report and slide show.

Sherry Hsi noted that the vendors demonstrated that "Behaviorism is alive and well."

Eifil Trondsen and others reported having interesting discussions. A smaller crowd (probably one third of earlier expectations) gave vendors and participants more time to talk. Also, the events of 9/11 imposed a hurdle only the dedicated appeared ready to clear, so attendees tended to be informed and intentional.

People assessed Online Learning with a variety of yardsticks. On the one hand, it's anomalous that an event about learning online features primarily learning face-to-face. (F2F is where the money is.) On the other, it's hardly reasonable to judge Online Learning as an educational gathering when it's heritage is Trade Show. Some people were dissatisfied by the lack of objectivity in breakout sessions (which happens when the faculty are unpaid volunteers).

Continuing a trend begun by Enterprise Ireland, vendors from New Brunswick, Canada, shared a booth which attracted many visitors.

The content realm was ho-hum. Many dropouts. Numerous custom developers. Everyone's talking objects but the definitions of object are fuzzy. Perhaps eLearning Forum will take a role in shaping up a tighter definition. The important content issue is getting in-house content online, and this was one of the thrusts of the LCMS vendors.

LCMS, learning content management systems, grabbed huge mindshare. A late afternoon session with Bryan Chapman, Clark Aldrich, and the LCMS Vendor Council overflowed out into the hallways. Autodesk's Jimm Meloy suggests that "content assembly systems" is a more apt name for the technology. Jimm observed that the important aspect of LCMS is not so much the tool as the procedures that go with it. Expect to see consolidation in the LCMS space in the next year. Jay thinks the LCMS companies will crowd out any non-C LMS providers.

Networking time

eLearning Forum News

Eilif described recent events from SRI's Learning on Demand project. He's off to Europe for a meeting of members of the project with the European Community in Brussels. eLearning Forum's Washington, D.C., chapter recently met at the ADL Co-Lab.

Jay mentioned the formation of a new offshoot of eLearning Forum, The Meta-Learning Lab. The group is devising practical ways to improve performance through process improvements, i.e. learning to learn.

Eilif

eLearning on Rations: Think Like a Survivor

Sally Crawford, CEO of Crawford International, and Bonnie Becker, Principal of BSB Consulting, described an investigation into how decreasing budgets have changed the ways companies design, develop and deploy on-line learning. Sally and Bonnie recently interviewed Applied Materials, Fujitsu, PeopleSoft, Sybase, Cisco, Xerox, Interwoven, BEA, Intel and Commerce One.

In additional to their presentation, Sally and Bonnie moderated a panel of representatives from Fujisu, Xerox, PeopleSoft, and Sybase. In contrast to the vendor-vision on display at Online Learning, these four companies were using bricolage. (Whoops, just Jay showing off. Bricolage means constructing something from whatever you have at hand, such as making a corkboard out of recycled wine corks.) The common theme: Make the most of what you have.

Bob Duplantier, Director of Employee Development, Fujitsu, first sounded the bricolage theme, saying "When you are working with rations, you use what is in place and adapt your learning around it."

Helene Waldman, Senior Director of Field Readiness at Sybase, described her no-budget approach to sales training. She has borrowed content from other departments and adapted it to her needs. Her sales training on a shoestring begins with web-delivered content, leads to a face-to-face workshop where an area manager drills in the message that "this product will make you money," and wraps up with conference calls, again with the area VP, who asks "What do you have to do to close?"

Bonnie Becker, former Director of eLearning for Commerce One, reported a dramatic increase in the number of courses being developed by subject matter experts, reducing or eliminating instructional design help. "Cut out the middle man," she advised. "You can do this without an LMS or other infrastructure."

Sally Crawford has seen cases where cutting out the middle man backfired. Without guidance, technical people are prone to load up on detailed content.

Chris Picket, Director of e-Learning Technologies, PeopleSoft University, described the quickened pace of new product introductions and the requirement to balance just-in-time with quality. These days, just-in-time wins. Don't dot the i's, just get it out there. PeopleSoft uses an incremental approach to new product training that parallels the steps of product development. Begin with white papers early on. Build on these to deliver online seminars. Go live. Provide classroom. Distribute an End User Training Kit. Here's the plan:

Xerox Internet Business Group's Tracy Mendez told us that the "lines between training, knowledge management and communications are blurring, but the desired result is intuitive access to what someone needs when they need it." Xerox saves $25 million a year using Eureka! (which we saw in our May 2001 session.) The system, now on the market as LinkLight, has cut service call time 5% and dramatically reduced costly machine swap-outs.

Everyone concluded that you can't expect eLearning to shoulder the entire load. Here are Sally and Bonnie's Top Five Tips.