• Top-down: If your management team is asking you to establish an e-learning program, then schedule a discussion to talk about why they want this type of program what they want it to accomplish. Ask them if there is a program that they would like you to use as a model and why they like that program.
  
• Bottom-up: If your management team is unaware of what an e-learning program can do for them, then you will need to show them programs like the one you're proposing and discuss with them how this might fit in with the organization’s strategic direction.  

Integrate management’s comments into the goals for your e-learning program. During meetings with your management team, make sure that they buy into the idea that your organization needs an e-learning program. Also ensure whether they understand that there will be some investment requirements, but that you believe that long-term the investments will pay off.

Now, you’re ready to draft the e-learning program’s goals. Ultimately, the goals of your program need to demonstrate the value of your e-learning program to your organization. For example, goals may include statements about revenue generation, cost savings, customer retention, or market penetration.

Elements of an e-learning strategy

Once you have a solid set of goals derived from all aspects of the organization, it’s time to start formulating your e-learning strategy. The elements of an e-learning strategy are technology, content, administration and support, communication, and financial analysis.

Technology

In general, there are two types of e-learning technologies used for delivering learning content: synchronous and asynchronous.

Asynchronous technologies involve having the learner control the time, place, and even the content that they view. Asynchronous technologies include web-based training courses and searchable databases, such as learning or knowledge portals, testing tools, and help systems.

And, yes, there is the LMS. Both asynchronous and synchronous learning programs can be managed by a learning management system; however, many learning management systems currently focus on one type of e-learning or the other. Often the synchronous or asynchronous tool that you choose may include an LMS as an add-on cost.

Also, synchronous and asynchronous technologies can be blended together to form blended solutions. Or they can be blended with classroom instruction to form another type of blended solution.

To determine the technology component of your e-learning strategy is a complex decision involving educational as well as technological factors. It's a good idea to involve your IT department in this process. If you plan to run your e-learning system internally, they may be the ones to run it and you want to make sure that you solicit their advice and get their buy-in on the tool that you choose. Over the years, I’ve seen IT department make and break e-learning programs. If you expect their participation and cooperation, be sure to make them your partner in the technology decision process.

To assist in the educational decisions, I’d recommend making a matrix like the one below to help you with a directional decision. For each requirement, think about whether an asynchronous or synchronous model would be a better solution. Remember that these two solutions are not exclusive, but can be blended together to form a comprehensive e-learning program.

Your e-learning strategy should make a statement about the technology that has been chosen to deliver the training, why that technology was chosen, and how that technology will help to achieve your e-learning goals. You also should include costs and time to implement the technology. And you must balance the cost statements by showing how the end results save money or generate revenue to cover the costs over a period of time.

Content

Content can come in multiple forms and from many different sources. In this section of the strategy, you need to define your content development and/or acquisition processes. This section of your strategy document needs answer the following questions:

• What content will you buy vs. build yourself?
• How you will prioritize and determine which e-learning courses get developed?
• Where are the sources of your content, such as subject matter experts (SMEs), existing courses and/or printed publications?
• At a high level, what processes will you use to take each type of source material and develop it into an interactive course? Your technology decision will greatly influence the authoring tools that your team uses to create courses. There may be several different processes depending upon the tools you choose, your audience’s needs and existing source materials.
• What are the roles and responsibilities of the team members. For example, will the SMEs develop and narrate a set of PowerPoint slides? Will you have an instructional designer work with a course author to develop an interactive simulation? Will you have a virtual instructor modify classroom materials for delivery in a virtual classroom? Will a project manager be assigned to each course to breakdown and assign the tasks to appropriate team members and contractors? These are a few of the virtually unlimited options for course development. You may choose several methods or a combination of methods to achieve your timelines and quality standards. 

Your development processes should include methods for evaluating your success, including surveys and assessments. These evaluations should drive a feedback loop, so that you can continually improve your e-learning program.

