Blueprint for an enterprise e-learning architecture. (Feature).

At the end of the 20th century, the first wave of Internet applications forever transformed the way the world conducts business. E-commerce revolutionized the way companies sold their products and services and the way they managed their supply chains. Customer support via the Internet changed the way businesses addressed customer needs and concerns, and Web-based, employee self-services empowered workers to access and seek information once limited to a select few. For the early adopters, these applications garnered huge productivity gains and cost savings, while increasing customer satisfaction, accelerating time to market, and providing competitive agility.

Many businesses today are implementing e-business models, hoping to replicate these business benefits to maintain their competitiveness, As companies rethink almost every aspect of the way their employees work, e-learning holds the potential of becoming the most widely used application in the enterprise. In this era of rapid change, employees around the world are expected to regularly assimilate vast amounts of new product, market and competitive information to compete effectively. Traditional instructor-led training cannot scale to meet these new learning challenges. E-learning, defined as Internet-enabled or Internet-enhanced learning, provides the tools to help companies tackle these learning challenges and make continual, lifelong learning a reality.

The Evolving Vision Of E-Learning

E-learning is evolving quickly. In its earliest stages, thousands of static pages of content were posted on the Web. It then became a quick and easy way to deliver instructions or learning modules to many people around the clock. The vision for e-learning going forward builds on this concept by continually imparting new bits of knowledge to thousands of people globally, in a variety of media, from many different subject matter experts. Employees will be able to choose when, where, how and how much they are ready to undertake in three-to five-minute learning increments as part of their workday.

Searching for these nuggets of knowledge will be easy, because each will be a self-contained, tagged object. These learning objects will be targeted to learners when they need them and only to those who need them. Practice exercises after each one will reinforce the learning. Completing these short learning sessions will become as natural as checking e-mail from work, home or on the road. Combining a number of these knowledge increments will result in a 30-minute lesson. Pre-assessments can identify the gap between what learners already know and what they need to know to effectively do their jobs. Post-assessment confirms if they retained the knowledge.

Along individualized learning roadmaps, employees and their managers will be able to track learning progress based upon business objectives. Learners and providers alike will be held accountable for their roles in the learning process. In short, e-learning is moving from a content-centric model to a personalized, "learner-centric" model that touches everyone associated with the enterprise, including partners and customers.

E-Learning Addresses Business Issues

E-learning is not simply "e-training." It is not merely about placing classes online to address training issues. E-learning encompasses training, education, information, communication, collaboration, knowledge management and performance management. It addresses business issues such as reducing costs, providing greater access to information and accountability for learning and increasing employee competence and competitive agility. E-learning is a critical element of any enterprise workforce optimization initiative.

Key E-Learning Stakeholders And Business Drivers

The key e-learning stakeholders can be divided into two broad categories--the consumers of e-learning and the providers of e-learning.

The consumers of e-learning are:

* Learners seeking knowledge, whether they are internal employees of the corporation or customers, channel partners and supply chain vendors external to the enterprise, and

* Managers responsible for guiding the learning and development of individuals and/or organizations.

The providers of e-learning are:

* Content providers -- instructors, subject matter experts (SMEs) and instructional designers -- who perform a needs analysis to determine the learning objectives required to make a targeted audience competent in performing a task. This group also includes curriculum developers who look at job roles and tasks and then specifically define the competencies (skills, behaviors and knowledge) required to do them.

* Administrators responsible for managing catalog items, schedules, resources (classrooms, instructors, equipment), lab time and pricing. They may also identify generic curricula for an organization and register content in the content management system.

The Key Business Drivers

Before beginning to build an architecture, it is important to understand the business needs that can be addressed with an e-learning solution: cost, access, modularity, timeliness, relevance and accountability. It's also worthy to acknowledge that the various stakeholders view the key business drivers from very different perspectives. While e-learning offers many new opportunities for learners and their managers, it is up to the e-learning content providers and administrators to tackle some of the challenges associated with this new vehicle to make e-learning a viable solution within their companies.

Cost. For learners and their managers, travel expenses associated with attending a week-long course represent a huge cost for a company, not to mention the opportunity costs of being away from the office or away from customers. By moving at least a portion of this learning online, the potential cost savings can be significant, especially for a large enterprise. Administrators of an learning solution must consider the most cost-effective ways to manage and integrate e-learning with the rest of the enterprise's applications. To reduce the cost of producing new e-learning modules, content providers must be held accountable for reusing and repurposing content available across the enterprise, rather than continually recreating it.

Access/scalability. Instructor-led training (ILT) poses timing, geographical and availability constraints that restrict access to learning. E-learning scales to make knowledge available to hundreds or thousands of learners simultaneously and at their convenience. E-learning also enables a company to better leverage global resources, using subject matter experts around the world. To meet the needs of a global, diverse audience, e-learning providers must offer multiple presentations of the same learning object based on a learner's profiling information. For example, a provider wouldn't attempt to stream TV-quality video to a learner in Asia using a 14.4 kbps modem.

Modularity. E-learning objects created in three-to-five minute increments can be reused in multiple training modules. This level of modularity also becomes an essential element in providing a highly personalized experience based on pre-assessments or other selection criteria.

