December 2006/January 2007

Volume 47, Number 3

The Corporate University, Online Training, and You

by Donna Brannan

What’s a corporate university, you ask? As defined in The Corporate University Handbook: Designing, Managing, and Growing a Successful Program (Mark Allen):

A corporate university is an educational entity that is a strategic tool designed to assist its parent organization in achieving its mission by conducting activities that cultivate individual and organizational learning, knowledge, and wisdom.

The company I work for decided to establish a corporate university to train its employees to deliver consistent and excellent service to its clients, in accordance with “the company way,” and I was asked to develop some e-learning modules for this university. An all-inclusive definition of e-learning would be “a structured, purposeful use of electronic systems in support of the learning process,” and modules refers to one complete e-learning lesson covering one subject.

Once I began working on this project, I realized that there was quite a bit I didn’t know about writing e-learning course material. I began a search for a consultant who had experience and a degree in instructional design and adult/corporate training. The consultant I located through the STC RMC provided me with some great suggestions based on the one module reviewed, including the following:

• Use the first screen of an e-learning module to draw learners in. Why would learners want to take this course? Make it meaningful and relevant to their work, and show that it will bring them some type of satisfaction.
• Include a case study so learners can identify with this experience throughout the course.
• Create characters for certain modules.
• Include appropriate graphics.

The modules were to precede a two-day employee workshop. The e-learning training portion was to be completed by the learners to teach them the location of tools on the company’s Intranet and the order of steps to be taken while working with the client. Everything learned while completing the training modules would be reviewed the first day of the workshop.

Suggestion: It would be best to create workshop training materials concurrently with e-learning training if your workshop is to be based on material from the online training sessions.

Some e-learning professionals recommend that e-learning be blended with classroom or workshop learning. According to Michael Allen’s Guide to E-Learning, by Michael W. Allen (2002), a well-nurtured learner will do better than a learner who is isolated or ignored. Blended solutions can be great—when done well, they can accomplish what no single form of instructional delivery can achieve. I think this is true in some situations where technical classes can be taught online, but some subjects, such as communications, would be best taught in a workshop (unless you are teaching online communications).

Here are some suggestions if you are establishing a corporate university. First, try to find out what has already been taught within your company. There may be written material already available that you can use as a starting point. If the corporate university is to teach employees how to do things the “company way,” you must research what that “way” is, usually within company goals and mission statements.

For creating your courses, consider using e-learning software such as Mindflash, so your IT department will not be taking on additional workload. From the Mindflash website: “Mindflash combines tools to create content (authoring tools), build and manage courses (learning content management system), and manage course enrollment and reports (learner management system) at a fraction of the cost of older systems.” You can locate them at www.mindflash.com and can begin using this software right away by creating your documents in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or other application.

What are some tips from the experts for creating your online courses? In addition to using suggestions made by our e-learning consultant, I scanned the pages of Michael Allen’s Guide to e-Learning and e-Learning and the Science of Instruction (Ruth Colvin Clark). Michael W. Allen lists three priorities for training success:

• Ensure learners are highly motivated to learn. Make this your first priority. “Highly motivated learners will find a way to learn.”
• Guide learners to appropriate content. “Highly motivated learners are eager to get their hands on anything that will help them learn.”
• Provide a meaningful and memorable learning experience “If a learner can’t understand the learning experience, or the experience seems irrelevant, it is obviously a waste of time for that individual. If a learner can’t remember what was learned, the experience is similarly unproductive.”

E-learning can provide all three!

e-Learning and the Science of Instruction gives these recommendations for creating e-learning material:

• Make graphics relevant, not decorative.
• Use animation to illustrate processes, procedures, and principles.
• Use organizational graphics to show relationships among ideas or lesson topics.
• Place corresponding words and graphics near each other.
• Present words as speech rather than onscreen text.
• Avoid lessons with extraneous sounds, pictures, and words.

I suggest that you not try to achieve a “perfect” module the first time. Do your best, get it online, have it tested, and go for it! Minor tweaks can be made at a later time. The modules for our university, for example, will be updated on a continuing basis as the company changes and technology develops.

Another book our consultant recommended is Designing Web-Based Training, by Bill Horton. If you would like the contact information for the consultant our company retained, please email me at news@stcrmc.org.

Resources

Michael Allen’s Guide to e-Learning, Michael W. Allen. Wiley, 2002.

e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer. Pfeiffer, 2002.

The Corporate University Handbook: Designing, Managing, and Growing a Successful Program, Mark Allen, editor. American Management Association, 2002.

Designing Web-Based Training, William Horton. Wiley, 2000.

Mindflash e-learning software: www.mindflash.com