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Best of breed

Most trainers , and indeed teachers , are big fish in relatively small ponds. Because classroom training requires real people to be in real contact with each other, it helps if the trainer and the trainee are in the same time zone, preferably the same town. Being the best trainer in the use of Microsoft Office in Basingstoke will not win you fame but it will win you contracts from companies just down the road.

If e-learning really takes off, things will never be the same. Because IT is much the same world-wide (thanks to Microsoft for being a monopoly), e-learning materials can be and increasingly are built for a global market. The high costs of development can then be offset by the potential revenues , not only from Basingstoke, or even the USA and Europe, but also such promising little markets as India and China.

The implication of all this? Well, whether you’re in Basingstoke or Beijing, with the help of the Internet, you can access the best training going in any subject you care to mention. Being the 1000 ^th best Java trainer in the world could earn you a very good living in the classroom era, but puts you way out of the reckoning when customers can afford to choose best of breed.

If it’s any comfort , university professors should be equally anxious. You want an MBA? Don’t bother with the local offerings, there’s one going at half the price and employing the world’s top experts from a new online college in New Zealand.

Survival tactics

What are the options for the classroom trainer in an online world? Well you could try good old-fashioned competition. Rubbish the benefits of e-learning and exploit the virtues of the classroom. Make sure that you deliver the best classroom training, training that makes optimum use of face-to-face tuition and group interaction. Lectures and lengthy presentations are out. Challenge the group . Help them explore the technology and their own potential. Get them to work together to solve problems and provide each other with support and encouragement. Concentrate on the practical. Most of us (some programmers that I know excepted) are social animals and will be happy to participate in the occasional group learning activity, even if we’re also e-learners. In the same way, e-commerce won’t stop us enjoying our favourite outdoor leisure activity - shopping.

But if you can’t beat them and you haven’t the funds to consider early retirement, then you could consider joining them. If you’re thinking of tackling the giant publishers head on then you’ve probably got so much money that you wouldn’t be reading this book at all – you’d have someone to do that sort of thing. For the rest of us, there are three realistic choices: (1) see where you can add value to e-learning materials already out there; (2) look to create something genuinely unique; (3) search for untapped markets.

Adding value

Most off-the-shelf e-learning products do a good job, but they often fail to provide a completely self-contained solution. Often there’s a gap between what the course teaches and the specific way that an organisation works. You can add value by creating additional online materials that fill this gap, providing the user with not only the general principles but also the specific usage. The DfES did this when they introduced Windows 95 across their organisation: to supplement online courses from NETg and others, they created a range of additional guides and job aids for easy reference on their intranet.

You can also add value by providing tutorial support to e-learners. Using the interpersonal skills you’ve acquired as a trainer, you’re well placed to offer subject-matter expertise and coaching, whether online or face-to-face.

You may be able to use your classroom training skills more directly, by presenting real-time seminars online. Although synchronous communication on the Internet is limited at present by the availability of bandwidth, it is already feasible to combine one-way video, PowerPoint presentations, multi-way audio and text-based chat, along with application sharing, assessment questions and audience polling, to create truly interactive sessions for large numbers ; ideal when your audience is widely dispersed geographically .

Another option is to build integrated curricula, combining face-to-face workshops with online materials. Exploit the benefits of the classroom, not necessarily to present new learning material, but for group projects, discussion and additional hands-on practice.

Yet another possibility is to provide accreditation services for e-learners. You could proctor online examinations or assess students’ assignments and portfolios of work. There will continue to be opportunities in this field as long as online assessments are restricted in the learning objectives that they are capable of measuring, and as long as it is difficult to authenticate students without face-to-face contact.

Finally, your organisation could act as an e-learning gateway for your clients . It is increasingly easy to establish your own, branded learning portal, with access to a wide range of learning resources, e-commerce facilities and collaboration tools.

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