Stop for a moment and consider that you may now be running your training course simultaneously around the world on various computer configurations. When someone wants to take a course, they need to receive a user ID and password. When someone can’t get into a course, someone needs to help that person troubleshoot their access problem. When learners have questions about content, they need to feel that they receive adequate answers. Part of your e-learning strategy is to determine how you will assign, track, manage, support, and report on your training course usage.  

This part of the strategy may include the following types of requirements:

• a learning system administrator who has strong administrative skills and solid computer skills. He or she may assign user IDs and passwords, load courses into the LMS, review learner progress and send reminder emails, and generate learning usage and progress reports.
  
• an e-learning technical support specialist who has strong technology and problem-solving skills, as well as understands the LMS and the course development technologies. He or she may answer calls and emails from learners. Sometimes your technology vendors will provide this support function as part of their contract, or they may act as second level support, picking-up the problems that your support specialist can’t support. The bottom line is that technical support for your learners needs to be included in the discussions with potential technology vendors. 

If you work in a smaller organization you may have one person performing all of these administration and support functions, as well as developing and delivering courses. Your strategy needs to make sure that these functions are assigned to existing or new personnel. Their workload and effectiveness needs to be monitored regularly to ensure that you continue to satisfy your learners.

Communication

Once you have your courses online, you will want many learners to take them. Guess what? This doesn’t happen simply because you decided to put the courses online. There are two factors to consider when communicating your e-learning strategy to your learners: change management and marketing communications.

In addition, you may have the best e-learning courses in the world, but if no one knows about them or understands why they are the best, you won’t succeed. So, you’re e-learning strategy needs to include a way to get the word out to your potential learners that these courses are available and would be of benefit to them. I’ve seen this done a variety of ways, from roadshows to tabletop displays and email blasts to colorful brochures. Your marketing department can be a great resource during this process.

Financial analysis

The return-on-investment will be the most important factor in determining whether your e-learning program receives the investment it needs to succeed and grow. Your financial analysis should include

• costs for technology, authoring tools, course development, support, and administration
• suggested course prices should be multiplied by expected purchases to provide revenue expectations on a quarterly basis
• calculations for how long it will take for you to break-even and the yearly return on investment after you’ve recovered your costs. 

Your accounting department should be able to help you by telling you how expenses and revenues are amortized in your organization, and they can provide advice about how to calculate and explain your numbers.

The financial analysis combined with the evaluation process should provide a method for you to use to evaluate whether the e-learning program is meeting its goals over the coming years. 

Final word of advice

The purpose of this article is to give you a framework, or outline, for your e-learning strategy. As you write your own strategy, I recommend that you further research decision factors for each strategy element or hire a professional e-learning consultant to guide you through these business critical decisions. By ensuring that your strategy has all of these elements, you will be well on your way to implementing a successful, high quality, and profitable e-learning program for your organization.

One gap arises from the passive training approach taken by current-generation capabilities. Whereas today’s online classrooms focus on “learning by viewing,” next-generation live learning focuses on “learning by doing.” By actively engaging in course activities throughout the session, learners experience a heightened sense of fulfillment with next-generation learning systems. Instructors benefit, too, by being able to engage learners in more interactive, dynamic sessions.

Today’s online classrooms also impose a limited, one-to-many mode of delivering training (one instructor to many learners), where the role of the instructor is rigidly assigned to a single individual. Next-generation live learning systems provide a many-to-many mode of delivering training, where possibly many instructors instruct many learners and where roles can be changed dynamically. This mimics a common classroom circumstance where one or more students change roles and become instructors in order to convey information to the class, such as a summary of their breakout session.

Let us examine how the next generation of live learning may create a multi-way, active, dynamic, “learning by doing” environment with more emphasis on the learners and learning process.

The Next Generation of Live Learning
There is one simple formula in the next generation of live learning: the learner. What will a learner do in the online classroom? How will the learner proactively participate? How will the learner react? How will the learner stay engaged? How will the learner get a hands-on experience and really learn by doing, by interacting and even by role-playing? How will the learner communicate with fellow learners? How will the learner communicate with the instructor? Above all, how well will the learners learn in the online classroom so that they will excel and even look forward to their next live learning session? And finally, can the learning continue beyond the live learning?

