Once the domain of colleges and universities, distance education is becoming more crucial for companies that wish to improve communications with employees, vendors and customers.

Dave Tranberg has the Holy Grail of the technology world, that all-important Something the Competition Doesn't Have — in this case — distance education. And, as luck would have it, that Something is a commonplace tool once relegated to college campuses and trade schools. Instead of night courses, Tranberg’s company, Roswell-based Sellera, uses distance education to push product details out to 250 sales people in showrooms nationwide. ‘What’s more, Sellera gets those details out just about as fast as clients Earthlink, Klipsch Audio Technologies and SimpleTech can ship their newest offerings.

“We can do turnaround and change content in a course in a matter of days,” says Tranberg, Sellera’s CEO, who started the company in 2002 after 24 years in the sales channel field when he discovered Design-a-Course, an online course-in-a-box sold by another Georgia company, Norcross-based MindIQ. Design-a-Course allows Sellera to churn out online mini-courses to train showroom personnel in the rapidly changing electronics market. “It’s more effective than posting a brochure to a website.”

Such is the state of distance learning at the start of the 21st century. Also known as “elearning” or “virtual learning,” the idea is to take virtually anything the information explosion can dish out and encapsulate it into online sessions or live webcasts virtually anywhere in the world — from retail showrooms to doctors’ offices. And it couldn't come at a better time. Even as the three Ts (travel, telecommunications and technology) shrink our crowded world, proponents say elearning is harnessing a barrage of information to help save countless travel dollars, and even diagnose life-threatening illness.

DISTANCE LEARNING ISN’T JUST SAVING DOLLARS,
IT'S SAVING LiVES

When the SARS epidemic hit, for instance, course designers at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta sprang into action to get webcasts detailing symptoms and treatment to American doctors and nurses who has never before seen the disease.

Similar emergency webcast came out for smallpox and anthrax. This sort of blanket education of the medical community is now routine for the CDC, which has an emergency response team that puts together web-casts on the latest public health threat at a moment’s notice, says Nancy Gathany, instructional designer at the CDC. At the CDC’s planned Global Communications Center, the agency plans to expand its national public training network into a worldwide network.

WiLL elearning BECOME JUST LiKE GETTiNG THE MORNING COFFEE?

Tendrils of virtual learning connections creep like kudzu throughout Georgia, weaving through industry, universities and government. And if prognosticators such as Michael Dell are right in saying that 2004 is the year that companies will be updating their old IT equipment, then demand will be up for IT training, as well. So, many in the elearning industry see 2004 yielding a new crop of opportunities for course con tent and software designers, as well as hardware providers that power elearning.

That’s the hope of Louis Bernstein, CEO of MindIQ, which has been offering classroom IT training since 1986. The company, named one of Inc magazine’s top 500 entrepreneurial companies in 2002, added computer-based training in 1995 — well before most companies were comfortable with the idea. “We were a little bit ahead of the curve,” Bernstein says. Then, last year, sales shot up for MindIQ’s revamped flagship elearning product, Design-a-Course. The idea of computer-based learning is finally catching on, says Bernstein, who estimates that Design-a-Course accounted for 10% of MindIQ’s 2003 sales a number he expects to grow.

Many companies are just barely scratching the surface, says Bernstein, who believes the best use of e-learning is when it “becomes as much of a worker's daily routine as getting the morning coffee, and hopefully as stimulating.” In other words, training modules work best when employees get in the habit of using them regularly.

To ensure that vendors peruse its courses, Sellera, for instance, stipulates that sales associates must be certified to sell its client’s products by scoring a passing grade on a 20-question quiz. The courses take about half an hour to complete. While many manufacturers simply provide sales associates with a paper or online brochure, Sellera takes the details from clients’ product brochures, plugs them into a Design-a-Course template and posts it to the Web. In this way, Sellera brings manufacturers’ showrooms to salespeople — no matter where they are keeping them updated on product lines. That’s something a brochure can’t do. elearning also works with prospective employees. MindIQ, for example, offers online assessments for weeding out job applicants or finding weak spots. An applicant claiming to be a Unix expert. for instance, can take an online assessment to see if their Unix skills are up to par.

UNIVERSITY PARTNERS

Georgia's universities — some of the state’s earliest adopters of e-learning — are also partnering with industry to develop online training programs. Last year, for example, executives at HomeBanc realized they had the beginnings of a training problem: a rapidly-changing mortgage market, growing work-force and several offices located a full day’s drive from the company’s Atlanta home base. So HomeBanc turned to Kennesaw State University to revamp its course offerings, which will include online refresher courses for HomeBanc’s 17 mortgage stores in three states.

