Virtual Learning – Now!

Virtual Learning has become a part of many organisations

knowledge management systems over the past decade, with a variety of
different methods being used. Knowledge management is aimed at
capturing, managing, and disseminating knowledge, in usable forms, as a
corporate intellectual asset.

“What organizations know will provide them with their single most important edge.”

Current Scenario – Overview of status of Virtual Learning in

Organizations
At present, aspects like product features, quality, and pricing are more
or less same among competitors leading to negligible or no
differentiation or brand loyalty based on product.
‘Knowledge base’ of the organization is the competitive edge now.
It’s all about knowledge management – “Quickly capturing and
disseminating best practices, radical improvements, and information
on key customers”.
There is a need for better virtual learning solutions which will allow
information to be well structured and organized and to be delivered in
the most efficient and fastest manner to the employees (The Herridge
Group, 2002).

The current technology allows the organizations for tagging,

storing, and displaying precisely the right digitized information
and learning at the job-site at the moment of need through their
learning management systems (LMSs).
The present learning management systems offer the
functionality to initiate and exhibit content and to manage the
communication between performers and the learning or
performance resources (The Herridge Group, 2002).
Present web based learning tools like audio-video,
teleconferencing provide the base for effective virtual learning
implementations such as CISCO’s WebEx.
Virtual learning is on verge of being revolutionised with the
advent of new technologies such as open source tools, mobile
learning technologies, Smartphones, PDAs, and personal
learning environments. Hence, there is need of a radical
improvement in the ways in which the virtual learning can
delivered be delivered successfully and intermittently across all
these platforms. According to a senior employee of CISCO, it is
very necessary that the present virtual learning platforms are extended
across all of these platforms which would foster collaboration and
partnerships amongst the learners. These new approaches to the
design of corporate learning and performance support are focussing on

education is; rather e-learning will be about meeting the learner’s needs for improved performanc
 chunked, reusable content that relates directly to specific performance
requirements.

The recent advancements in the various technology areas of delivering

information across different locations and different platforms have
converged to form virtual learning providing access to content anywhere,
anytime increasing the value of the learning experience.

Organizations across the globe have adapted to various variants of

virtual learning and consider virtual learning as one of their long term
reusable learning strategies. Knowledge management and performance
management has become far more efficient and scalable. Currently,
according to a senior employee, CISCO uses a global learning platform
which is accessible to everybody, anywhere and has a central storage.
The learning management systems in CISCO normally use technologies
like Saba. The training and learning is learner-centric and specific in
nature. For instance, every CISCO sales employee outside the U.S has to
take the Foreign Acts training on the learning platform if he/she needs to
sell any product outside the U.S. But, different organizations use virtual
learning and e-learning according to their needs and business goals.
These needs may vary for different organizations depending on which
industry and sector of market they belong to.

In January 2010 ASTD published a survey on ‘E-Learning Trends’

which was conducted in November-December 2009 across 210
organizations. The most important question asked to the organizations
was ‘How does your organization uses e-learning’. The result for this
particular survey question is shown in the bar graph below (ASTD.Org,
2010).

It can be inferred that e-learning is extensively used by

organizations for various purposes such as customer service training and
salesforce training. Rightly said by a senior sales employee of CISCO,
salesforce training is very crucial for updating the sales skills of the
employees and also to educate the partners and clients involved in the
whole sales ecosystem. These data indicate that virtual learning has
become an unavoidable strategy of many of the global corporations.
However, the changing landscape of technology and the economic &
business challenges have forced organizations to explore new frontiers.
Current Forms of Virtual Learning
Virtual Learning has become a part of many organisations
knowledge management systems over the past decade, with a variety of
different methods being used. This section will outline what is currently
available to organisations. Virtual learning is delivered, currently, in the
following two ways (IBM.Com, 2010):