The next generation of live learning should focus on the learner. Very simply, the goal of next-generation live learning is to create the most compelling experience for the learner. And if the learners are enjoying the experience and learning, so will the instructors.

Keep It Simple
It is very easy for a vendor to get caught up in the competitive-features game and add lots of bells and whistles to its online classroom offerings. What the vendor ends up with is a system that is utterly complex for instructors to comprehend and worse yet, downright scary for learners. Very soon the vendors will have to offer courses for instructors, and maybe even for learners, so they can learn the online classroom solution. It kind of defeats the purpose if instructors and learners need to be trained to use the online classroom.

The next-generation online classroom should strive to keep things as simple as possible for the learners. If the designers make the base assumption that these learners have never participated in a live learning session and are averse to technology, perhaps they can come up with a system that anyone can understand intuitively and use. This is not to say that the more advanced learner cannot use the additional powers of the classroom and maximize their learning experience through personalized interfaces, but that for the layman, the classroom should be as simple as using an Internet browser.

How do you simplify the experience? Talk to learners of all types and experience. They will tell you that what really matters is that they can see what the instructor is doing and that they can ask a question when needed. Everything else is overload. Vendors need to break away from their original designs and design something really simple for the learners. Of course, the instructors can have all the functionality they need to deliver a compelling classroom, but for the learners, the more the technology stays behind the curtain, the better it gets.

Learning by Doing
Learning must engage the learners and make them participate. How do you really do this? By adding functionality that matters to the learner and by adding lots of hands-on learning tools. For instance, if the instructor is going to train the learners on how to use a software application, the next-generation classroom must contain hands-on labs that allow the learners to train on these applications on their own. Of course, this should be accomplished in a very simple way. At the flip of a switch, the learners can be dropped into a hands-on environment where they can begin working on the software applications as if they were launched from their own computer. The instructors can look over the learners’ shoulders and jump into any of these hands-on sessions. The classroom vendors can expand this hands-on learning experience further by providing split-screen training, where the computer screen gets divided in half or with tabs. On one side the learner is seeing what the instructor is doing, on the other side, the learner is working on the application in parallel. This is the truest form of hands-on learning. If the learners are able to complete this kind of live hands-on exercise on their own, the need for a test or poll to test their knowledge is suddenly overrated. Another example is learning by role-playing. The next-generation system can provide an environment where the learner is asked to go through several what-if scenarios as if they were actually in the middle of the real-world business. Perhaps a co-instructor can also guide them through this role-playing exercise. Again, the learner is in control and engaged. Finally, the inclusion of scenario-based gaming and simulations can add a new dimension to hands-on learning. Gaming stimulates the learner’s interest and creates a challenging situation. In each of these activities, the learner is truly engaged. The learner is learning by doing.

Breakouts Made Simple
The goals of next-generation live learning include keeping the learners engaged and keeping it simple. Breakouts add a real value to an online classroom, but you must keep it simple. The trick is to not change the current interface and take them to a new place and bring them back—the trick is to keep them here. Breakouts should happen within the main session, as opposed to outside. This means that at the flip of a switch, the main session gets transposed into smaller breakouts with various members. Learners still have access to the main session by simply going one level up (as if browsing a file directory). This way, learners stay within the familiar confines of the simple interface they are used to, and breakouts really become extensions of the main session. And as for voice, again, it is simply controlled automatically as you move from main session to breakout session and back. The learners do not need to do anything to turn things on or off to participate in the breakouts. Everything flows automatically. On the instructors’ interface, they can simply jump from breakout to breakout or get a bird’s-eye view of each breakout from their vantage point. Also, if your session has co-instructors, they can manage the breakouts and serve as group leaders or group helpers. Finally, learners can interact with other learners in these breakouts in a simple yet effective manner and bring back the complete tasks or exercises to the main session.

