Recently, Joe Gorup -- our CEO and co-founder of CourseAvenue, was asked to participate in an executive forum representing our enterprise-class applications in the field of eLearning within the Life Sciences and Pharmaceutical industries.
Mr. Gorup's participation in the forum points out CourseAvenue's vision of eLearning implementation for the industry, as well as an outline of where the industry is going as a whole.
Do you feel as if the Life Science industry is warming up to eLearning as a cost effective way to train staff across various departments?
Adoption of eLearning is increasing and cost effectiveness of delivery is certainly a contributing factor. Given the regulatory aspects of Life Science and sheer volume of required learning elements for certification and compliance, the industry will continue to benefit as eLearning development and deployment becomes more efficient.
Also contributing to adoption is improved infrastructure. As the learning management system (LMS) has matured and broadband access has proliferated it is just easier to deploy, track and execute eLearning.
Combining ever increasing regulatory and compliance needs with improving infrastructure and more cost effective delivery of learning - all things point to increased adoption.
Has the adoption of eLearning helped to increase retention and productivity?
The concepts of adoption and productivity are certainly complimentary. People tend to adopt what makes them productive – the more productive the more eLearning will be adopted. The eLearning attributes of anytime, anywhere learning clearly lends itself to productive employees.
Retention rates are a bit more challenging to correlate directly to eLearning. Broadly speaking, employees who feel their employers actively invest in modern productivity tools such as eLearning are more likely to stay put. Consider an example where one employee can become “re-certified” via an eLearning course at a time and location that is convenient for them versus one forced to leave on a Sunday night for a three day course out of town. It is pretty clear which employee would be more productive and generally happier.
Put another way, an employer that utilizes modern productivity tools is more likely to attract and retain employees that are interested in the same things - productivity and new ways of thinking.
Why is XML becoming so important within the Pharmaceutical industry? Has it helped in creating, maintaining, and distributing information? If so, how? And where do you see the biggest opportunities to exploit this power?
XML is becoming important because it provides a convenient, non-proprietary means of exchanging data. Given the diverse supply chain and general complexity of the Pharmaceutical industry, anything that can efficiently facilitate communications and integration of systems is important.
We see an opportunity for XML to ease data warehouse processing and complexity. As opposed to “transforming” the data using complex and traditional data warehouse technologies, the ability to build an enterprise model using XML and providing open services to interact with the data can dramatically reduce time to market for data warehouse oriented reporting.
Development of eLearning is clearly a collaborative process between instructional designers, subject-matter experts, graphic developers, etc. How do you manage the efforts of this diverse group of people?
For the vast majority of organizations – this “collaborative process” is either broken or very inefficient. The inefficient process usually involves dozens of e-mails, chat sessions and conference calls eventually resulting in one person, often the instructional designer, left to manage the “production” task.
Unfortunately, many tools on the market focus solely on the production task or the creation of the final product and are not built around the true development process. Installing “authoring” software on everyone’s desktop is certainly not a scaleable solution. The act of turning the content into a course is a small percentage of the overall cost of development. The real cost involves the upfront work of uniting the input from the different parties into something that can be produced.
To manage these efforts efficiently, one needs a true collaborative or “shared environment” that everyone involved in the development process can partake. This collaborative environment can take different forms but is certainly more formal than the desktop-based, email, and chat anarchy that seems pervasive today. An ideal case is what I call “direct contribution” - each of the parties involved can directly contribute to the development process. For example a subject matter expert could directly add their know-how into the course structure as defined by the instructional designer. As opposed to force a subject matter expert into becoming an “author” – he or she should be able to simply cut and paste their content directly into the “shared” course structure.
Management is only possible when there is control over the process. Given the multitude of people involved in the courseware creation process, a “shared experience” or “collaborative environment” is required to establish such control before true management can take place.
eLearning has shown to be an effective way to share information across a supply chain. For example, courseware from manufacturers can be used by distributors and in some cases continued down to the end consumers. How have you used eLearning across your supply chain? What hurdles and/or successes have you seen in this regard?
It is unfortunate to see cases where internal employees are given a complete and formal training curriculum yet for an external audience, say a distributor; there is little more than a page of instructions. While one should tailor training to the audience, many times small design decisions on the structure of a course could result in many elements being made available to more than one audience. Therefore, one of the hurdles to using eLearning across a supply chain is simply considering multiple audiences, both internal and external, in the original learning design.
On the success side, a manufacturer using eLearning as a sales tool to gain an advantage over the competition is a great story. In this case, a prospective customer can choose from Vendor A or Vendor B. Vendor A ships “a manual” with their product. Vendor B provides a co-branded, collaborative eLearning environment where the customer and Vendor work together to keep all training up to date and augmented as experience is gained. Furthermore, the Customer can publish their own versions of a course for use in their own LMS.
The benefits of Vendor B are significant. Not only is it a competitive advantage during the sales cycle, but the result is a more educated customer which has a number of longer term benefits.
What have you seen as the biggest challenges to developing eLearning on a global scale?
Some of the biggest challenges are a combination of two ideas above. Namely, inefficient processes for courseware development and learning design that does not consider global use. This is in addition to standard cultural and language barriers that exist in diverse environments.
Developing a course in say, 20 languages really magnifies the process problem. If the project manager struggles to deal with half a dozen people to develop a course in one language on one continent – the task becomes all but impossible when European, Asia-Pac, Middle East and African teams are brought in.
If the process problem can be addressed, eLearning is a great medium for global communication. Delivering up to date content to remote sites where ILT courses are either not available or very costly to deliver just makes sense. Just as the challenges of developing eLearning on a global scale are magnified – so are the benefits.
In recent years, learning has progressed from being “technology-supported,” to “web-based,” to “eLearning.” In what directions do you now see it evolving? What sorts of learning tools do you envision will be introduced in the future?
I see eLearning becoming more ubiquitous; melding into normal business operations versus something you do as a separate action. In many respects, learning technologies have been constrained by the overall state of technology. The move to “web-based” was because the web-itself came into being. More modern eLearning with extensive tracking and multi-media exists because processing power and bandwidth have increased so significantly.
Future learning tools will be focused on making the line between ILT and “eLearning” very fuzzy – blended learning will truly be blended. The difference used to be great – going to a classroom versus sitting in front of a “green screen”. As media, video, bandwidth technologies move forward and web-based social networks emerge the distinction between “online” and “real world” continues to blur. Lastly, as the generation of kids that grew up chatting with 4 friends about math homework hit the workforce – “learning” will have to adopt or be left behind.