E-Learning brings world-class training right to your desktop

IDC Research estimates that the global e-learning market is now growing at an annual compound rate of 150 per cent and predicts that it is now worth $23 billion. Furthermore, Gartner Group believes that more than two thirds of Global 1000 enterprises now include e-learning as part of a formal Business to Employee (B2E) initiative.

The ubiquitous availability of the Internet, more user-friendly technology and improved IT infrastructures are setting the stage for this widespread uptake in e-learning. Internet connection rates are improving all the time, sophisticated software packages are available that let employers insert their own training materials, and some suppliers even offer a "hosted" e-learning system, which means that in-house IT staff do not need to be pulled off projects to manage or fix the training software.

Many HR executives are now also considering e-learning to improve productivity, reduce the cost of holding physical seminars, minimise training expenses and improve knowledge sharing. Another key driver is the global focus on good corporate governance in line with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the United States and the adoption of the new International Accounting Standards.

"It is impossible for any organisation to achieve compliance unless all its employees have the necessary skills, capabilities and training, and not simply in their day-to-day duties but also in the business practices, ethical guidelines and regulatory or statutory requirements," said Brian Gregory, a Senior Director at Oracle, one of the leading suppliers of e-learning software.

"In a large multinational organisation, communicating to, training and monitoring the workforce is a difficult matter, but one that can be made a lot simpler with the use of e-learning linked to a Human Resource Management System that records and monitors skills and capabilities."

British Airways is one of the large multinationals using a new, comprehensive e-learning offering from Oracle and Thomson NETg to create a global learning program for its 48,000 employees that will cut operational costs and improve professional development.

The partnership between Oracle and NETg ensures interoperability between Oracle® Learning Management - an Oracle application that helps organisations manage, deliver and track training programmes in online and classroom-based environments - and the NETg Open Learning library, a comprehensive offering of IT, desktop, business and professional development courses.

British Airways is using Oracle Learning Management and NETg Open Learning to transform its existing training strategy into an integrated learning programme that manages hundreds of online and traditional courses for its global workforce.

The system's open architecture is helping British Airways cut implementation time and costs by connecting existing training courses and importing employee data to the new learning programme. As a result, British Airways is able to further its commitment to employee safety and professional development in a cost-effective and timely way.

"The integration of Oracle and NETg technologies is making it possible for British Airways to deploy our learning programme efficiently around the world," said Graeme Davison, Oracle Learning Management Implementation Manager at British Airways. "The combined solution has provided British Airways with a comprehensive learning programme that trains our global workforce in critical areas such as baggage safety and airport security, and empowers employees to manage and track their personal training progress."

Because Oracle Learning Management is integrated with Oracle Human Resource Management System (HRMS), British Airways can track training programmes alongside other learning activity for a comprehensive view of employees' personal and skills development growth.

The system's self-service capabilities enable British Airways employees to register for courses, participate in classes, access in-depth information and manage their training schedules through an intuitive online portal.

All training records are stored in a single repository, allowing managers to view the training progress of employees, make adjustments to their training schedules and produce detailed reports.

Another major adopter of Oracle Learning Management is the Amplifon Group, a provider of hearing aids, which is using the software to reduce training-related costs and increase the productivity of its globally dispersed 2,700 person sales team. In two months, Oracle Learning Management saved Amplifon €70,000 in travel-related training expenses and reduced course time by 58%, or 4,900 hours.

Even educational establishments are turning to e-learning. Yeovil College in the UK was one of the first educational establishments in the country to install Oracle Learning Management to serve 8,500 full- and part-time students and 500 staff.

In keeping with a general trend towards colleges developing their own virtual learning environments for further education - a trend supported by significant annual British government funding since 2001 - Yeovil College was looking to develop a Web-based learning environment and content-management system.

"We wanted a low-cost, high-penetration learning solution to increase the level of service we are able to offer both students and staff," explained Dick Russell, director of academic planning at Yeovil College. "For students this might mean coursework and extra-curricular material; for our staff it might mean IT training and health and safety reports."

Russell describes the implementation of Oracle Learning Management as a significant step towards achieving the college's overall goals - to provide a high quality of service, to attract and retain students and to ensure the highest possible exam achievement.

Yeovil College has been using Oracle Database since 1997, and introduced Oracle Application Server and OracleAS Portal in 2001. "We have four database instances set up within a single Real Application Cluster," said Steve Fenwick, the college's MIS manager. Yeovil's Oracle Real Application Clusters are configured using two Dell servers running Windows 2000.


"Oracle Application Server Portal provides a public Website, an academic portal for students and a corporate portal for college staff," Fenwick said. "Oracle Learning Management is also connected to a database instance in the database cluster. Our potential for growth in the area of e-learning is almost limitless."

One of the advantages of having Oracle technology already in place is that it provides a platform from which to move forward, as Yeovil College experienced first-hand. "When it came to establishing an e-learning environment, we considered several other major software providers," said Russell.

"However, we quickly discovered that all of the other software we were looking at duplicated the portal technology we already had in place with Oracle Portal. More significantly, the others only seemed to offer a cut-back portal functionality, while we had the full-blown product. That's another major reason why we chose Oracle Learning Management.

