Earlier today I went to an “audio conference” presented by GAZEL, Greater Arizona eLearning, an Arizona High Tech Industry Cluster group. Briefly, GAZEL’s mission is to “promote the growth of Arizona’s eLearning industry and theadoption of eLearning in business, education, government, and community development.” Visit GAZEL’s website for more information.
The program was hosted by the University of Phoenix at its site on Grant Road near Craycroft. Steve Peters who is on the GAZEL board and is the founder and driving force behind CITA was the Tucson moderator. About 16 people attended in Tucson at the U of Phoenix site and about 25 attended at the U of Phoenix’s site in Phoenix.
The program was entitled Selling eLearning To Management Colleagues and Customers. The theme interests me and was a topic discussed at the eLearning Guild Symposium that I attended in Scottsdale in February 2003. I found the most relevant points were made by panelist Frank Garcia who is President and CEO of Persistech. Garcia noted four hurdles in selling eLearning to management:
- elearning often has an enterprise entry point via an LMS. This usually means that it needs a greater scope of people involved in its planning, managing, execution, and on-going support.
- infrastructure: Garcia’s company has developed elearning for large companies and he used Shell Oil as an example to illustrate the hurdles encountered with Shell. Shell has people at sea on oil rigs that need to receive the elearning.
- Change management: again, learners on an oil rig must accommodate significant changes in attitude and routine to properly experience elearning
- feel good surveys: the surveys that assess elearning are often attitudinal and don’t measure learning in terms of needed skills acquisition
Garcia also spoke to assessing how the learning has had a positive or negative impact. In a university setting, we are “selling” instruction. But a corporation doesn’t sell it. The “gold standard” as he put it is still one-to-one and realizing this successfully in this environment is a challenge. He said another challenge is the use of language, especially in an international environment where English is not the lingua franca. From his experience of proposing his company’s services to corporations, he said that SCORM and ROI are big at the point of sale but not there on the operations side.
In addition to customer satisfaction look to assess if the training helped accomplish a programmatic goal of the company’s and assess if it changed behaviors and achieved results. Training specialists in the room with us who are with TEP spoke to the need to couple the training design with the organizations HR so that outcomes are matched to job needs. They recommend teaming a business analyst with instructional designers. Another trainer at our Tucson location noted that most learning takes place in a classroom because we can’t leave a classroom. The economics and ubiquity of elearning is what makes it successful and will drive its success in the future. This prompted a question of how to sell training to people who don’t have requirements. That is, they won’t realize a promotion with a particular certification. There was some sentiment that these are people, like entrepreneurs, who are driven to learn and look for any advantage that might be captured from an elearning course. However, it was stressed that the elearning experience must focus on what people need to assure success. As Garcia added, selling and finishing are two different things. People often pay for elearning and if it doesn’t meet a need early on, they are gone.
