HOT NEWS IN THIS REPORT:

1. E-Learning Comes of Age
2. Firm Launches Alternate Domain Names
3. Trend: Peer-To-Peer Meets Wireless
4. Cool Tool Plus 32 Helps Evaluate Job Candidates

Executive Technology Briefing (ETB)
Editor/Publisher: Jordan Ayan
Contributing Editor: Chuck Frey

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E-LEARNING COMES OF AGE

Practically every company today has a growing need for training that can be updated quickly and accessed on demand - by employees, customers, dealers and other key audiences. Web-based training is quickly emerging as a strategic business tool that can help organizations address many key business issues, such as: frequent new product rollouts, rapid technology changes that require ongoing learning, and customers who want on-demand access to extensive product support information.

Although Web-based training has been around for several years, it is just now becoming practical, thanks to increasing bandwidth and improved training technology. According to International Data Corp., U.S. sales of e-learning technology will grow to $11.4 billion by 2003.

Web based training includes these models for delivering knowledge: * Videoconferenced, instructor-led classes, where students can interact with the teacher,
* Archived versions of Webcasts, which students can listen to after a session has taken place,
* Web-based, self-paced tutorials, and
* Web-based, instructor-led tutorials (where the instructor and students share a common learning space, but don't necessarily need to be online at the same time)

What makes e-learning attractive is that students do not need to be in the same place -- or even available at the same time -- to learn new skills and strategies. This makes it the perfect solution for companies that need to disseminate knowledge quickly and cost-effectively to people in multiple locations.

Web based training offers a number of compelling strategic benefits, including:

* Cost savings: Online courses often cost significantly less to deliver than instructor-led training. That's because it eliminates the travel costs of sending a trainer from one location to another, or sending multiple employees to a single training location. Because learners can access these courses from wherever they are, e-learning also minimizes lost employee productivity. IBM is one company that has made a major commitment to Web-based training. It now offers five times the training content it did prior to the advent of e-learning and one-third the cost, for an estimated savings of $200 million.
* Speed: E-learning can be disseminated across a large organization much faster than instructor-led, face-to-face training. This may be an advantage if your company is in a highly competitive, fast-changing market, where speed is a critical advantage.
* Smarter salespeople sell more: As product life cycles get shorter and shorter, salespeople must be knowledgeable about a dizzying array of new products. Many companies are aggressively embracing Web-based training to make sure their salespeople are as knowledgeable as possible, and therefore can sell more.
* Improved customer satisfaction: Providing up-to-date training for your front-line employees can help them to solve customer problems more effectively, leading to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.
* Reduced employee turnover: Providing your employees with expanded training and knowledge resources can help them to keep their skills up-to-date, which should increase your odds of retaining them. Much of today's knowledge work requires an increasing amount of "on demand" learning, a need which e-learning is well-suited to meet.

Applications of e-learning

E-learning is best suited to basic or supplementary training needs, such as:
* New employee orientation
* New product training
* Product service and repair training
* Remedial training (as a follow-up to classroom training)
* Situations where knowledge needs to be transferred to a large group of geographically dispersed people

Web-based training is poorly suited to training on sensitive issues, such as teaching managers how to communicate with their employees during a business downturn, or subjects that require extensive interaction between the instructor and students. Self-study courses offer little or no interaction with a live instructor, which is critical to some types of courses and subjects. But that is likely to change in the next few years, as e-learning technology providers develop ways to integrate these features into their course development and hosting tools.

E-learning technologies

E-learning courses can be produced using a number of different authoring tools, which vary in their capabilities and learning curve. Here are some of the more popular tools by training type:

Web conferencing tools These applications enable live, instructor-led training via the Internet, incorporating audio, video, presentation slides and other small group collaboration features. WebEx (http://www.webex.com) offers an excellent set of inexpensive collaborative tools. It is especially well-suited to small- to medium-sized audiences and point-to-point (2 locations) applications. Its cost is $0.15 per minute per user.

For larger audiences and multiple locations, MeetingCenter 2000 by Placeware (http://www.placeware.com) provides a full-featured learning environment that duplicates many aspects of its physical namesake -- including the ability to ask questions of the speaker and enter into a sub-conference with other learners in your "row."

