Blending e-labs into the curriculum

One thing is for certain and that is that e-labs do not represent a stand-alone option – like so many new training tools, they need to form part of a blended solution. So how are vendors integrating e-labs into their curricula? Sharon McKechnie is an e-Learning Consultant for Spring, who has been using e-labs since March: “We like e-labs because they are real-world, unlike simulations. In conjunction with our partner, Productivity Point, we offer e-labs as an optional ingredient alongside classrooms and generic e-learning from NETg. We’ve found that the people who respond the best to the concept are the techies themselves. They really like the ability to get hands-on practice, which you can’t obtain with self-paced e-learning alone. These are people who like to roll their sleeves up and e-labs allow them to do that any time of day and night, from wherever they are.”

At Global Knowledge, e-labs are available to students regardless of their preferred learning medium, as Geoghegan explains: “We develop our classroom, self-paced e-learning and virtual classroom courses side-by-side, so they all share the same content. We’re already using e-labs to support our online offerings and we expect to extend this to the classroom as well, to reduce the amount of distributed hardware needed at each location.”

Logilent have been using e-labs for sometime, as part of a predominantly e-learning package, but have more recently opened up the e-labs as a separate offering for use by individual learners, training departments or resellers. Clarke: “As an example, unlimited access to all 112 Cisco labs for a year would cost an individual about $1000, whereas a single lab for a single person would cost $50. By contrast, Cisco themselves purchase from us and then offer labs free to all their channel partners.”

Other providers have constructed new blended solutions, but chosen for now to leave e-labs out of the equation. Brian Sutton is Chief Educator for QA Training: “In designing our new blended MSCE, we evaluated a wide range of alternative methods. We chose to go with a combination of web-based training from Microsoft, which incorporates guided practice using simulations; virtual classrooms for tutorials; and real face-to-face classrooms, exclusively for problem-solving activities in teams, based on real workplace scenarios. We felt we could achieve what we wanted better using this approach, but are keeping an eye on e-labs as a possible option for future courses.”