“ The old days of the 20-year or 30-year fixed mortgage, that’s changed,” says Gordon Grant, senior vice president at HomeBanc, which offers more than 170 mortgage products and has 1,300 employees. “To try to educate our workforce on which one is the right one and the particular underwriting requirements of each loan type, it’s gotten far trickier and more complex than it ever was. When we were a much smaller company we could afford to send a trainer out in the field. But as we’ve gotten bigger and bigger, we just can’t do it. We think the perfect medium to do it is through e-learning.”

While HomeBanc’s mortgage information is complex, online learning can encompass some even more esoteric offerings, such as digital signal processing. When Texas Instruments needed a refresher for its engineers, the company turned to Georgia Tech. The school routinely puts together non-degree courses (“short-courses” in Georgia Tech-speak), sometimes traveling to the client, as when the school brought a course to Las Vegas for defense contractors.

Mission control for Georgia Tech’s distance learning efforts is the Global Learning Center, a state-of-the-art facility located in the new Technology Square that includes production studios for interactive Web conferencing. While the Global Learning Center gets most of its mileage from the school’s degree programs, the site is also rented out for interactive meetings, says Bill Webfer, vice provost for distance learning and professional education. About the only limits to Tech’s e-learning capabilities are the time and interests of its professors. ‘As a university, we’ve tried to make our distance learning and short courses jive with the interests of faculty,” Webfer says.

Distance learning also helps Georgia Tech keep close ties with its remote campuses in Savannah, France and Singapore. It’s also great for emergencies, as when a Georgia Tech mechanical engineering student was called up to serve in the Iraq conflict, but was still able to finish his classes remotely.

Technology aside, the most effective distance learning blends in classroom time, too, according to education experts. Indeed, 70% of all training is done with a live instructor, according to Training magazine’s (www.trainingmag.com) annual research survey. At HomeBanc, for example, its 7- to 9-week boot camp at the Atlanta headquarters, which consists of intensive classes, complete with daily assignments, midterm and final exam, will always be part of its corporate culture. Online learning will serve as a refresher for its “troops in the fields,” says Homeflanc’s Grant.

DISTANCE LEARNING FACES BARRIERS

Fot the most part, the dream of e-learning as an integral part 0f daily work life has a way to go befhre reaching its fill potential, Bernstein says. Money learning curves, time and management buy-in seem to be the main obstacles, according to his company’s surveys. Another obstacle is sifting through the range of onlinelearning choices, which includes anything from live virtual meetings (synchronous) to learning modules that users can access anytime, anywhere (asynchronous).

Costs vary, but asynchronous learning modules are considerably less costly than live conferences. MindIQ's website quotes the standard price for training 1,000 employees, on an unlimited number of courses, at $4.29 per student annually; Web-ex, one of the leaders in online conferencing tools, quotes a price on its site of $132 per hour for four attendees — assuming all the necessary cameras and monitors are provided by the customer.

While live virtual meetings (synchronous) are considerably more expensive requiring a large investment in specia cameras and software, they can cost considerably less than airfare. For a company like Inovis — where weekly team meeting with offices in California, Georgia, Texa and Germany are a must — online conferences with Web-ex’s Meeting Center and Microsoft’s Net Meeting are a way to keep travel costs down. Screen-sharing, another version of online meetings, enables Inovis’s far-flung team members to meet via telephone and share PC screens as they pour over spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations together.

Synchronous meetings, however, have their own set of challenges. First, the equipment has to match. “Everybody better have the same bandwidth and speed and capability,” says Georgia Tech’s Webfer, who finds most companies want to use live conferencing very sparingly. Second, live conferences only work when everyone agrees to sit down at the same time, just as in actual live meetings. “Most folks we’ve dealt with don’t want to do synchronous because they can’t tie their employees down,” Webfer says. And third, firewalls — vital in the high-speed Internet world present obstacles that must be overcome.

Often, a blending of high-tech and low-tech works best, training experts say, such as when the CDC uses live webcasts followed up with toll-free call-in numbers, e-mail discussions, online tutorials and even instructional videotapes mailed out to groups on request.

All in all, if the limits of equipment and people are taken into account, live online meetings do serve a purpose, especially when blended with phone calls and other communication. “You gotta hit the sweet spot,” advises Webfer.

At any rate, whether synchronous or asynchronous, distance education is graduating to a flexible, powerful tool for business and government. Using the Internet, virtual learning offers a way to get knowledge to the people who need it, when they need it.