The Power of Rich Media
Whereas today’s online classrooms work reasonably well with static documents, instructors and learners are looking at ways to deliver dynamic, interactive, rich media. How can instructors weave rich media into their lesson plans? A rich-media experience, where the instructor can deliver learning objects via Flash, 3-D, streaming audio and video, recordings, videotapes, DVDs, etc., adds a new dimension of learning. Rich media allows for delivering compelling visuals, simulations, dynamic content and more. This creates an engaging experience for the learners. The learners are no longer staring at static slides and hearing the instructor read them over. They are now engaged in a multimedia, audio-video, theater-style drama that is very hard to resist. Net result: Learners are engaged, with higher retention of materials and an improved learning experience.

The Power of Many
We have heard of co-instructors, co-trainers, panelists, assistants, subject-matter experts, moderators and more. In a face-to-face classroom these helpers often take on the more mundane tasks of answering particular questions, administering tests, providing grades and assisting in breakout sessions and even take on the onus of managing the operational environment of the classroom. Welcome to the world of online classrooms.

Many solutions in the marketplace today provide such helper roles. What the instructor or training coordinator is missing is the definition of this role of helper based on the type of classroom. For instance, for a fully hands-on classroom focused on lots of interactivity and hands-on exercises, the helper roles could be similar to the main instructor, where they have equal authority in driving the hands-on and breakout sessions. For a less intense classroom for delivering simple presentations and a bit of testing, the helper role could be to just switch the slides and conduct the tests.

Going one step further, the next-generation classroom should provide roles for group leaders among learners who can manage breakouts or hands-on exercises, even group dialogue and Q&A. At the end of the session, the group leader can present the findings. In essence, the next-generation classroom should provide flexibility in creating custom helper roles based on the type of classroom. Ultimately, the power of many instructors or leaders helping during the live classroom has a positive impact on the learning.

Intelligent Classroom
In a face-to-face classroom, since the instructor can see the learners and has eye contact, the instructor has a good sense of the overall learning experience. But how do you do this in an online classroom? How do you really get a sense of how engaged and active the learners are?

The next-generation online classroom needs to build intelligence about the learner, for instance, through automatic real-time tracking of learner activity, such as mouse strokes, keystrokes, use of raise-hand and feedback tools, questions, interaction in breakouts, tests and polls, hands-on exercises and more. Now the instructor can simply click on a learner’s name and get a real-time score of how engaged and active the learner is. If the learner’s score is high, that’s a great sign. If not, perhaps the instructor or the classroom needs to routinely solicit feedback from this learner and get him to participate. If the overall score of the entire classroom of learners is low, perhaps there is something wrong in the way the instructor is teaching. This could signal the instructor to change pace, bring in more engaging content or perhaps even overhaul the entire lesson plan. In the same manner, the classroom can do real-time tracking of the instructor’s activity level. Again, this is valuable information that can help the instructors dynamically change their delivery of training or drive their own self-learning and development.

Besides measuring real-time activity levels, the next generation of live learning can also add contextual tools that allow learners to cross-reference topics and text with industry-specific data and intelligence. For instance, if the instructor is talking about HIPAA compliance, the learner can simply click on the words and get a small summary of what HIPAA compliance means in real time. Building intelligent tools in the classroom allows for real-time tracking and analysis of the effectiveness of the learning.

Continuous Learning
Today’s classrooms are session-based. Learners show up on the day of the session, attend, learn and leave. When the class is over, learning is over. However, customers’ view of learning is continuous. Learning does not end when the class ends. Also, many classrooms are not just single-session classes—they are spread out over the course of many sessions or recur in certain patterns. There is also the element of pre-session learning and post-session follow-up and collaboration.