Based on these two generic ways of delivering information over

the internet, there are many tools and technologies which are currently
being used in organizations for virtual learning and training. Some of
these are simple, and some are more complex depending upon their
degree of difficulty in implementation and the infrastructure required for
delivering them in a normal mode across various platforms. Examples
some of these e-learning technologies are shown below:
 It is not uncommon for these different methods of learning to be
mixed together. This can often reduce the limiting factors of one form of
e-learning and increase the availability of learning materials on different
platforms. Moreover, it provides the learner a wider range of options to
access learning and training in a virtual environment. For example, Google
Wave can be used by collaborators to edit a document simultaneously in
real time and at the same time they can also carry on video messaging on
some other application such as VoIP.
These technologies or tools can be used for various training and
learning purposes by the organizations based on their specific business
and performance needs. Though most of the organizations, currently, use
various tools for conducting in-house virtual learning and training, the
most popular tools can be identified from the 2010 ASTD ‘E-Learning
Survey’ below (ASTD.Org, 2010).
Each of these tools/technologies have their level of interactivity
which depends on various characteristics such as the richness of the
audio-video stream, ease of navigation, degree of engagement,
availability, portability and certainly, look and feel. There are different
levels of interactivity (low, moderate, high) depending on the e-learning
method that is chosen. These are shown in table blow:
Which direction is virtual learning heading towards?

Virtual learning, or for the fact of the matter, e-learning has come a
long way in the last decade or so. There has been a tremendous
transgression form the traditional computer-based training systems to
more dynamic and rapid learning management systems. Furthermore, the
arrival of Web 2.0, open source tools, virtualisation, SaaS, e-book readers,
tablet PCs and social media has thrown up several opportunities to
harness information and knowledge in the most cost-effective, optimized
and efficient manner.

However, according to Gartner Education Hype Cycle 2009, the

most interesting opportunities are yet to come or are in their due course
of their mainstream adoption. The education hype cycle can be seen in
the figure below (Jimdonovan.net.nz, 2009).
Leading Trends in Virtual Learning

 Virtual Classrooms

‘Virtual Classrooms’ have

been one of the most used
synchronous method of delivering
learning and training in most kind
of local and global organizations.
This method allows the
synchronous teaching, lectures,
simulation, demonstration and
peer collaboration over the web.
The main benefit of virtual
classrooms is that users who are
disparately located can ‘come together’ online to listen, view and interact
with the live instructors and their fellow learners in a scheduled event
(The Herridge Group, 2002). The technology and infrastructure required
for establishment of Virtual Classrooms, in most of the cases is available
with the organizations and is affordable as well.

However, the transition to virtual classrooms is mostly because of

financial reasons than instructional. Organizations perceive virtual
classrooms as the way to reduce travel time, cost of travel and
importantly, the cost of replacing the instructor every time. Moreover, the
virtual classrooms allow the organizations to develop a repository of
reusable learning and training materials, hence increasing their
knowledge base (The Herridge Group, 2002).

Are ‘Virtual Classrooms’ worth it?

Though virtual classrooms provide learner-trainer and learner-learner

interaction, it does not propagate personalization and collaboration of
work and ideas as it might be in a regular classroom. Hence, if the goal of
the learning process is to advocate team-work and collaboration virtual
classrooms might not be the best answer. Moreover, the number of
learners that can possibly participate in an online virtual classroom and
still have some level of interactivity is, most often, lesser than that in the
situation of face-to-face learning.

However, virtual classroom is cheaper to develop in comparison to the

asynchronous web-modules and in some instances, could be the best
solution. For example-

✔ Training on a new software deployment

✔ Allowing access to a particular expert for a short interval with the
technology and facilitating a larger, geographically diverse group to
participate.
✔ Short discussion for a key change.
✔ Advocating collaboration and communities of practice.

But still, virtual class rooms have their own share of challenges, some of
which are:
1. The content should be properly designed for the learners, the module
tasks, and most importantly, the delivery mechanism.
2. The facilitator should be appropriately trained and skilled in managing
the learning technology and engaging the audience.
3. There should be a high degree of reliability in the learning
technology.
4. The training material should be more rich and interactive in nature
and should not be just a cut and pasted content from an already existing
classroom course.

Conclusively, virtual classrooms can be considered as a cost-effective

method of delivering learning with its own share of pros and cons.

