Your new career: e-learning process manager: carve a new role managing the many groups necessary fr successful e-learning

T+D, April, 2004 by Gonca Telli Yamamoto

Because e-learning necessitates working with many disciplines, it forms a new ground for training, requiring the cooperation of people with different capabilities and qualifications.

The work starts with creating the demand. To break any resistance, identify the organization's opinion leaders and set them into action to spread the word that e-learning is beneficial and necessary in a world transforming to an information society.

Those opinion leaders are called e-learning challengers, and their job is to be knowledgeable about e-learning and make others believe. To help pave the road to e-learning with the least resistance, e-learning balancers ensure that information and technology are provided in harmony. Challengers and balancers work in concert with the creative design team, who handle the technical aspects.

Acting as a separate research group, the e-learning market research team should be in contact with learners worldwide, any time--sending questions and discussing issues. The receivers of e-learning, the e-learning knowledge incomers, are in contact with the research group and the creative design team to help construct appropriate programs.

As manager, you provide technical, personal, and marketing solutions; a human relations approach; and an open mind to innovation and creativity.

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E-learning expands the limits of learning services. New careers requiring various capabilities are emerging as e-learning is becoming a major sector of the field. These new careers require marketing, organizational planning, and technical applications.

By now, we know with e-learning that instruction can occur without time, place, and space limitations to multiple individuals, groups, and organizations at almost any time and any location they desire. In organizations, e-learning is an agent that provides multimessaging in the work environment created by multi-users. E-learning is, thus, an integrator of work flow. But most e-learning entrepreneurs face the problem that, in their own words, "they don't know the e-learning business." E-learning technology, concepts, and terms are new and constantly evolving.

The virtual hub

Because e-learning is open to continuous interaction, it requires a marketing process that many training practitioners have not yet incorporated into their career skills set. The process considers the needs and requirements of the organization and the learners, in such terms as customer orientation and training purchases. Trainers have to "market" to executives the need and value of investing in often costly e-learning solutions (or demonstrate the cost-savings), as well as market to learners what may be to them a new way of learning.

Through research and work in their organizations, the training function can establish an e-learning center. These virtual hubs become the channel for delivering information to learners. It's crucial to select the appropriate training to meet individual and organizational learning needs and to constantly evaluate learners' experiences and the process as a whole.

The process

The process of e-learning is a series of operations that involve humans, computers, the Internet, and instructional material, and that produces the outputs to learners and the organization. The e-learning process should be evaluated as the activities, which create value, add various inputs to attain the aimed learning.

The e-learning process consists of the following inputs:

* information

* technical equipment

* a preparatory team

* teaching specialist(s)

* demand for learning.

Those are subject to various operations at certain times.

The outputs are the product or service, information or experience, that appears at the end of the operations.

Another process, the e-learning teaching process, comes on the scene. The e-learning teaching process can be detailed as

* forming the e-learning plan, basic programs, and learner data

* defining, stimulating, and attracting of the target audience

* putting e-learning into operation

* recording potential customers (learners) to the database

* starting the communication

* providing the e-learning program

* evaluating results of the training

* examining the learners

* identifying new needs.

A new career

Because e-learning necessitates working with many disciplines, it forms a new ground for training, requiring the cooperation of people with different capabilities and qualifications. The work starts with creating the demand. In order to break any resistance, identify the organization's opinion leaders and set them into action to spread the word that e-learning is beneficial and necessary in a world transforming to an information society.

It takes a group

E-learning challengers. Careers formed within the e-learning process are two-fold. One is directly as a deliverer of e-learning. Another involves planning, marketing, and organizing e-learning.

Groups are required to make e-learning more effective, to put forth its value to individuals for their personal development, and to influence opinion leaders. That group could be called the e-learning challengers. They should be people who are knowledgeable about e-learning and believe in its value. They will make others believe. The next step is preparing e-learning programs in accordance with the defined learning needs and desires.