Talk presented as
part of the panel on Education Integration Strategy by
at the
E-Learn Expo,
Paris
Palais
des Congrès,
Many of you are engaged in migrating your classroom operations to e-learning. You are
facing many unknowns, and this forum is intended to help share experiences,
provide some guidance, and facilitate some networking. I have been active in marketing and consulting for more than twenty years, most of it at the leading edge where technology-empowered consumers are changing the branding, supply chain dynamics, and even the business models of their product and service providers. Because that world changes daily, I have spent much of my career training my clients and the public in general, and of course I’ve been a learner all my life. The internet has allowed my processes to change too. I started working on computer-based training in the ‘80’s, founded my first
Internet-based communications company in 1994, and have been providing online
learning courses and services to corporations for many years as an “outsourcee”. In my brief presentation on this panel today
I’d like to share some of the lessons learned, and propose some rules for
successful outsourcing, specifically in the field of learning.
Several years ago I presented a
paper to the conference of the American Society for Training and Development
(ASTD) in which I described the kind of online courses we had been running for
professionals seeking certification in project management. Back then, we
provided anytime, anywhere courses that were heavily mentor-supported. In
addition to a formal curriculum, learners were guided
to use chat sessions to create their own content, which was built into an
organically growing learning community. Many people in my audience just did not
“get it” because they were so focused on delivering “CD-ROM on the Web” but now
it looks like attitudes are changing. I am pleased to hear so many people in
recent months starting to embrace the idea that e-learning should foster
communication and create self-sustaining learning communities.
I’d like to begin with a
comment on the “new economy” and the cynicism or denial with which many people
regard the term. By making real-time networked communication ubiquitous, the
Internet has changed the world of business and the world of education forever.
You can try to contest that with studies, academic research, and cost benefit
analyses. You can challenge the impact or the benefit from any theoretical or
philosophical platform you choose. But the reality is that the world is changing
at a pace faster than you can measure.
The future is a place none of
us has visited, yet many of us, foolishly, feel we know it quite well. But in
the new economy whatever you know about how things work today cannot be
extrapolated into the future without risk of embarrassment. Everything you know
about learning is changing fundamentally, and the collective impact of those
changes will produce exponentially more changes. It will never stop. It will
only accelerate, and it won’t be smooth and predictable. Just to stay competent
in their jobs, people have to learn more, and learn more often, than ever
before—and they have less available time to do it in. Companies that do not
help their workforce stay competent will lose their own ability to function. It
is now a corporate survival requirement that education and training is
continuously available and continuously evolving. (The only alternative to
continuous real-time training of employees is to view them as disposable: don’t
build your own human capital, rent it from an outside vendor. We are seeing whole
IT departments being outsourced to low-cost high-education countries like
E-learning is not a single
species with a fixed DNA. There are many manifestations of e-learning. When the
media tell you that the e-business bubble has burst, it is not true. You are
not seeing the death of an industry—for the first time things are changing so
fast you are able to witness evolution unfolding, as in a time-lapsed movie.
The extinction rate in this evolution is terrifying. Technological progress is
usually measured by
I have always believed that the
true power of the Internet both as a marketing and an educational medium lies in its ability to
network individuals with each other to share their experiences, not in its ability to cheaply
broadcast canned messages to millions. We have all heard so much about B2C and
B2B models, but I believe that the model that will be the “killer app” in
education and in marketing is P2P: peer-to-peer. The Internet is not a network of machines, it’s a network of people. When you allow people to
connect with each other without forcing them through some central controlling
institution, the value of that network explodes. Where, according to Metcalfe’s
Law, an ordinary network has a value of n2 (where n = the number of
nodes), the value of a peer-to-peer network is a vastly greater 2n-1.
On the Internet, n is already many hundreds of millions.
It’s February 2001. E-businesses
are already discovering the power of P2P networks (Napster is a prominent
example, as is Hotmail’s viral marketing). Brand managers don't like the idea of losing control of their message, but it's going to happen. And educationalists are inherently
opposed to the concept of allowing people to learn informally. They believe that education is best achieved in a
hierarchical distribution system. They believe that learning is about a central
knowledge resource communicating its knowledge in a controlled way to an
audience, in a one-to-many broadcast model. But the value of a learning network
lies not in centralizing knowledge, but in networking the experience of
learners. As more people share your knowledge, the value of that knowledge to
your company increases. This is as true of learning as it is of marketing. The two fields have so much in common!
E-learning and e-marketing should be rich in
experience-sharing processes that draw people into the learning environment.
Outsourcing is an old-economy
word that implies buying some product or service from an external provider
because they are more reliable or cost-effective than your internal resources.
