School’s out

For years, businesses have used old-fashioned methods of chalk and talk to train employees. But we are witnessing a training revolution. As Donald Clark, former chief executive (CEO) of e-learning company Epic and now an independent industry adviser, says: ‘There has been more change in learning in the past six years than in the previous 600 years.’

The arrival of the internet and, more recently, Web 2.0 technologies has given organisations the ability to deliver a substantial chunk of their training online. The advantages are obvious: online training is vastly cheaper and more efficient than classroom-based training, as Xerox’s experience testifies.

In 1999, Xerox launched Learning at Xerox, an e-learning portal that is now available to all the firm’s 50,000 global employees. The portal was put to the test early on when the company decided to train all its employees to yellow-belt standard in Lean Six Sigma methodology – a basic level that allows staff to participate in but not to lead core processes.

Darrell Minards, Xerox’s head of education and learning, says it would have been a huge challenge to carry out the training by conventional means.

‘If you do it face-to-face, you have all the problems of training up lots of trainers, and scheduling lots of people and taking them out of their workplace at a time which is possibly not convenient,’ he says.

All the yellow-belt training, however, was carried out online using interactive training materials. It used simulations, and combinations of video, audio and read materials that the delegate could do at their own pace and in their own time.

Initially, says Minards, there was some resistance from employees to the idea of online training. But as they become more used to using the internet at home, that resistance disappeared.

As Charles Abrams, research director at Gartner Intelligence, points out, young people who regularly use MySpace and YouTube come to the workplace expecting to use similar kinds of web-based technologies there.

Xerox now has 50,000 online courses available to its staff, provided in conjunction with e-learning specialist SkillSoft. It uses a wealth of different technologies, including virtual classrooms – where students and trainers gather in an online space – podcasting, videocasting and video streaming, as well as more conventional methods of delivering information online. The company still uses classroom-based training, but in conjunction with a range of electronic methods.

The shift towards training online has meant not just savings in cost and efficiency, but a change in the nature of learning itself.

In particular, the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, such as blogs and wikis, has resulted in learners taking a more active approach to their own learning.

‘Training used to be one way, but this medium is two ways,’ says Clark. ‘The very fact that it is a two-way dialogue, which is what learning is really about, is what makes it different.’

In classroom-based training, says Clark, the trainer stands at the front of the classroom delivering information to the students. There may be some element of collaboration, in the form of break-out groups, but essentially the trainer is in charge. With the new technologies, students take control of their own learning.

Even an apparently simple technology such as podcasting is proving revolutionary, says Clark, because learners can choose to listen to information in bite-sized chunks – most people are unable to take in information for more than 10 minutes at a time, he says, making the traditional hour-long classroom lesson an expensive waste of time.

One of the best examples of how these technologies can be used in practice is Doctors.net.uk, a web portal that allows doctors throughout the UK to collaborate with each other, receive training and share knowledge.

Founded by former doctor Neil Bacon in 1998, the portal now has 137,000 members – 95 per cent of the UK’s doctors.

The service has a number of uses. GPs can, for example, post details and photographs of difficult cases online, and within minutes other doctors will respond with suggestions and comments about similar cases. This can save the GP from having to refer the patient to a hospital for a second opinion.

The portal is also used by outside organisations such as hospitals and government agencies to deliver training quickly and effectively.

The Health Protection Agency, for example, took only three months to train 23,000 GPs on how to deal with an outbreak of pandemic flu. Bacon says the online training, in which doctors are expected to make diagnoses and suggest treatments for case histories, has also been proved to be more effective than the traditional method of sending doctors printed material in the post.

Doctors.net.uk also has a wiki functionality, which GPs are using collaboratively to create a vast resource of up-to-date medical information. Any mistakes can be corrected quickly, and new information is added as soon as it becomes available. As Bacon says: ‘It is not top-down, it is grass roots up – any doctor can write any education module they like.’

The great advantage of the web is that it is hugely democratising. Sarah Burnett, senior research analyst at Butler Group, says users can go straight to subject matter experts to find out the answer to a question. The interaction can also work the other way round: print company Polestar is using the web to provide educational materials about the print industry to school students.

The initiative started two years ago as a way of improving recruitment to the print industry, says Darrin Stevens, group training director at Polestar. The company had found that young people tended not to consider print as a career, and knew little about it.

The web site created by Polestar, www.printdynamics.co.uk, was launched to 15,000 schools and now has 20,000 individually registered users.

It contains a vast array of resources, including teaching materials that can be used with interactive whiteboards and a large photographic library.

The result has been impressive. Three years ago it found it hard to attract apprentices: now it has 30 applications for every apprenticeship advertised.

Some companies, meanwhile, are starting to adopt games as a way of training their employees, marking a complete departure from the old classroom-based methods of teaching.

‘Games motivate people in a way that hardly any other medium does,’ says Clark. They can be most useful in simulation – the military uses games for flight simulations, for example, or for training soldiers to man checkpoints in Iraq, while the NHS has used games to teach staff how to deal with aggressive patients in Accident & Emergency.

Cisco uses games to train employees in technical skills: employees still attend courses, and play the games in their own time. The games are designed to be as engaging as possible: one, for example, asks the gamer to imagine being on a spaceship that has just welcomed aboard a new alien race. It is the employee’s job to configure a series of wireless networks by installing access points, adjusting antennas and setting security so that the aliens can communicate wirelessly with the crew.

Jerry Bush, programs manager at Cisco, says that feedback from employees has been extremely positive, with staff often playing the games just for the fun of it.

It is clear that the potential for changing the training landscape is enormous. We may not have seen the end of the classroom yet, but its use in future will surely be limited to very particular requirements. The case for e-learning technologies is simply too compelling.

What do you think? Email: feedback@computing.co.uk

What the experts say

You need to make sure not only that your knowledge workers are up-to-date and using these new types of collaborative software, but that you have the right community empowerment within your organisation so you can create the right knowledge you need quickly, and disseminate it and find the right markets for it.

Charles Abrams, research director, Gartner Intelligence

A lot of businesses need to learn to join up their thinking with other agencies. Schools are only one of them; further education is another. We have to have this collaboration where learning goes through from the start to the end of their careers.

Darrin Stevens, group training director, Polestar

A partner had been at a high-powered presentation by a leading industry figure and posted something about it as soon as they came back to the office. Without the blog, it would have waited for a formal email or team meeting several days later.

Ruth Ward, head of knowledge systems and development, Allen & Overy

After the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the Health Protection Agency asked us to deliver training for doctors on the recognition, diagnosis and management of radiation poisoning. The great advantage of doing it online is they asked us on a Monday, and by Friday, the module had been written, peer-reviewed and launched.

Neil Bacon, founder, Doctors.net.uk

Unless we exchange information with our colleagues on a regular basis, we keep information in our heads, and that gives rise to experts who won’t tell anybody anything. As a way of mining knowledge and sharing information, these Web 2.0 technologies will prove their worth.

Sarah Burnett, senior research analyst, Butler Group

The real advantage the web has over traditional methods is that you can evaluate how every single individual is doing. So when someone is learning about a new product online, we get very accurate data on the knowledge passed to them.

Darrell Minards, head of education and learning, Xerox