Constant variables

E.learning Age, Feb 2007 by Pester, Ben

Work from home? So why not train from home? But is there such a thing as flexible learning?

Flexible working. Everybody's talking about it; advances in handheld and broadband technology mean that now you can be in touch with the office and working wherever you are. But how about flexible learning? If the future really does involve making practical use of previously wasted time away from the office then eventually training will need to adapt to catch up. The good news is that it looks like there's plenty of opportunity to make this happen, when the time comes. A key issue for business is how to make the most of flexible learning for real competitive advantage rather than mere convenience.

Potential - what's on offer?

Flexible training is at a relatively experimental stage, to see how far it could be taken we can look to the academic world. Universities and colleges are aligning web 2.0 communication ideals with eleaming to create an almost virtual campus - with wikis, blogging, chat-rooms and collective research databases.

At the Open University Niall Sclater, Virtual Learning Environment Programme Director, is already calling its approach "e-learning 2.0". Sclater's team are currently "...developing Moodle (open source LMS) as a virtual learning environment to make much more Open University learning content available online. We're also making our communication more online too."

These objectives highlight the fact that if there is such a notion of flexible learning it is as much to do with communication as it is to do with availability of content. Having learning content available through the internet is of clear benefit in business as it has talent retention implications for employees working from home; on sabbatical or long-term leave.

Bill Perry of SumTotal, global enterprise LMS vendors, says that the concept of learning from home in a corporate context is already well established, if that's where people are working already: He says: "Companies often choose to train pharmaceutical or insurance sales forces from home. These sales people often see a steady stream of data and marketing on new products or services. To constantly rotate such groups through a central training facility would be costly and take time away from these teams' sales activities. Since many of these sales people work from their homes, it's efficient to provide training in a setting in which they normally work."

Or it can be used to bring people up to the same level for classroom-based training; Bill Perry again: "...employees can prepare for more advanced training courses by taking prerequisites at home, prior to the first day of class. This brings a classroom of employees up to a pre-determined baseline, which aids an instructor in moving a class through a prescribed curriculum."

Communication cycle

Looking at communication, there is an interesting cycle in development - many of the tools being incorporated to enable learning flexibly were developed with business communication in mind to start with. Now they will be used in the academic sector for learning and soon reinvented for learning in business.

Sclater says: "Aspects of the Open University innovations will be made available for handheld media, where appropriate. Users can give themselves quick tests online, or contribute data findings directly from the field - so people on a geography field trip, for example, can instantly send recordings or findings to a central database."

The benefit to the academic world here is that they can centralise the findings of thousands of students (provided they have a high enough subscription) using technology developed primarily to make communication more mobile, primarily for business advantage.

How can the business world reclaim their technology and apply it to their own learning needs? According to Graham Sherry, Director of Driven Systems, corporate LMS specialists, it's performance that matters. He says: "Potentially, using mobile ; connectivity to record training results from the field can be very helpful. Field sales on-the-job-training, for example, can be recorded instantly in terms of how much exposure a trainee received and the nature of the sale. It also empowers the trainer to rate a trainee's input based on an expected level of knowledge retention. It's always about getting the balance right though, performance can be negatively affected or measured badly if too much irrelevant information is recorded."

The shockwaves of any academic breakthroughs with mobile learning can be expected to be felt in the corporate sector, eventually. How much and how quickly will depend on the extent to which these innovations can solve real business problems.

The major difference between academia and business learning is that while the universities can build themselves purely around a hive of learning and collaboration, the corporate sector must seek solutions to business challenges. So while the advances made at Open University and the like can be looked upon as a general innovation, the same principles need only be applied in business if there is a distinct competitive reason to do so.