In the new economy, outsourcing implies more. It implies a partnership that
integrates seamlessly with your own business—and the businesses of other
partners—and contributes to your strategic evolution. It implies the
streamlining of your internal processes, and the compression of planning
horizons. An outsource partner is an agent of change, who can make things
happen faster, better, more economically, and with less operational risk than
trying to do it all internally.
If you needed to build a new
house, would you order a truckload of bricks and enroll in a bricklaying
course? Would you buy a spade and start digging the foundations? No – most of
us would call in an architect and a builder. We do that because we want the
project defined, managed, and executed in a quality way—on time, on budget, to
our chosen standard. Building an e-learning environment is really no different.
The reasons that most companies outsource are simple:
·
Time to deployment: It can take you a long time to research the market, pick
your development tools, learn how to use them, develop
a few courses, test them, re-develop them and finally deploy them. And that’s
only the start of the work involved in providing a dynamic e-learning service.
Outsource providers are already high up that learning curve, have the
expertise, use efficient production and deployment processes, and can get your
courses online in weeks. They can also host and manage your courses and provide
learner technical support until you are ready to do it in-house.
·
Quality: You can’t afford to deliver a learning experience that
doesn’t work, from the perspective of technology, pedagogy, administration, or
support. However you define quality, your end product must meet your standards.
Outsourcing the project helps you achieve this in two ways. First you are
forced to define your target quality, along a number of parameters, with your
outsource partner helping you manage your own expectations. Second, your
partner has the experience to deliver.
·
Cost: The cost of internal development can be significant.
Software is the smallest, but most obvious, item on the expense list. Training
and personnel costs are substantial, as is management time. Hardware and
bandwidth can be prohibitive, as can learner technical support. If you factor
in all your costs honestly, outsourcing should be cheaper.
·
Risk: If the end result is not as expected, and you have
incurred huge expenses and delays, the damage to the reputation of the learning
department may be the least of your worries. If an outside provider lets you
down, you at least have recourse. But working with an outsource partner
inherently reduces your risk from the beginning because the project is defined
in realistic terms and managed according to a project plan.
·
Innovation: Your perception of what e-learning should be is limited
by your own experiences and knowledge. An external provider has a broader
understanding of e-learning technologies and e-learning pedagogy, so can help
you avoid hidden dangers and suggest alternative approaches. Even if you decide
to do everything in-house, calling for proposals from outsource companies will
give you great insights into the different paths you can follow.
·
·
Strategic advantage: An outsource partner can rapidly put you in an education
leadership position in your industry while your competitors are still trying to
acquire new skills and infrastructure. And if they need to build new skills and
infrastructure, they don’t inherently have the core competencies to do the job
properly. In the online world, where hardware and skill-sets are evolving
continuously, in-house programming talents and infrastructures are unlikely to
be sustainable assets. Hiring external talent that has to keep itself
leading-edge is much more attractive. If you’re not clearly the best people to
be doing a job, don’t do it. Use an outsource provider that is.
If there are so many good
reasons to outsource, why do many companies start off by trying to do their
e-learning in-house?
·
Fear of losing
control—though it is often easier to control an outside provider than your own
conflicting internal resources.
·
Fascination with new
activities, and a desire to be conspicuously progressive.
·
Perception that
outsourcing is expensive or complicated or risky.
·
Perception that
in-house e-learning development expertise is strategically vital.
·
Defining the education
mission as the building of courses, instead of as the ongoing delivery of a
workforce with knowledge and skills appropriate to your business strategy.
·
Reluctance to embrace
e-business principles of speed, efficiency and streamlining, which have become
indivisible from partnering in all other corporate disciplines.
·
Unavailability of adequate
outsourcing partners.
I have listed a number of
reasons why companies might not outsource all or part of their e-learning operations.
In my view, none of these are valid. You could look at me with cynicism,
because, after all, I am an outsourcing resource. But the reality is that
corporate learning professionals should be focused on strategic performance
improvement issues, not on operational e-learning development and deployment.
You can build up a fifty-strong e-learning development team, equip them with
high-end machines, and train them in all of the latest authoring tools and ISD
techniques. And maybe that’s price you are willing to pay to get you up a
learning curve. But a year or two from now I suspect you will be “rightsizing”
your operations, firing that team, and partnering with a competent development
shop on the other side of the world. Heck, I already outsource many of my own
company’s operations to people who can do things faster, cheaper, better.
There is an evolution in
Internet adoption that takes place inside companies, and e-learning is just a
thread in that process. If you are like most companies, you start out regarding
the Internet as a good place to have a corporate presence.
·
Your corporate
communications people put up a site that is like a static annual report.
·
Then people want to
know more, so the marketing people use the site to advertise products or
services.
·
Then people want to
buy, so the commercial people build transactions ability into the site.
·
Then customers want
better service, so the IT people integrate those transactions into supply-chain
management systems, and the customer service people want to help customers
online.
