Blueprint for an enterprise e-learning architecture

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Oct 2002 by Crowley, Rick

esales-service.com

At the end of the 20th century, the first wave of Internet applications forever transformed the way the world conducts business. E-- commerce revolutionized the way companies sold their products and services and the way they managed their supply chains. Customer support via the Internet changed the way businesses addressed customer needs and concerns, and Web-based, employee self-services empowered workers to access and seek information once limited to a select few. For the early adopters, these applications garnered huge productivity gains and cost savings, while increasing customer satisfaction, accelerating time to market, and providing competitive agility.

Many businesses today are implementing e-business models, hoping to replicate these business benefits to maintain their competitiveness. As companies rethink almost every aspect of the way their employees work, e-learning holds the potential of becoming the most widely used application in the enterprise. In this era of rapid change, employees around the world are expected to regularly assimilate vast amounts of new product, market and competitive information to compete effectively. Traditional instructor-led training cannot scale to meet these new learning challenges. E-learning, defined as Internet-enabled or Internet-- enhanced learning, provides the tools to help companies tackle these learning challenges and make continual, lifelong learning a reality.

The Evolving Vision Of E-Learning

E-learning is evolving quickly. In its earliest stages, thousands of static pages of content were posted on the Web. It then became a quick and easy way to deliver instructions or learning modules to many people around the clock. The vision for e-- learning going forward builds on this concept by continually imparting new bits of knowledge to thousands of people globally, in a variety of media, from many different subject matter experts. Employees will be able to choose when, where, how and how much they are ready to undertake in three-- to five-minute learning increments as part of their workday.

Searching for these nuggets of knowledge will be easy, because each will be a self-contained, tagged object. These learning objects will be targeted to learners when they need them and only to those who need them. Practice exercises after each one will reinforce the learning. Completing these short learning sessions will become as natural as checking e-mail from work, home or on the road. Combining a number of these knowledge increments will result in a 30-minute lesson. Pre-assessments can identify the gap between what learners already know and what they need to know to effectively do their jobs. Post-assessment confirms if they retained the knowledge.

Along individualized learning roadmaps, employees and their managers will be able to track learning progress based upon business objectives. Learners and providers alike will be held accountable for their roles in the learning process. In short, e-learning is moving from a content-centric model to a personalized, "learner-centric" model that touches everyone associated with the enterprise, including partners and customers.

E-Learning Addresses Business Issues

E-learning is not simply "e-training." It is not merely about placing classes online to address training issues. E-learning encompasses training, education, information, communication, collaboration, knowledge management and performance management. It addresses business issues such as reducing costs, providing greater access to information and accountability for learning and increasing employee competence and competitive agility, E-learning is a critical element of any enterprise workforce optimization initiative.

Key E-Learning Stakeholders And Business Drivers

The key e-learning stakeholders can be divided into two broad categories - the consumers of e-learning and the providers of e-learning.

The consumers of e-learning are:

Learners seeking knowledge, whether they are internal employees of the corporation or customers, channel partners and supply chain vendors external to the enterprise, and

Managers responsible for guiding the learning and development of individuals and/or organizations.

The providers of e-learning are:

Content providers - instructors, subject matter experts (SMEs) and instructional designers - who perform a needs analysis to determine the learning objectives required to make a targeted audience competent in performing a task. This group also includes curriculum developers who look at job roles and tasks and then specifically define the competencies (skills, behaviors and knowledge) required to do them.

Administrators responsible for managing catalog items, schedules, resources (classrooms, instructors, equipment), lab time and pricing. They may also identify generic curricula for an organization and register content in the content management system.

The Key Business Drivers

Before beginning to build an architecture, it is important to understand the business needs that can be addressed with an e-learning solution: cost, access, modularity, timeliness, relevance and accountability. It's also worthy to acknowledge that the various stakeholders view the key business drivers from very different perspectives. While e-- learning offers many new opportunities for learners and their managers, it is up to the e-- learning content providers and administrators to tackle some of the challenges associated with this new vehicle to make e-learning a viable solution within their companies.