The Cold, Hard Facts about Designing and Implementing E-Learning Architectures: It's Difficult, It's Complicated, and It's Necessary

Hear IT and Learning Architects from two thought-leading companies about how they are planning and implementing a comprehensive e-learning architecture. Presentations will include their visions, architectural building blocks and strucure, and roadmaps for implementing all components of an e-learning enterprise solution.

This just in: This is recommended reading before the meeting. We recommend reading it and coming prepared with questions so we can have more discussion and less presentation.

Description (from the speakers):

A Blueprint for an Enterprise E-Learning Architecture

In deploying an enterprise e-learning solution, technology alternatives are vast. To ensure a company-wide platform is developed, it is vital that business groups partner early and completely with IT management. Such a partnership is critical in implementing the heterogeneous technology solutions necessary to create a robust and scalable enterprise e-learning architecture. In this session, Rick Crowley will discuss how to model the e-learning applications platform, including a drill down to give a view of the underlying technologies that support the services model Cisco has deployed. He will also describe the anatomy of Cisco e-learning architecture and discuss the key business drivers for building an architecture.

• Understand the key business drivers for building an architecture.
• Explore an example of a workable model to begin building your own architecture.
• Receive a set of best practices and critical success factors for deploying an enterprise e-learning solution

Gerry Lang, Microsoft

Transitioning from Training to Rapid Performance Tuning

Microsoft is consolidating their fragmented learning landscape by building a common infrastructure. You'll hear about both the hurdles and best practices that are leading toward cost savings through a single learning infrastructure investment; consistent service offerings across the enterprise; faster deployment of new learning content and services; consistent, integrated reporting; and greater visibility to the skills base of Microsoft s workforce and partner base.

Presentations

Gerry Lang, Microsoft

Creating a common learning infrastructure (23 pages, 650Kb, PDF)

Rick Crowley, Cisco Systems

Cisco's e-Learning Architecture (25 pages, 1.9Mb, PDF)

Other readings

Cisco's Blueprint for Enterprise e-Learning [cisco.com] white paper