✔ HP’s Virtual Classroom for Toyota Canada

Toyota Canada utilizes the HP Virtual Classroom for various types of
training purposes both in English and French. For every new car launch, a
HP Virtual Classroom trainer starts going through a power point
presentation displaying the novel features, changes in the new car and
compares it with the similar releases from the competitors. Moreover, the
product specialists, throughout this process can ask questions by using
the ‘hands-up’ feature from the facilitator.
 (HP.Com, 2003)

 Peer-to-Peer Learning

Peer-to-Peer or P2P signifies inclusion of collaboration tools and

developing collaboration into virtual learning programs. P2P is a
“networking technology that enables the sharing of resource. The peers
are the individual computers that make up the network” (Hoffman, 2002).
This technology facilitates the virtual learners to share information and
data by allowing one computer to connect straightaway with another
computer on a network without going via a file server. This inter-
connection allows creating shared workspaces in which learners can easily
collaborate, communicate and exchange ideas (Hoffman, 2002).

Challenges of Peer-to-Peer learning

○ To ensure accuracy & validity of the available information? Internet

is a deluge of information- how to sift out the most relevant and
meaningful data?
○ To ensure privacy and data security on P2P links. To make it sure
that only the designated learner can access the information
displayed (Hoffman, 2002).

Potential market for P2P: Collaborators and group learners dispersed

across countries.
 Blended Learning

If we go by the latest
buzz in the virtual learning or e-
learing sphere, ‘blended
learning’ is the most talked
about learning method by the
learning pundits. As the name
suggests blended learning is
the method where the
organization encapsulates
different modalities of training
such as instructor-led, face-to-
face, self paced learning into
single combined service. Most
of the global organizations
perceive blended learning environments as the solution to provide the
learners the vastness of content, diverse style and the fastness of access
to information and knowledge. Moreover, certain types of training and
learning do require a blended approach to be efficient and effective, as
highlighted by a senior sales employee of CISCO. For example, blended
learning can do wonders for the training of new hires in an organization by
facilitating both basic corporate training, which is more suited to a self-
paced online course and role-specific training which has more one-to-one
interaction with an experienced trainer or a peer. The current LMS
technologies, albeit slowly, ia keeping pace in its calibre to cater blended
approaches.

Challenges of Blended Learning

○ Though organizations have blended learning solutions, they lack a

clearly defined strategy of implementing them for their particular
needs.
○ Organizations lack an evaluation technique for tracking the progress
of completion of tasks across various learning modalities within a
single program.
○ The organizations need a clear cut strategy to make a smooth
migration from the traditional methods to blended approaches of
learning.
○ The organizations are always sceptical of migrating to a new
learning technology being wary of losing the existing comfort level
(The Herridge Group, 2002).

What needs to be done

✔ Develop a robust strategy for implementing blended approach.

 ✔ Formulate tactical evaluation techniques to determine the existing
platform’s resilience to adapt and deliver blended learning.
✔ Determine and carry out a pilot study, beforehand, to know how the
implementation of blended learning might affect the learning
process of the employees and their overall performance.
✔ Ensure that the transition does not impact the satisfaction levels of
the learners and the facilitators (The Herridge Group, 2002).

(Codianni, 2009)

 Open Source Tools

At present, according to
an estimation there than
40 vendors of open source
LMS products (few of the
most renowned are
Moodle, ILIAS, eduplone,
Claroline and SAKAI).

Most of these open source

learning tools have their
own extensive developer
base and dedicated
communities and their
effectiveness pose strong candidacy as alternatives to the existing
expensive commercial learning products. Some of the characteristics that
are in support of making a verdict regarding an Open Source learning
applications are associated to cost savings, stability, performance and
access to code. Moreover, for ensuring that users in the near future as
well as the longer term have access to the best available applications,
these Open Source software applications should be built on open
standards (Carabaneanu, 2010).
Appendix: Major Learning Tools in Current Practice
In current practice, organizations along with their in-house global
learning systems also use various web 2.0, social networking, VoIP tools
for virtual learning and training across the length and breadth of the
organizational structure. However, each of these tools has its own share of
challenges, strengths and weaknesses. Some of these aspects of the
major tools in practice are shown below (Mason, 2008):
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