Over the next few years, the term e-learning will take on new meaning, says Tom Kelly, vice president, Internet Learning Systems Group, for San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems. Perhaps, the term itself will even go away. Training magazine recently had the chance to sit down with Kelly and talk about the future of e-learning. Here are a few highlights from our conversation.
E-learning is not just e-training. “Most people still try to solve training problems with e-learning. They focus too strongly on training metrics. Between 50 and 70 percent of what is learned on the job is unstructured, through informal contact and content–at Cisco, less than 20 percent of e-learning strategy is about training. It is information, communication, collaboration and then training. Today’s workers constantly need new information. Online systems should allow them to jump straight to the source and, technically speaking, that’s not training. People should be able to access information when they need it and learn what they require in 20 minutes or less.”
Centralized deployment; decentralized development. “If e-learning efforts center too closely on IT, students will wander off and the department will lose the ability to leverage contact with everyone. At Cisco, the Learning Systems Group’s goal is not to create content for every department, but to keep 35,000 employees guided toward convergence. We don’t want to rule the world from a content perspective. We don’t know it all, and we don’t pretend that we do. We just leverage it.”
It’s not just about cutting fixed expenses. “It’s about measuring positive business impact which can be difficult when all of the required corporate data to do so is unavailable. Five years ago, Cisco operated six LMS systems, none of which were hooked up to HR. There is a huge increase in the companies building tools to help deploy these systems to measure ROI.”
If you build it … who cares? “IT is your best friend, but don’t ignore marketing. People must know about what you are doing in your training departments and how it will benefit them. Get marketing involved–both externally and internally. At Cisco, between one-third and half of all marketing efforts focus on internal marketing.”
E-reading is basically sleeping. “To be effective, e-learning programs must fully use the technology. It is a bit of a myth that video programs can overwhelm a company’s internal bandwidth; video itself actually requires a small pipeline. What absorbs much of a company’s system is video-on-demand, which is much different than live streaming video sessions that reach everyone at the same time. At Cisco, 185 separate content servers, which are ‘LAN-locked’ house much of the video-on-demand programs. So the video-on-demand never hits the live network. But of course, if you don’t have the bandwidth, we are willing to sell you some.”