After years of promise, can elearning finally deliver what it has been claiming for so long?

By Tim Buff, CM Group

With the current economic challenges, boardrooms across the country are re-examining their approach to many of their most basic business functions to make sure that they are staying competitive in a difficult climate. One key area is staff development. So, have the benefits of elearning, combined with the recent advances in technology and new innovative elearning products made its adoption within organisations a “no brainer”? To help answer this, we look at Orange Telecom’s recent experiences with elearning?

Most organisations recognise that having their staff well trained and always up to speed with company products, services, corporate policy and in some cases the ever-changing compliance and legislative environment is not a luxury, but is absolutely essential  to the success of their organisation and how well they are able to serve the customers that rely on them. But traditionally staff training and development is one of those optional spend areas that comes under the spotlight when belts need tightening. It’s a brave HR professional that stands their ground when under co-ordinated attack from both the CEO and Finance Director.

The challenge for successful HR functions is not only to find what combination of staff development approaches work the best, but also what provides their organisation with the best value for money solution. The latest technologies such as Luminosity from CM Group can increase the effectiveness of the training mix and at the same time actually reduce overall spend. In other words, it is not enough to be just driven by cost savings, companies need to know that they are selecting the best learning experience for their staff.

The advantages of elearning as part of a training strategy have long been recognized but are worth recapping:
•  Enables mass training over shorter time periods
•  Provides a  consistent delivery message and quality
•  Saves on skilled training delivery resources – instructors and facilities
•  Requires less time away from the job for attendees
•  Reduces/illuminates travel and subsistence expenses – lower carbon footprint!
•  Supports home workers who are often located remotely
•  Makes it easier to organize attendance and co-ordinate diaries
•  Simplifies tracking attendance and assessment results

With all these advantages, what has held organisations back in their adoption of elearning? The main problem seems to be that traditionally, it has taken a long time to develop elearning materials and therefore it has been costly to create. Additionally there has been the problem of keeping the courses up to date, which in the past has been expensive and, if created by a third-party, has sometimes put organisations at the mercy of their elearning suppliers, resulting in materials becoming out of date and losing relevance and credibility to the intended audience. And finally, it has just been plain hard work to create good, relevant, engaging elearning that provides a really satisfying learning experience. So, if these challenges have held back elearning in the past, what is so different now?

Orange’s experience
Orange is a telecoms company, but in many ways it is typical of lots of today’s people centred organisations. It needs to ensure that its workforce is well trained and equipped so that the organisation can succeed in a very competitive environment.

Orange is a large organisation with over 13,000 people employed across the country. It has five major offices, many smaller offices and 350 retail outlets. Orange is the number one UK mobile operator in terms of pay monthly revenue and has over a million broadband customers, making it one of the leading mobile operators in the country.

Against this background Karen Gusterson, Head of Managed Services at Orange, faced a particular set of problems that she wanted to tackle head on. Orange’s overall training and development strategy is based around providing the most suitable training possible for staff. But with the rapid rate of change in the organisation, keeping materials relevant and up to date is a headache. Karen wanted to focus training more tightly making it more applicable to individuals within the company.

Orange has used externally produced elearning for many years and has been only too aware of its historic limitations. Karen says “We always thought that there should be great opportunities for integrating elearning into our wider training strategies but felt that these were inherently limited due to cost, quality and timescale constraints. I wanted to find a solution that could cope with a range of requirements which included training for office personnel, technical staff and our sales teams. I wanted elearning for wide distribution training, but also to be flexible enough to become a much more focused tool within our overall training and staff development strategy.”

At the same time Karen was determined to achieve a solution that provided excellent value for money and a readily justifiable return on investment (ROI). What she came up with was a new product called Luminosity from British company CM Group. Karen explains, “Luminosity is a rapid elearning development platform that was quick and easy to use and designed for larger organisations which wanted to easily create their own elearning courses. We first got involved with CM during the Beta test phase of the product’s launch and were pleased with their flexibility and responsiveness….…..For us, an advantage to working with CM was that they produce elearning for some of the largest companies in the world and are experienced in all the pitfalls and best practices of developing and implementing effective elearning strategies. It’s good to deal with someone who has been there and done it and have been able to build that experience into their product.”

Since then Orange have been using Luminosity extensively to enable its own staff to collaborate and internally develop high quality, engaging elearning for a wide range of audiences. Karen has been impressed by the ease and speed of creating and then updating elearning courses and corporate communications.  Karen says, “Given the comparatively high cost of getting elearning developed externally, the ROI equation means that our investment in Luminosity will pay for itself in months rather than years and enable a better focused and more agile approach to training needs.”