The next generation of live learning should effectively build itself into the continuous learning cycle. The classroom should provide persistence that allows learners and instructors to go back and retrieve contents of the classroom as well as to use it as a platform for exchanging ideas and notes before and after the class. For instance, imagine the learner had a question for the instructor or co-instructor after the class. Since the classroom is persistent, the learner could simply go back to the class, look at the notes, recording, Q&A, etc., and if the question is still not answered, pose the question to the instructor in the classroom. When the instructor receives this question, she can automatically reply to the learner as well as add the answer to the classroom. The learner can also pose the question to fellow learners and perhaps receive an answer from them. If the class is a multiple-session course, this persistence allows for class to begin exactly where it was left off, and even allows for the learners to look ahead and preview what’s coming.

The ability to record your classroom, break it down into knowledge nuggets and have it available for on-demand learning is also huge. The environment should provide a simple way to record a live classroom and repurpose it on the fly into vignettes that learners can use anytime, anywhere. The next-generation classroom goes beyond the session—both in the past and into the future. This type of classroom can tremendously improve the learning experience and the critical knowledge base of your training.

(Article also available at www.clomedia.com)

Technology has changed our lives giving us the freedom to conduct these activities from the comfort of our homes

When I look around today at the conveniences produced by information and communication technology, I often pause to reflect on past decades when we didn�t have any of this. How did we ever get anything done? A document that now takes a few seconds to attach and send by email took several days by regular mail not to mention that you had to address the envelope, put a stamp on it, and deliver it to the nearest post office. As for banking, you were required to adhere to the hours of the local bank when you wished to deposit your paycheque, pay bills, or withdraw funds; thank goodness for direct deposits, preauthorized payments, and automated tellers! Technology has certainly changed our lives by giving us the freedom to conduct these activities from the comfort of our home and at any time we choose.

This same technology is now providing more choice when it comes to education. It is no longer necessary to attend lessons in a classroom in order to further our learning. The widespread use of the Internet has globalized education and enabled educational institutions to be able to offer courses to students anywhere in the world. E-learning has changed the way that courses can be taught and distance education has removed the traditional barriers of higher education. Since I have always been fascinated by computer technology and keen to try the latest trends,

As a computer technology developer, the resources that I needed were readily available in the classroom including access to the Internet. In the earlier stages, students were taught how to use the Web to access and gather information, and to use email for communications and to send and receive assignments. Then some of my colleagues began to set up websites for their students to access and I was just starting to entertain the idea when along came WebCT (www.webct.com) it is a much more user friendly e-learning tool that could accomplish the same task, and I didn;t need to spend hours deciphering HTML code to set it up;, the software helps instructors and students have an integrated teaching and learning experience and thousands of colleges and universities in more than 70 countries worldwide are now employing it. WebCT allows instructors to easily engage with students, manage their assignment and assessment submissions, and evaluate their performance. Another popular e-learning program is called Blackboard (www.blackboard.com). Blackboard Inc., a Washington, D.C. based company, offers a complete suite of enterprise software products and services that power e-Education

In the first couple of years after WebCT was introduced, only a handful of instructors at my college utilized it but gradually more faculty became interested, especially when textbook publishers began to offer software that integrated with WebCT and included on-line tests, assignments, and grading. Students can access the material from any computer system with Internet access but the instructor can control how much they can see at any given point in time. What more could you ask for? Most Universities in the world  has chosen to use WebCT as a communication tool for their students; this way students have a common resource that they can utilize from anywhere and individual instructors can also use it as a delivery tool for their courses.

At the same time that I was experimenting with different forms of e-learning, I also began to take notice of distance education. This was an electronic version of traditional correspondence courses and certainly an innovative departure from conventional learning. The introduction of this Web-based resource opened the door to higher education for many individuals who lack the resources to do it any other way. It allows individuals like myself to gain a degree while still working full-time, it allows stay-at-home mothers to earn their credentials while raising their children; it allows people to study without leaving home. But is distance education being taken seriously by major educational institutions? Just take a cruise on the Web and it won’t take long to realize that most post-secondary establishments around the world have adopted this technology and are competing with each other for the global student market. While some institutes offer distance education as an option to their regular classes, there are others such as Athabasca University where the majority of the students study remotely. As technology advances, they are able to offer students more options such as video and web conferencing, and discussion forums and live chat. Many e-learning tools are also integrated into the course delivery in order to provide as many educational resources as possible for the distance learner.

