Lessons in e-Learning

Computerworld - Although e-learning has been adopted by just a handful of Fortune 1,000 companies, those that have tapped into electronic training and instruction are praising its benefits, such as rapid delivery of content, student-progress monitoring and cost savings.

But before you take the plunge, be warned: Once these benefits become tangible, senior managers frequently view e-learning as a replacement for - not an adjunct to - invaluable face-to-face employee training. Despite its benefits, e-learning is still in its nascent stages.

	DEFINITION E-learning is the delivery of remote training over the Internet or a coporate intranet via a Web browser.

Corporate training is the biggest of the four e-learning market segments. (The others are the government, universities and K-12 education.) Earlier this year, Framingham, Mass.-based IDC estimated that as many as 350 companies were either marketing learning-management systems (usually server-based software), educational content or e-learning hosting services. IDC put the U.S. e-learning market at $2.2 billion last year.

"Unfortunately, e-learning is still not as widely used as it should be," says Bryan Chapman, an analyst at Brandon-hall.com, an e-learning research firm in Sunnyvale, Calif. Although about 60% of U.S. corporations have active e-learning initiatives, "a lot of those people are just dabbling in it," he says.

AT A GLANCE
Online Resources For more information about e-learning, go to the following Web sites: Integration of knowledge management and learning management from Brandon-hall.com E-learning starter kit from GeoLearning Inc. E-learning market statistics from Thinq Learning Solutions Inc. Six steps to e-learning from Brandon-hall.com

The Costs of Higher Education

The biggest change in e-learning in the past year has been a shift toward enterprisewide delivery of coursework, says Chapman. As a result, pricing for these systems has begun to resemble licensing fees for applications such as enterprise resource planning systems. Rather than being charged for the number of concurrent users, customers are being charged for the total number of users - which raises the total cost of e-learning, Chapman says.

Still, despite the high cost of entrance, companies can generally expect to knock 50% to 60% off their training costs by using e-learning applications, thanks in part to reduced training time via Web-based delivery, says Chapman. In addition, the cost of off-the-shelf e-learning courses has been dropping as the base of customers has increased.

E-learning tends to befit the kind of training where content doesn't change rapidly, since it may not be feasible to continually update teaching materials, Chapman says.