What's best about online learning

Internet Strategies for Education Markets: The Heller Report, Sept, 2001

The 2001 B-learning User Survey conducted by e-learning magazine (Santa Ana, CA, www.elearningmag.com) shows that "anytime, anywhere" is most widely identified as a primary benefit to online learning. The survey allowed multiple primary benefits to be selected. Overall, 79% of respondents identified "anytime, anywhere," 59% pointed to "cost savings," and 59% to "self paced learning." Self paced learning was valued as highly as convenience by government and military users.

The survey included respondents from corporations and companies (53%), government and military (19%) and higher education (12%). That distribution weights overall responses in favor of corporate learning, but primary benefits were fairly consistent throughout the sectors.

Both government/military and higher education users identify cultural resistance as the major challenge to e-learning. Corporate users point to bandwidth.

Higher education is the most likely to develop content internally (65%, compared to 38% from government/military users and 33% from corporate users). Corporations most frequently combine migrating existing materials, developing new content internally, and working with external content developers.

All sectors deliver e-learning most commonly with HTML content via the Internet. Presentation software and HTML content via the intranet are neck in neck for a distant second. The intranet is more common for corporate learning, and presentation software is more common in the other two sectors.

Corporations and government/military identify "soft skills" as the courses most commonly taught, followed by application software skills. Higher education puts higher education at the top of the list, followed by software skills and applications.

All sectors measure the success of e-learning primarily through employee feedback. They also frequently track the number of employees who take advantage of online offerings.

E-learning decision makers in higher ed are, not surprisingly, different from decisions makers in other sectors. Both corporations and government/military identify corporate/senior management first, followed by human resource/training management, then IT/IS and finally a trainer. Senior management/administration tops the higher ed decision-maker list, followed by IT/IS, a faculty group, human resources/training management and finally, a trainer. Responses are similar for approval of purchasing e-learning content, technologies and services.