VideoLike college deans everywhere, Rick Taniguchi knows a thing or two about the high cost of education and the need to balance student expectations against administrative realities. Having lobbied for a $4 million expansion to his "campus," his careful cost-benefit approach will soon be put to the test.
As associate dean of learning technology at the University of Toyota, Taniguchi played an important role in the creation of the "Insight" project, the car maker's most substantive foray into Web-based training and development to date. Beginning next month, more than 50,000 Toyota and dealer employees will have online access to 100 hours of training on everything from car repair to financial management.
Toyota has offered Web-based training to some workers for more than a year, through a hodge-podge of systems that have grown increasingly costly and burdensome to administer. By centralizing and standardizing these efforts, Taniguchi says that the company can earn back its investment in just two years.
On Course
While computer-based training is at least 20 years old, the advent of the Internet has triggered what Gartner analysts Kathy Harris and Jim Lundy call the "hyperadoption" of E-learning. They say that by 2005, E-learning will be the single most-used application on the Web. Not all of that will be corporate use; primary, secondary, and higher education will also tap the Web extensively, as will government entities. But corporate investment in E-learning will grow, they say, from $2.1 billion last year to $33.4 billion by 2005. Another IT consulting firm, Meta Group, says that 60 percent of companies will deploy E-learning systems over the next two years.
Genuine E-learning is not the same as using the Web to retrieve information. As practiced at the corporate level, E-learning encompasses several distinct technologies or business practices. At the heart of most companies' E-learning programs is a "learning management system" (LMS), software that acts as a course catalog and registrar's office rolled into one. Priced from $250,000 to $350,000, an LMS provides a repository of information about course content, the ability to enroll employees in courses and, more important, a range of information pertaining to employee development: who has taken what course, how they've fared, whether they are working toward professional certifications or taking the course as part of a career-development plan, and so on.
"Authoring" or content-creation tools are used to develop Web-based courses or translate courses developed for classroom or other use into Web-ready versions. Web conferencing and collaborative technologies can be added to the mix so that the experience of Web-based learning is as interactive and, where appropriate, team-based as possible. And a host of companies provide professional services to tie these disparate elements together.
Proponents of E-learning claim the technology can yield impressive returns, from obvious savings on travel to harder-to-quantify benefits such as better customer service and a more-productive employee base. But they often face skepticism on the part of senior managers, who balk at the high price and wonder why current methods of training don't suffice.
At Toyota, Taniguchi says his team had to do an enormous amount of analysis to win funding for the project. Car makers are logical candidates for such systems; in Toyota's case, the E-learning system will not only help educate thousands of internal employees, but also tens of thousands of workers at its dealers, everyone from mechanics, who must be kept apprised of repair information, to salespeople, who need to know how to position Toyota and Lexus models against competing makes.
Toyota picked Vuepoint Corp. to provide an integrated LMS and set of authoring tools in part because it believes it can save $1 million a year simply by standardizing on one company's technology. Toyota develops many of its E-learning courses in conjunction with various third parties, which tend to create them for different technology platforms. Now they will all develop courses to work with Vuepoint's technology. And Toyota will reduce administrative overhead by using the Vuepoint LMS to enroll and track employee education, versus dozens of databases and related systems today.
Learn To Earn
But that ability to centralize functions, which is a major E-learning selling point, is also a hurdle. At many companies, employee training and education take place in many different business units, from marketing to service to field sales. The human-resources staff is often involved, but usually only on issues pertaining to employee hiring and orientation. Many companies talk about "human-capital development" and the importance of "lifelong learning," but to date few have put significant resources behind the rhetoric. In fact, employee education is one of the first areas companies cut back on any time money gets tight.
Tom Kelly, vice president of the Internet Learning Solutions Group at Cisco Systems Inc., says that companies need to bring a different attitude to E-learning. "CFOs have to understand that an E-learning system can provide the infrastructure for all kinds of collaboration and communication," he says. Having made almost 100 acquisitions over the past several years, Cisco uses the Web to broadcast speeches from senior executives and provide other information that can make all those new employees feel a part of the team.
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