Virtual classroom training has become popular in recent years. Virtual classroom training can be as simple as web-based, instructor-led sessions with traditional PowerPoint slides, or it can be more elaborate, with whiteboard sharing, breakout sessions, and collaboration among students.
Virtual classroom training also poses certain challenges:
• Creation of materials
Creating materials for the instructor and the participants presents problems similar to those associated with producing ILT training materials.
• Management of materials
Virtual classroom software is designed for learning to be shared in a virtual classroom. The software often provides a method for uploading learning assets (PowerPoint slides, videos, and so on) but there’s no way to actually manage the materials once they are loaded. There’s also no way to tell what the most cur-rent version of the asset is or even where to find it. Virtual classroom software provides very rudimentary search and retrieval capabilities. Once an organiza-tion starts to use the virtual classroom extensively, they lose the ability to keep track of the content.
• Instructor availability
Despite the fact that this type of training can reach more learners in many different locations, the amount of delivery is still constrained by the availability
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ptg7799847 of instructors, and the fact that there are only so many hours in a day for
delivery. Some companies record the presentation so that others can watch it in the future, but these secondary learners lose the live interaction, the collabo-ration with other participants, and the ability to ask questions. Just listening to sessions can be pretty boring, and learners may lose interest.
eLearning
Many organizations have moved away from classroom-based learning to eLearning.
eLearning provides web-based training for self-paced learning. eLearning can be as basic as a “page turner,” where content is presented on a screen and the learner clicks the next button to read through the materials, or as high-end as learning with simulations and virtual worlds. Most eLearning offers medium-level interac-tivity, with some page turning plus video, audio, interactive exercises, and quizzes.
eLearning involves its own challenges:
• Cost
The biggest issue with eLearning is its cost. It can be significantly more expen-sive to design medium or high-end learning materials.
Early proponents of eLearning touted it as a way to combine the immediacy and interactivity of ILT with the low cost of web delivery (compared with the cost of an instructor). But it turns out that “replacing the instructor” is not as easy or inexpensive as it first seemed. To understand what the learners need, to anticipate all the interactivity required at any point in the learning cycle, and then to design and create all the learning assets (text, audio, or video) is very difficult and expensive.
Although costs can vary, the typical cost of developing ILT is about 30 hours of development for one hour of instruction. Compare that to eLearning, which often takes 100 hours of development for one hour of basic eLearning, 200 hours of development for medium-level interactivity, and 300 hours of development for high-end eLearning. We’ve known some high-end eLearning to cost millions of dollars. Unless you have a lot of learners, these costs may simply not be justifiable.
• Customization and localization
The higher the level of eLearning, the more expensive it is to customize. Simu-lations, videos, and other interactive materials tend to be created as a single
“chunk” of content. It isn’t easy to switch out language or images, or change interactivity, without redoing the entire set of materials.
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• Bandwidth
If you’re accustomed to a high-speed Internet connection, you take it for granted. It’s only when you don’t have high-speed access for some reason that you realize how important it is. High-end eLearning requires very fast Internet speeds with good throughput. If your learners are in a location where they don’t have reliable high-speed access, then high-end eLearning might not be an option. In most cases the files are designed to be streamed (viewed in real time over the Web) rather than downloaded. If the content is being handled by a local server, it may not be too much of a problem, but eLearning that’s located on a geographically different server can become unusable because of slow per-formance issues.
Mobile
Learning has moved from the classroom to the desktop and now to mobile. With mobile, learners can learn wherever they are. Learning materials can be delivered in bite-sized pieces to enable learning whenever people have some downtime, such as in lineups, on the commuter train, or between other activities.
Learning via mobile (mLearning) is still in the early adoption stage but growing quickly. A recent survey of their membership conducted by the eLearning Guild1 found the following:
• 25.5 percent were engaged in producing mLearning
• 40 percent were exploring mLearning
• 51 percent had seen a positive return on investment (ROI), while another 38.8 percent said it was too early to tell
• 47.4 percent intended to do more mLearning in the next year
In another report, Ambient Insight Research determined that the mobile learning market is growing at a rate of 18.3 percent annually; revenues reached $632.2 mil-lion in 2009 and will top $1.4 bilmil-lion by 2014.2
Mobile learning involves the following challenges:
• mLearning versus eLearning
Mobile’s ease of access and the short time periods people typically spend on it are better suited to performance support than to full-scale learning. Typical
1 The eLearning Guild. Mobile Learning: Landscape and Trends, www.elearningguild.com 2 Ambient Insight Research. www.ambientinsight.com
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ptg7799847 examples of mobile performance support include job aids, checklists, and
access to information we can’t easily remember (for example, numbers and details). Mobile can capture activity and provide unique responses based on customer selections.
• Content conversion
Learning content developed for classrooms, virtual classrooms, or eLearning doesn’t convert well to mobile. Learning materials developed for one channel aren’t designed to adapt to another. As in other industries, content is tied to format and delivery channels, making it difficult to convert. However, more importantly, content for other learning channels isn’t optimized for the unique environment of a mobile device (for example, small screen; short, rapid usage;
and lack of integration with enterprise tools).
• Proliferation of devices
Mobile content has no equivalent to the eBook EPUB standard. There’s no single across multiple mobile platforms; material developed for the Android won’t work on iOS (Apple), and material developed for webOS won’t run on Windows Phone 7. This means that mLearning materials have to be recoded to run on each device platform.
In addition, the differing capabilities of devices running the same operating system, such as Apple’s iOS, are significant—consider the differences between an iPhone and an iPad. What works on one may not work on the other. The combinations of operating system and hardware capabilities mean that the mobile training market is highly fragmented.
• Lack of Adobe Flash
A lot of learning materials have been built using Adobe Flash. Many devices, notably Apple’s iOS-based devices such as iPhones and iPads, don’t run Flash.
Adobe has ceased the development of Flash for mobile devices. It will be replaced by HTML5-based interactivity. This will require the conversion of existing Flash materials.
• Security
Organizations are often concerned about the security of their content. Pass-words and wiping of stored information can help, but many are concerned about the information being accessed en route.
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