Luminosity outputs materials to any SCORM compliant LMS, SharePoint portals or hand held gaming devices and can also deliver to mobile devices, an area of particular interest to Orange.
Karen knows that elearning doesn’t suit every learning style and she doesn’t want it to totally replace classroom based instructor lead training, but she does believe that it can provide a highly effective training solution when combined with more traditional training delivery methods and for certain key areas is the best route available. Orange will also be exploring the use of the platform for generating interactive corporate updates rather than relying on PowerPoint type communications.

Karen says “We’re now able to use elearning for areas where it just wasn’t practical before, for example training our sales staff on tariffs, products and offers where the details can change right up to the last minute before launch. Now we can easily guide staff through changes in processes, products and personnel, and keep materials up to date ourselves really easily.”
One of the attractive aspects of Luminosity is its ability to support mobile devices.

CM Group has recently completed a project writing multiple short training courses, for delivery to field sales staff of a large multinational both over the Web and via their Windows mobile phones. CM consultants designed the educational and technical solution to meet specific client objectives.  SCORM compliant courses were created using the Luminosity platform and then published to a number of sites for Web access. Field sales staff had the option to access the courses directly or via a SharePoint Web part added to their existing SharePoint portal. This SharePoint integration uses CM’s SharePoint Connector for Luminosity Content Server (CM’s Learning Management System). In parallel, the courses were automatically published out to mobile devices using Luminosity’s mobile publisher. The mobile publisher automatically renders content to make the best use of the limited screen area found on SmartPhones and PDAs.

CM’s Managing Director Tim Buff said “Because Luminosity is designed to support multiple output formats, the same courses can be developed quickly and easily and be delivered in a choice of ways. We have to get away from thinking eLearning is slow and cumbersome. With the latest technologies, eLearning can now be easily integrated into a wider training strategy and provides an agile, flexible and focused method of effectively addressing rapidly changing needs.”

Next steps for organisations interested in elearning
If the business advantages of elearning are clear, then the next step is to identify the learning technologies and tools that match an organisation’s specific requirements. 
These are some of the key features that the new breed of elearning authoring tools like Luminosity offer organisations. Whichever tools you decide upon make sure they provide you with the following:

• Ease of use: Authoring and management interfaces are graphical, Intuitive and simple to use. This is essential in order to allow your own staff to be productive from day one.
• Collaboration capability: This coordinates the activities of the people within the organisation that have the right set of skills to work on each stage of developing specific elearning courses. They can be subject matter experts, course designers, authors, editors, reviewers.
• Occasionally connected users:  Enables course authors to work when disconnected from any network, eg from home or on board a train. This means the ability to check-out and work on different courses or pages within an elearning project from anywhere over the corporate internal network or the Internet. Course developers must be able to continue to work offline on these pages if disconnected from the network.
• Automated workflow: this should be optional, so that if you want you can use the system to manage the flow of production.
• Ability for authors to work alone: Your teams may need the flexibility to author courses singly rather than in groups.
• Sharing learning and media assets: Make the most of your existing assets by making selected ones available for re-use to provide consistency (and reduce cost).
• Authoring templates: An extensive set of standard (and easily customizable) authoring template pages composed of text, images, media (video/audio), simulations and assessment elements allows authors to quickly create individual pages that comprise the elearning content.
• Course publishing style/customisation: This should be centrally controllable. For example you may wish to have total central control over the colours, fonts, logos, branding and legal notices. This means that the organisation can if it chooses mandate a specific output format and look and feel that all its courses fit into.
• Multiple delivery device support: The format for the platform the elearning course will be run on – for example web browser ((HTML or Silverlight), smart phone, PDAs or even hand held games consoles.
• SCORM compliance: Published courses that are SCORM compliant can be uploaded to the organisation’s Learning Management System (LMS). The LMS manages which students can use a course, records their progress within a course, and stores their course assessment results.

Every organisation, including the smaller ones, should be seriously re-evaluating their approach to harnessing elearning. It may not be the answer to all the staff training and development needs of today’s organisation, but with recent advances it finally looks set to take its rightful place as an essential and very cost effective component in the overall strategy.

Contact details:
Tim Buff, Managing Director
T: +44 (0)1454 269222
E: info@cm-group.co.uk
www.cm-luminosity.co.uk