If information technology continues to impact education at the same rate that it has in the past ten years, I can�t wait to see what will happen in the next decade. Perhaps distance ed and e-learning will become the standard and traditional teaching methods will become as old fashioned as it is a snail mail. It only time will tell.

Picture an all-too-familiar training classroom scenario.

An employee walks into a training room and is greeted by a trainer. He sits back, relaxes and appears to listen to the trainer drone on about the subject matter. Then the lights dim. He is barraged by a multitude of boring PowerPoint slides; maybe he takes some notes.

He starts to drift. His mind wanders to the multitude of messages in his inbox waiting for a reply. He snaps out of it briefly as the trainer engages a nearby participant in a question-and-answer exchange and possibly even a discussion. But the instructor continues to drone on and he drifts again.

At some point he may complete some questions either verbally or on paper. He might even be asked to perform a task or procedure. At the end of the session, he walks away with some printed material that the trainer says is already out of date. He might even receive the phone number of the trainer for further questions, but he is pretty much on his own.

The assumption has been that face-to-face training -- with a human being actually providing the training -- leads to greater interaction than computer-based training, and as a result, leads to greater success. But that assumption is not based on fact. True e-learning provides many, if not more, opportunities for interaction than instructor-led training.

From a conceptual perspective, e-learning is a holistic view of training and performance support embedded in the actual work environment. Designing effective e-learning tools requires stepping back and evaluating what support the learner needs before, during and after the point of need. The resulting e-learning solution can include many of the traditional attributes of training and performance support as well as several new components enabled by technology.

E-LEARNING INTERACTION

The following depicts a blended e-learning scenario that includes a high degree of interaction:

To begin his learning experience, the employee logs onto a self-paced Web-based-training program to familiarize himself with basic concepts. The WBT interface is intuitive. The content is presented in modularized segments that are easy to absorb, and there are plenty of engaging interactions requiring the employee's input.

The employee receives effective feedback immediately and is given the opportunity to go back and review material if necessary. If he has a question, he can browse the "frequently asked questions," explore the more detailed online support or click a link to initiate a live chat with an expert.

Deepening his knowledge, the employee participates in a real-time learning experience where he, other participants and an instructor are all interacting in a live training session over the Internet. The instructor presents information using a live video feed, video clips, animations, diagrams and slides.

The employee clicks a link that tells the instructor he has a question. There is an online whiteboard where he takes control and makes annotations to the diagram that is presented. The instructor lets another participant answer the question while all participants observe. The employee wants more information, but chooses to ask that participant to join him later in a private off-line discussion.

Then the instructor posts a series of review questions for all participants to answer. The instructor notices that several participants did not correctly answer the questions. He therefore reviews some of the material and posts more questions to measure retention. When complete, the tabulated scores are posted for all to see and a discussion begins. This pattern of interaction is repeated several times until the entire session is complete.

After the session, the employee has a question, so he posts it in the threaded discussion for the instructor and other participants to respond. He also has access to an extensive knowledge base that is continually updated. If he is still at a loss, he can request a live chat with an expert to get resolution.

AN ACTIVE ROLE

As can be seen, e-learning doesn't prevent interaction from taking place. In fact, e-learning can actually increase interaction as it shifts the participant from a passive learning role to an active learning role. It also provides both the participant and the instructor with tools to measure real-time retention of information and allows for corrective measures to be made accordingly. E-learning can even include scheduled or randomized post-training assessments to measure the retention of information over time.

At its best, e-learning is more than just interactive. It is collaborative. The participant is connected to learning peers through the virtual learning community. He also has access to mentors, experts, colleagues and professional peers, both inside and outside his organization for problem solving and decision-making.

By taking a holistic approach, a company can arrive at a training process that is more engaging and effective than traditional face-to-face learning at an economical cost. With the focus on the participant, e-learning can ensure employees fully master the training content, ultimately leading to greater job performance and a stronger bottom line.