Continuing education goes online.

Use a bulletin board service format to meet distance-learning needs.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone talks about distance learning, but nobody does anything about it. Until now. The American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA), Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, sought and found an easy, inexpensive way to reach all members with educational offerings, particularly in rural and remote areas. Other associations can adapt this relatively simple formula for meeting member education needs while making a profit.

In 1994, AOTA continuing education staff brainstormed options for distance learning. We explored teleconferencing, interactive video, and a new form of online tutorial-style workshops, and concluded that online learning was the most usable and affordable and had the greatest potential reach.

How it works

Technically, designing and operating the online symposium was simple. AOTA has had a member bulletin board system (BBS) - The Reliable Source - for several years. We would offer a special conference on the Source, limiting access to workshop participants and faculty by using password protection. For our initial offering we chose a previously "live" workshop on the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) that had been canceled in early 1994 for lack of registrants. We created a workshop file directory that contained plain-text lecture material submitted by five faculty members, AOTA's position paper on ADA, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's public-domain ADA regulations and interpretive guidelines.

Upon registering, each participant received a password and operating instructions. The tutorial-style manual is for first-time BBS users and contains basic directions for accessing the Source, retrieving lecture files, and sending or receiving e-mail. Participants could choose to view the lesson files while connected to the Source and/or to download the material into their own computers to review at their convenience.

AOTA conducted the workshop during a six-week period. Individual progress was self-paced, as participants worked through portions of the material, submitted questions to faculty via e-mail, and responded to other participants. Participants signalled completion of the program by filling out an online evaluation form. Each earned 10 contact hours for one continuing education unit.

Measuring success

Remember that in its live incarnation, this workshop was canceled for lack of registration: 69 participants from 33 states - including Alaska and Hawaii - logged onto the ADA online workshop. AOTA reached new markets of members who would not attend live programs.

Online evaluations showed a 98 percent approval rating and people asked for more workshops. The event's major appeal was the ability to interact with both faculty and other participants using the BBS e-mail function. Participants seemed to feel much more comfortable asking questions and offering candid remarks in the anonymous BBS environment. This workshop generated 200 screens of questions and answers.

Start-up investment

AOTA's design phase for this first effort lasted several months. That adds up in staff, faculty, and overhead costs, but we broke even on development with the first 10 registrants. The design window is also far shorter for subsequent workshops. Plus, look at the real-time savings: no travel expenses, per diem, hotel accommodations, facilities, car rentals, voluminous workshop materials, and best of all, no more overpriced coffee breaks.

Here's the real gravy: Once the program is done, you have a finished workshop-on-a-disk, complete with hundreds of pages of referential questions and answers, ready to sell to members who didn't want it online, and even to other organizations. Since all expenses were incurred producing the online workshop, the disk version is virtually cost-free, representing pure profit.

A note here on copyright issues. AOTA has faculty sign releases and retains ownership of all workshop materials, including questions and answers generated online. Before publishing any of the latter, we delete names and sometimes edit questions to protect participants' confidentiality. You might consider including in registration materials a notice to this effect.

Factors to consider

Is an online workshop right for your association? As with every decision, the answer is, "It depends."

* Is your subject largely text-based? Simple text works better than anything requiring hands-on participation or live demonstration. That will change with the added graphical and interactive capabilities of CD-ROM and/or a Windows environment in the next three to five years, but for now focus on text-based programs.

* Are your members technology-friendly? AOTA's online workshop is remarkably simple to operate. Still, unless your members are comfortable with the concept, it won't fly.

* Do you have in house or can you hire the technological talent required to put a program together? And to be there when and if it breaks down? Regardless of your planning, a glitch will develop somewhere, sometime, somehow. AOTA's glitch was someone leaving a function running all weekend by accident, blocking program access for everyone else.

* Will your material sing as text-based education? Only you and serious beta (pre-market) testing can answer that. We've all been trapped in agonizingly boring, from-the-book lectures. Your program can't do that. It must hold the learner's interest, each step provoking an eager leap to the next.

AOTA's initial effort proved so successful that we immediately planned five more workshops. The response? More than 120 participants signed up for the second one, a month before its launch. Early this year, 165 members signed up for our latest offering - more than triple the participation of any live AOTA workshop.

Most important for you, of course, is getting ahead of the curve. Consider developing an online workshop before your members request one. They will give you a lot of credit and profits, and you will provide them a new service and the education they want.

RELATED ARTICLE: Technology at ASAE 

Like your own association, ASAE is experimenting with a variety of technological media for developing and delivering quality education to members. Last year, ASAE offered its Management Conference Proceedings in CD-ROM format. This year, we'll make them available from our home page. We're also gearing up to offer some online legal education and are preparing to launch via satellite a portion of one of the general sessions at ASAE Boston 1996, ASAE's annual meeting and exposition.

In a few short weeks, ASAE will open its doors to a second Association Technology Conference that offers educational opportunities and showcases a variety of applications you can use at your own association for purposes educational and otherwise. If you'd like to attend the conference, June 13-15 in Washington, D.C., and have not yet received registration materials, call ASAE's fax-on-demand service, (800) 622-ASAE, and request document 58007. International callers dial [phone].

From a resources standpoint, if you need help finding providers of the technology products or services you need to develop new educational opportunities or delivery systems, ASAE's 1996 Technology Solutions Directory, published in the April issue of ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT, may prove a useful reference. (The directory is also available online as a searchable database from ASAE's home page at http:/www.asaenet.org.) ASAE also offers members a discount on telecommunication service, such as audioconferencing and video-conferencing, through an agreement with MCI. For more information, call MCI, [phone].

RELATED ARTICLE: Do's and Don'ts for Online Seminars

At the American Occupational Therapy Association's national office (AOTA), Bethesda, Maryland, a full-time computer professional oversees operation of The Reliable Source bulletin board system. The distance learning event itself was organized and managed by an educational technologist with 15 years of BBS experience.

Even with these advantages, the premier electronic symposium was an important learning experience. Here's what we gleaned from that six-week program.

Seven do's

1. Work out all BBS computer hardware glitches well before the event begins.

2. Prepare a customized, user-Friendly guidebook with the basics.

3. Advertise the event. Be explicit about required equipment and the expected level of computer literacy. Be sure participants know how to download files from a host computer.

4. Be firm about faculty deadlines for submitting lecture material. Accept material only in ASCII format on diskettes to avoid retyping or scanning.

5. Be clear about how much and what kind of telephone technical support you will provide participants.

6. Place all lecture files on the BBS well before the event begins and thoroughly test the downloading process.

7. Ensure that nothing a participant can do online will cause a system lockup.

Four don'ts

1. Don't accept more registrations than your BBS can handle comfortably, or be prepared to add dial-in lines and modems.

2. Don't start without a clear refund policy in place and published in the workshop brochure.

3. Don't start if you're just establishing a bulletin board system from scratch. Carefully investigate available software with a view toward intuitive operation by the end user.

4. Don't think you know it all. In spite of all your efforts, be prepared to spend considerable time on the telephone offering technical assistance. Log all calls, recording for future reference the nature of the difficulty.

John B. Cox, CAE, is associate executive director, professional resources division, and Andrew Cohn is educational technologist at the American Occupational Therapy Association, Inc., Bethesda, Maryland.