Timeliness. Timeliness and pervasiveness of training in an era of rapid change and growth is an ongoing challenge today. ILT content creation is often the bottleneck for delivering learning, because it may rake six to twelve months to create a full, week-long course. Once the ILT is completed, it may not be offered for many weeks, may only be offered in a few locations and/or it may fill up quickly given the space constraints. E-learning can be as simple as providing video-on-demand (VOD) or audio-on-demand for anyone who immediately needs to know something to improve job performance.

Relevance. It's difficult to make all aspects of an ILT course relevant for all learners, since every learner enters a class with a different baseline of knowledge. E learning addresses this issue in two ways: by letting learners select only the information they need and by providing a prescribed learning target for the individuals or groups. Online pre-assessments will indicate the learning opportunity most relevant to each learner.

Accountability. Aside from certification programs, it has been difficult to hold learners accountable for what they've learned, hold managers accountable for the development of their teams, or hold instructional designers and instructors accountable for the effectiveness of their offerings. E-learning tracks learner progress with post-assessments online. Online feedback buttons allow learners to provide specific feedback on each small increment of learning, rather than limiting the feedback to a brief evaluation at the end of a 40-hour training session, The number of times an object is accessed provides an indicator of its value to the learner and a good measure of its effectiveness. Managers can create individualized roadmaps of learning to ensure their employees master the skills they need, Content providers can be held accountable for reusing and repurposing content based on the cost of their creations.

Design Principles And Implementation Guidelines 

With a clear picture of the business drivers fueling an e-learning initiative, it is appropriate to consider some implementation guidelines that can be used to build an e-learning solution architecture. Ideally, consider an enterprisewide e-learning architecture that is open, scalable and global, with plug-and-play capabilities.

Open Architecture

With the goal of creating a plug-and-play e-learning applications environment that supports interoperability among different vendor solutions, the framework of the architecture must be an open, standards-based model. A proprietary situation can be limiting. Be sure to choose the vendors and solutions that are aligned with the emerging standards for interoperability as defined by organizations such as AICC (The Aviation Industry CBT [Computer-Based Training] Committee), IMS (IMS Global Learning Consortium), SCORM (Sharable Course Object Reference Model) and IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).

Scalable. No matter how small an e-learning solution architecture may begin, it must be scalable, B-learning will probably become one of the most widely used applications in the enterprise, accessed by every employee. As the enterprise builds mote and mote objects, bear in mind that the object repository will grow quickly and the systems and applications required to manage it will need to scale as well. A scalable architecture delivers appropriate performance as broadly as possible, while providing the flexibility to increase the level of sophistication of the overall learning solution as it matures.

Global. Ideally, enterprises with a global employee base should localize the content, user experience and end-user support of its e-learning applications. If a subject matter expert wants to do a search in Chinese, for example, the metadata should account for that. This is a challenge, however, because most new e-learning solution vendors base their business models on initially addressing a U.S.-based audience, with ultimate plans to fine-tune global capabilities. Applications development providers today are creating technologies and standards that will nor only translate content, but will translate the applications themselves.

Integrated. The goal of seamless integration extends beyond the individual components that comprise an e-learning architecture. An e-learning architecture must integrate with all back-end application systems--including human resources, finance, performance management, knowledge management, entitlements and security--as well as the overall network infrastructure.

Flexible. B-learning has fueled the need for new types of applications. New, better, best-of-breed products will continue to emerge. A plug-and-play architecture needs to be adaptable to changing business requirements and processes, emerging technologies and new vendor solutions.

Rapid and timely. Set a goal of delivering incremental value rapidly, with an eye for continuing to add levels of sophistication over time, Given the critical issues that e-learning initiatives are attempting to address; companies do not have the luxury of 18-month implementation schedules. It is important to be able to implement new solutions without major architectural changes. The potential cost savings are significant, so enterprises will want to be able to reap business benefits quickly.

Since the e-learning concepts in practice today are new, one can assume the business model will continue to change as it matures. This is an appropriate place to take some risk, with rational experimentation. Remember, e-learning could be the most widely used enterprise application, so factor a significant level of complexity and mission criticality into the systems planning effort.

With the proper executive support, e-learning can provide significant strategic and competitive advantage for an enterprise. Depending on current circumstances, e-learning can also provide significant and immediate return on investment by reducing non-value-added expenditures such as travel.

The key to success in implementing any solution is to clearly capture and articulate the enterprise's most important business drivers and then create solutions to address those requirements. This will determine the appropriate level of complexity or sophistication required for content creation and management, delivery management and overall learning management services to be provided. Once an initial framework is implemented, it will be easy to add more functionality and capabilities, provided the e-learning solution architecture considers all possible components.

Keep in mind that this is still a very nascent industry, so standards and technologies will continue to emerge. Vendors will also continue to emerge or consolidate, so don't be trapped into thinking that a strategic, long-term decision relative to technology choices must be made. Focus on providing a reasonably open application platform that considers various functional elements to allow for future flexibility and rapid enhancement.

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Rick Crowley is director of Learning Architecture for the Internet Learning Solutions Group at Cisco. Cisco Systems Inc. is a worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. News and information are available at www.cisco.com.