Self-paced training tools These applications enable trainers to build self-study courses that incorporate text, images and animation. CourseBuilder, an extension for Macromedia's popular Dreamweaver Web design program (http://www.macromedia.com/coursebuilder), enables you to quickly and easily create test questions, to gauge how well your students have learned the course material. It's a free download for Dreamweaver users.

Macromedia Director (http://www.macromedia.com/director) is a popular high-end course development tool that enables authors to incorporate text, animations, video clips and other contents into highly polished presentations. But Director's high cost and learning curve make it suitable only for experienced designers. Macromedia Flash (http://www.macromedia.com/flash) and Adobe LiveMotion (http://www.adobe.com/livemotion) offer a lot of sophisticated animation capabilities, but aren't as focused on creating training presentations as Director is.

Streaming video training tools SeeItFirst.com (http://www.seeitfirst.com) offers streaming multimedia development and hosting services with a twist: The company has developed a way to visually index segments of the video to a visual table of contents, which makes it easy for a student viewing the program to jump to the video segments that are most relevant to him or her.

IBeam's (http://www.ibeam.com) WebCast technology enables corporate trainers to offer a window of streaming multimedia content, surrounded by other types of synchronized content (presentation slides, links to related Web sites, etc.), all in one tightly integrated interface. It also allows you to take older video training segments and wrap fresh content and knowledge around them, effectively extending the "shelf life" of these materials.

Integrated Web based training solutions Solutions like Macromedia Authorware (http://www.macromedia.com/authorware) and Mentergy's family of e-learning tools (http://www.mentergy.com) combine course authoring and hosting with learning management tools, which track each student based on which course segments he or she has viewed, and how he or she scored on any tests.

Extending learning beyond the enterprise

As more organizations recognize e-learning as a strategic advantage for their employees and salespeople, they're also discovering that it makes sense to extend their online learning initiatives to other organizations in their market channel - suppliers, distributors and customers. Providing e-learning to a new supplier can help the firm get up to speed faster on your key products, technologies and processes. E-learning is also a cost-effective and fast way to educate distributors - who are geographically dispersed throughout the country or the world - about your new products' key features, benefits and advantages. And customers are demanding more information - before, during and after the sale. Sharing more information with your customers will soon become a strategic imperative: Either your company will help your customers to be more productive or your competitors will. Customers considering a purchase will increasingly consider the content and quantity of your product support services and e-learning materials in their purchase decisions.

Developing an e-learning strategy

Like any new technology, you can increase your odds of success when implementing an e-learning initiative by first developing a well thought-out strategic plan, which specifies the business objectives you hope to achieve, the people, resources and technology investments required, and the potential hurdles you must overcome.

Before embarking on a major investment in Web based training, consider doing a thorough needs assessment, starting with the gap between what your employees, customers and other key stakeholders know today and what they need to learn to reach your desired business goal.

A written e-learning strategy can help executives in your company better understand the potential roles and capabilities of Web-based training. Your company's senior-level executives are more likely to see e-learning as a competitive weapon when there is a strategic vision for it; a well-articulated plan also increases your odds of getting the funding you need to get a Web-based training program off the ground.

Here are other some key points to keep in mind if your company is considering an e-learning initiative:

Offering Web-based training courses to your employees or business partners doesn't mean they will automatically fall in love with online learning. Dramatic culture shifts are sometimes required to get people to embrace the whole concept of getting training from a computer - especially for those employees who are not computer savvy.

E-learning can also have a steep technology learning curve for your training and MIS departments. Some companies have found it difficult to integrate their new learning management tools with their existing employee databases. Also, your MIS department may restrict the use of multimedia on your company's network, because it tends to be a bandwidth hog. Remember, many corporate networks were designed around e-mail and shared file storage and printing - relatively low bandwidth applications. Multiple employees watching a streaming video program could bring your network to its knees. If you plan to deliver e-learning courses to people outside of your organization, outdated modems, a lack of the proper browser plugins or media player software, and corporate firewalls could affect your audiences' ability to view your Web-based training programs.

Keep in mind that initial development costs for Web-based courses tend to be more expensive than producing handouts and presentation slides for an instructor-led training course. But once the content is produced, the delivery cost of online courses is significantly lower than classroom training, especially for large numbers of employees or multiple locations.

Web based training is still in its infancy. Many of the content authoring tools have a significant learning curve and are subject to the old "garbage in, garbage out" rule: Just because you purchase an e-learning authoring tool doesn't make you an instant expert in instructional design. Designing content for online delivery requires a keen sense of how people consume and interact with training materials.