"Oracle has provided us with the potential for development that we needed. We could have bought an off-the-shelf e-learning package designed specifically and only for colleges, and that might, in the short term, have saved us some in-house development work, but it would not have provided us with the integration with our other crucial, existing systems, or the possibility for expansion that we need in the longer term. And one of the strengths of Oracle technology is how well and easily it lends itself to achieving any necessary customisations in a cost-effective manner."

Oracle Learning Management is available as an online service, eliminating the need for complex installations on individual computers and ongoing software maintenance. Learning communities can therefore be set up very quickly, enabling organisations to customise their community and deliver course content in a pure Internet environment.

Yeovil College launched Oracle Learning Management across the college over a three-day period in January 2003. The swift implementation was carried out in-house, following some training from Oracle consultants.

"Our strategy is aimed at improving the quality of the learning experience," Russell said. "Oracle Learning Management gives our students access to teaching and learning at times when they could not otherwise get it because, for example, the college is closed or students are based remotely.

It also potentially attracts those students whom we do not currently see at all, and broadens student participation in academic college life. Lastly, it provides effectiveness and efficiency. Some things are best achieved through electronic means and some things are best achieved by assembling people in a classroom and talking to them - it's a question of being selective and using the new tools appropriately."

For example, Russell explained that the college would not be able to attract the critical mass of students in one place to offer archaeology as a conventional class. But Yeovil College is running an archaeology course solely through e-learning. The college also uses e-learning for the benefit of higher-education students who are out at work during the day and therefore cannot regularly participate in conventional classes.

"These two examples show two different ends of the spectrum: those who are studying out of interest and those who are seeking to develop or change their career paths," Russell explained.

Even at this early stage, the e-learning facility is already being used by about 10% of students at the college, a figure that is expected to grow rapidly as students and staff become more familiar with the concept of e-learning.

Any initial reservations about e-learning among students and staff have already been replaced by a marked enthusiasm for the possibilities it offers. "One lecturer was particularly resistant, and after a few months of using it he is now full of plans for how to develop its use further in delivering his courses," Russell reported.

In the business world, the recent focus on corporate governance following the financial scandals of 2001 and 2002 is helping to generate interest in e-learning. While a great deal of emphasis has been placed on the availability and accuracy of consolidated management information, less consideration has been given to the equally vital role that the workforce and Human Resources play.

Yet, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), corporate governance "is the system by which business corporations are directed and controlled.

The corporate governance structure specifies the distribution of rights and responsibilities among different participants in the corporation, such as, the board, managers, shareholders and other stakeholders, and spells out the rules and procedures for making decisions on corporate affairs."

Before Enron's demise, corporate governance definitions focused on how companies best conduct business to meet shareholders' demands within the scope of the law. Post-Enron, corporate governance goes beyond making a legitimate profit, and is much more about making sure the whole organisation operates according to the highest qualitative and quantitative standards.

The area where e-learning can make the most effective contribution to good corporate governance is in ethics and compliance training. Companies and public sector organisations alike can mitigate risk of regulatory non-compliance by simply reminding employees of the industry rules and regulations to which they are bound.

This seems obvious, but an Internet search quickly reveals that many breaches of compliance across a wide variety of industries are due to insufficient staff training. To give just one example, the 2001 Julius Report about Banking Code compliance found that 53% of the UK banks assessed had weak training and competence in this area.

The reason is that industry codes of conduct tend to be communicated to employees at their induction, when they are new to the job environment and need to take in a lot of different information on the same day.

Subsequent refreshers are often sporadic and outdated. Considering the pace at which the regulatory environment shifts in some industries, more frequent training would undoubtedly help to reduce the number of compliance breaches.

Perhaps even more at risk of neglect is ethical training. Most companies have a code of ethics written down somewhere, but whether that code is communicated or enforced is an entirely different matter. Writing in the Kansas City Journal, corporate compliance expert Arthur Chaykin observed that even "Enron...had a perfectly good code of ethics. However, no one was responsible for enforcing it, advocating it or serving as a clearing house for issues arising under it."

The problem, of course, is that companies do not have unlimited funds for employee training, and when training is not directly related to increasing profitability, it is often regarded as "nice-to-have" rather than essential.

E-learning is a highly suitable solution to this dilemma. According to the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative, when compared to traditional instructor-led courses, e-learning can reduce training costs by 30-60 per cent and cut the time needed for instruction by 20-40 per cent.

For example, last year Oracle delivered an internal ethics training course and examination simultaneously to more than 42,000 employees around the world, using its own Oracle Learning Management software. The software allowed all staff to take the course and the test in 30 minutes while seated at their desks, ensuring minimum disruption to the working day.

The training was rolled out at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time that a classroom-based course would have taken. Perhaps most importantly, because the software is linked to Oracle's overall Human Resources Management System, HR managers were able to track the results of the test in real time and watch out for any serious knowledge gaps.

Results and benefits like these are helping HR professionals to move e-learning out of the "IT ghetto", where it has been used almost exclusively by information technology workers to learn new computer programming skills or take online certification courses, and into the wider organisation.

"Oracle Learning Management was built from the ground up to provide both mid-sized and large companies and public-sector organisations with a complete learning management system that supports the full range of activities associated with training and development," said Joel Summers, senior vice president of Global HRMS and Learning Management Product Development at Oracle.

"Coupled with Thomson NETg's library, companies can now provide employees with world-class learning programs that are easy to deploy, targeted to job roles and aligned with organisational goals."