·
Finally your business
partners want to integrate their online systems with yours to streamline
everything, and you have what is now called e-business.
The more Web-savvy a company
is, the more it focuses on its core competencies, out-sourcing the rest to
external partners. In e-business, core competencies are typically defined by
the value that you can add to your customers’ processes. E-businesses now
outsource many of their mission-critical processes because they fall outside of
core competencies. The same is becoming true of e-learning.
There is actually nothing that
we do in e-learning that is not already done (usually better) in some other
e-business context. Tracking and analyzing click-streams is fundamental to
e-commerce, as is instant customization and personalization, management of
knowledge-richness, database integration, real-time reporting, and online
customer service. E-businesses already integrate with the systems of their
suppliers and customers. In fact, good e-business sites are in many ways much
more powerful than e-learning sites, and usually do a better job of managing
dynamic content and customer satisfaction. Training departments can’t do that
sort of thing with an in-house group of people schooled only in ToolBook, DreamWeaver and Flash.
The e-business experience tells
you this: you cannot take an online course and manage it successfully without
integrating it into a learning environment that is in turn integrated into a
service environment, all operating at Web speed in real time. There is much
more to providing an e-learning service than simply building courses and
attaching them to a Learning Management System.
Beyond the vital strategic tasks,
here are some of the major operational activities involved in going online:
·
Developing
courses—whether you adapt existing classroom courses or author new ones, there
is learning design, editing, and creative work to do. You must define content,
testing, and assignments, as well as the ways you will leverage the networking
of learners and experts into a sustainable learning community.
·
Web-enabling—you have
to code your content, create your audio and video if used, acquire your
graphics and images, code your interactive tests or assignments, and integrate
all of the components with chat, threaded discussion, and library
functionality. Then do quality assurance and revisions.
·
Deploying—your courses
can’t be accessed without the hardware and telecommunications that make them
accessible, so you need to plan for performance, scalability, privacy and
security, then acquire and install the systems that put your site on the Web or
the LAN.
·
Hosting—your courses
should have a learning environment to support them. That includes a Learning
Management System to manage gatekeeping and tracking,
but it also includes support functionality for learners, faculty, and
administrators, and e-commerce systems if you are a commercial training
business.
·
Resources—in addition
to technology infrastructure, you need to provide the people to keep your
service competitive, particularly in the areas of ongoing quality control and
technical expertise. If you are using online instructors, you’ll need to do
some training and recruitment.
·
Administration—your
LMS might handle some administration like basic learner tracking, but you’ll
need to customize a system to integrate with your other administrative systems
such as order processing, interdepartmental billing, CRM, and reporting.
Ideally, your administrative systems are all real-time browser-based tools.
·
Support—Your online learners work a lot at nights and weekends so
you have to provide 24x7 technical support. If you work with learners from
other companies, you may have to provide different levels of customer service
and support.
·
Upgrades—your courses
and their background technologies and services will need updating and upgrading
continuously so they stay fresh, relevant and technically viable.
·
Marketing—finally, if
you are providing internal training, getting employees to want to learn online
is a marketing challenge. If you are a commercial course provider, you have a
host of additional complications to overcome, from troubleshooting a client’s
firewall problems to integrating your LMS with theirs, to custom-building
invoicing or gatekeeping systems. Your sales and
marketing team will need a lot of education and experience to deal with these
issues.
You can build the resources to
handle all of these tasks, but it you should also be able to outsource any or
all of them, and be as involved or as distant from the day-to-day as you
choose.
·
Learn about
e-learning. Go to expos and conferences, take some courses, join
an online discussion forum like ASTD’s e-learning
community. Talk to other companies, share experiences. Remember, there are no
experts, and everyone is at some stage in their own discovery process.
·
Know what you want to
achieve. E-learning means so many different things that unless you know what
results you are looking for, you will not know where to begin. Defining the
educational result is more relevant than focusing on the means—let your
outsource partner work that out for you. The solution that works for your
situation will probably be unique to you. But defining your solution should
start with looking at the content, context, target group, and technology
infrastructure, at an individual course, individual learner, and enterprise
level. Consider also the development time, ongoing support resources, and
overall cost constraints that you have.
·
Do a reality check,
redefine your goals, define your risk tolerance. Learn
to recognize vaporware. Understand that bleeding edge technology is compelling
but frequently impractical. Start with technology that works today and will
achieve your learning objectives. Your learners should not have to master a
technology learning curve before they can get into the content of their course.
·
Be clear about who
owns the e-learning process inside your organization. The Education, Training,
or Employee Development group should own the e-learning process, not IT or IS.
While IT has to play a major role in the e-learning development process, it is
the education integrators who should own that process and manage the project.
At the very least, Training should be the customer, and IT the vendor. Training
is paying, is responsible for the effectiveness of the service, and should
define acceptable quality parameters. If your IT people do not know enough
about e-learning to be helpful, get them educated.