E-learning: Where to start

To increase your odds of success in implementing an e-learning initiative, I recommend that you consider creating a pilot application, with the help of an outside "Learning Services Provider" - a firm that can assist you with developing and hosting the course (an "LSP" is the e-learning equivalent of an ASP). This approach will give you an opportunity to experiment with different formats and models of e-learning, while also keeping your costs low.

And, as always, be aware of any cultural or structural hurdles within your organization that could hinder or undermine your e-learning initiatives.

FIRM LAUNCHES ALTERNATE DOMAIN NAMES

http://www.new.net

A private firm has come up with an ingenious way to launch 20 new domain name suffixes, bypassing ICANN, a government agency that is supposed to oversee the development of new top-level domain names. Its new domain names include .shop, .inc, .family, .tech, .law and .travel. Visitors to the New.net Web site can also suggest and vote for new domain names.

New.net's new domain name extensions technically are not top-level domain names, but its system cleverly redirects your browser to the site's actual Web address. To access Web sites that use these new domain names, you must either access the Internet through one of New.net's ISP partners, which include EarthLink, Excite@Home and NetZero, or download and install a small browser plug-in. New.net claims that over 16 million Internet users already have access to these new domain names, and this number is expected to grow as the company forges additional ISP partnerships.

Why is this development strategically important? It gives your organization an opportunity to register new domain names that may be more relevant to your customers and other target audiences. It may also spur ICANN, which has gotten bogged down in endless negotiation and politics) to move faster in its domain name expansion efforts.

TREND: PEER-TO-PEER MEETS WIRELESS

http://www.wesync.com

As wireless technology becomes more common on handheld PCs, it is starting to open up new opportunities for accessing and sharing data, no matter where you are. One emerging business model is to synchronize handheld PCs with a central Web server or as part of a peer-to-peer network that could include both wired and wireless computing devices - eliminating the need to be "tethered" to a full-sized computer.

One company that has already anticipated this wireless internetworking revolution is WeSync (http://www.wesync.com). The company's mission is to provide individuals with access to their data wherever they are, using multiple devices. The company has developed a set of tools that add group synchronization capabilities to Palm PCs -- whether a Palm is in its synchronization cradle, or accessing the Internet via a wireless modem. WeSync enables small workgroups to synchronize calendars, contacts and project documents from a variety of devices.

Like Groove.net (reviewed in the February 2001 issue of ETB), tools like WeSync can provide project teams with significant increases in productivity, by enabling all team members to respond faster and work from a synchronized set of tools and project data. WeSync was recently purchased by Palm, Inc., which means any future offerings from this bright young company will probably be focused around Palm's popular line of handheld PCs. But I predict that other companies will soon follow this innovative business model, helping companies to share information and collaborate in some powerful new ways.

COOL TOOL: PLUS 32 HELPS EVALUATE JOB CANDIDATES

http://www.brgarrison.com

One of the most difficult challenges facing any business is selecting and hiring the right employees. Many executives interview candidates, but often even a good interviewer can fail to ask a vital question that, if the answer were known, could rule out a candidate, or make them the hands-down winner for a position.

One outstanding tool that can help with this process is called Plus-32 Employment Testing System. This is a stand-alone piece of software that administers a variety of employment screening tests, including an impressive personality profile of the candidates you are interviewing. While there are many sources of personality testing, what we feel makes this one unique is its' ability to produce reports that combine various potential employees with an existing team to profile how the team will work together, and the various roles at which each will excel. You can also produce benchmark files profiling the personality style of your top performers, allowing you to compare a pool of candidates to those who are succeeding in a particular role. The graphical test reports are printed immediately after the candidate takes the test and are easy-to-read and understand.

The system also includes a battery of other tests useful in the employment process including sales ability, memory, grammar, spelling and intelligence. If you have specific skills you need to test for, the software allows you to design custom tests based on criterion you establish. The tests can be downloaded from the company's Web site (http://www.brgarrison.com), and are licensed for either a specific period of time, or number of uses, and are well worth the investment if you are looking for a more scientific way to help select top performing employees.

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That's all for now! I welcome your comments and feedback on the Executive Technology Briefing, which will help me to focus it even more closely on your needs.

Jordan Ayan
President
Create-It! Inc.