·
Evaluate prospective
partners:
o
Send out a “Request For Information”.
o
Determine what the
vendors do best, how they think, what their service record is.
o
Look for a learning
company that understands e-business, not a pure software company. Insist on
talking with the proposed vendor’s project manager—you will be working with
that person pretty intensively, and it is vital that you like and respect the
individual. Work with people who challenge your assumptions and change your
perceptions.
o
Look at actual courses
they developed or deploy, and talk to their customers or learners.
o
Ask about their
technology and methodologies. Practically, standards certification is still a
remote ideal and should not be as important as open architecture.
o
Find out their
attitude to quality (high production values are not learning quality)
o
Make sure their
operations and technologies are scalable.
o
Do not let geography
be a factor. People like to work with a vendor down the street, or in the same
city. This can be an obstacle—get used to living in a global marketplace, and be
ready to work with vendors in other countries, on other continents. E-learning
is ideal for virtual project work.
o
Be concerned about vendor
longevity. Smart companies will endure, and they are not necessarily the big
companies or the old companies.
·
Define your needs in
writing in a “Request for Proposal” and have several companies submit bids for
the project.
·
Try to work with
prototyping and iterative development cycles rather than designing and building
the whole project. Use development methodologies that are suited to speed and
flexibility. That means embracing Rapid Application Development as a core
approach to building functionality. RAD assumes that 80 percent of a solution
can be produced in 20 percent of the time that would have been needed to
produce a complete solution, and that much of the missing 20 percent are
operational requirements rather than business requirements. That partial
solution can be used as a prototype, which gets refined iteratively. Usually
you do not know what you want until you have a straw man to critique, so building
prototypes is a more effective route to e-learning than spending months
intricately planning the perfect solution. Besides, if you take months to build
it, it’s probably going to be out of date when you’re finished.
1. Define a vision and communicate it clearly. The difference
between a vision and a hallucination is the number of people who can share it.
2. Decide that your mission is to deliver quality knowledge,
skills, and performance, not low costs, to your company.
3. Understand that you are providing a service—not just
courses—to your customers, and partner with people who share that commitment.
4. Partner with profitable companies who will still be in
business next year. Their profitability is your insurance.
5. Pick partners who have a depth of experience in developing
and implementing e-learning in a corporate culture, and who know how to manage
intensive projects.
6. Don’t be seduced by technology. Use open architecture
rather than proprietary authoring systems or “platforms”, because your
infrastructure is going to change—constantly.
7. Be willing to rewrite your purchasing policies and
procedures. The best vendors are not always the biggest or the oldest.
8. Learn to work virtually—do not let vendor location be a
major factor.
9. Be willing to take on more risk and embrace rapid change as
a constant.
10. Don’t think e-learning is a destination or a journey. It’s
a Big Bang.
11. All rules have a half-life of two months. Even this one.
Some of the failings of this nascent
industry are that we focus on technology instead of service; on activity
instead of outcome; on tactics instead of strategy; on linear extrapolation
instead of fundamental change. Our industry trade shows are dominated by
software salespeople. Our seminars tend to focus on how to apply the latest
tools, or on technology standards. There are plenty of
authoring tools and Learning Management Systems out there, but the tools do not
make you a service provider, any more than Microsoft Word makes you Voltaire.
We have exaggerated the ease with
which companies can engage in e-learning, and made it appear to be all about
technology. It’s not. A quality e-learning service is all about streamlining
business processes and integrating them into your corporate strategy for
dealing with the new economy. An experienced outsource
partner (or partners) can help you define your learning vision and strategy,
and help you see beyond tools, technologies, and courses.
Like an e-business strategy,
your wired world learning strategy has to ask and answer the following
questions:
·
How will you build an online presence and a community of
customers?
·
How will you treat your online customers as individuals?
·
How will you retain
your customers and grow their business with you?
·
How will you deliver
your products and services faster?
·
How will you improve
the cost-effectiveness of production and delivery?
Whether
you are creating internal training or commercializing your learning experiences,
these are vital issues to debate and decide on. Your answers to these questions
will determine your strategy and the future viability of your venture. If
successful you will improve the fundamental value of the company, making it
more competitive, customer focused, streamlined, and efficient.
The easiest path to fast,
successful global implementation of corporate e-learning is usually strategic
outsourcing. Outsourcing gives you simplicity: simplicity in project
management, design, technology, learning models, infrastructure, administrative
and instructor systems, and business models. It allows you to be flexible and
responsive and professional, minimizes your risks and your investment, and gets
you up the e-learning curve with the least amount of unnecessary baggage. Most
importantly, it helps you to see through the operational fog so you can focus
on keeping your strategic educational vision in line with your corporate
vision.
Godfrey Parkin is the President of MindRise, a consulting firm in