Going the Distance with E-learning

Going the Distance with E-learning

ASPs can deliver your professional development programs pronto.

by Willie Schatz

"Using an ASP [application service provider] was far and away the best move we made in gaining the most cost-effective access to the applications we were seeking," says Jeff De Cagna, managing director, strategic learning and development, for the Special Libraries Association (SLA), Washington, D.C. The 13,000-member organization for information professionals used Boxwood Technology, Inc., Hunt Valley, Maryland, to help it establish a career services area on its Web site (www.sla.org) and is now identifying partners with which to work on its distance learning program.

The ASP advantage

Prior to using Boxwood’s ASP solution for its career services offering, "We were working in-house," says De Cagna, "which means manually posting jobs to the career site. If the jobs got to us by Wednesday, we’d get them up by Friday. Otherwise, we’d have to wait a week. There was no functionality. So it was clear that we were going to have to outsource, because I knew that we could do better, but we didn’t have the staff to do it ourselves."

Now the staff doesn’t have to worry about it. SLA’s customized site, operating within Boxwood’s proprietary, private-label shell, runs almost on its own with what De Cagna describes as functionality comparable to Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com. The former members-only career site has morphed into an open-access system that entices employers to post more attractive jobs than when it was closed, and has become an indispensable career tool for information professionals. Yet members still get what they pay for with services such as preferred access to new job postings and online career advice from other member professionals. And following SLA’s positive experience with Boxwood, De Cagna is eager to move forward with an ASP partnership in the area of distance learning.

"As we plan our distance learning efforts, we want to make sure that we have a quality product as well as a quality partner," De Cagna says. "Our chief concern is making sure that the technologies that we use make sense for our members and are both useful and usable. That’s more than having the latest and greatest; it’s also having someone to help when the technology doesn’t work in the way that you anticipated."

It’s also about having applications that will follow what De Cagna calls the "true North" of SLA’s learning and development efforts, as articulated by its two guiding questions: How can information and knowledge professionals affect positive change and create their most desired futures through learning? How can information and knowledge professionals become indispensable in the 21st century?

In addition, SLA’s distance learning approaches must help the staff create learning opportunities that are consistent with the organization’s five core principles of learning:

1. Learning is a primary and critical activity of human existence;

2. Learning is best as a social, collaborative, and generative process;

3. Learning must involve support and challenge;

4. Learning should be about changing thinking and action; and

5. Learning should be a profoundly liberating, inspirational, and transformational endeavor.

Any providers with products that don’t help De Cagna and his team live up to these principles are unlikely to do business with SLA.

"Those questions and principles are about how to create a rich and meaningful experience for our members with the mission of helping them to become more effective learners," says De Cagna. "We want to be disciplined in selecting technology opportunities and partnerships that help us provide a true value proposition around distance learning. That means bringing to the organization a fairly inexpensive and accessible tool that will facilitate change."

Future expectations

De Cagna has plenty of company. (See "What’s up with ASPs?" and "ASPs A La Carte" in the May 2001 issue of association management for more information on associations that are adopting the ASP model.) According to a recent survey by The Industry Standard (www.thestandard

.com), researchers agree that the ASP market will explode in the next four years; they just disagree on the size of the bang. IDC claims businesses will spend $7.8 billion on application services by 2004, six times more than this year’s expected $1.3 billion. The Gartner Group, Stamford, Connecticut, is more optimistic, predicting a $25.3 billion market by 2004, about three times more than this year’s $8.4 billion. Different reporting methods account for the discrepancy in the forecasts. But either number means big bucks are available for vendors that can seize the moment.

Communication is the killer app for ASPs. Sixty percent of the companies responding to The Industry Standard’s survey access their e-mail, messaging, and groupware through an ASP. E-commerce and finance and accounting tied for the second-most-used applications with 37 percent, one percentage point higher than education and training applications. One third of the respondents indicated that "to avoid maintaining and supporting an in-house application" was their primary reason for using ASPs. Approximately one fifth cited either a shorter implementation cycle, lower cost, or access to high-quality applications as their major driver for using ASPs. Ironically, it would seem that most information technology professionals are hearing without listening—or watching without seeing. Asked about their familiarity with the term application service provider, 58 percent said they were "not familiar" with it, 24 percent had "only heard the term," 13 percent had "some knowledge of the term," and only 5 percent had "detailed knowledge" of the term.

But those who don’t get it better do so quickly, because, like it or not, ASPs are where it’s at.

Purposeful partnerships

"ASPs are the only way to go for our technology-based education programs," says Amy Blagriff, ASAE’s manager of distance learning. "Compared to the dot-com world, things move slowly within associations, even when there’s a sense of urgency. With an ASP, I can tell my partner that I have a problem and literally five minutes later it’s fixed. Associations typically are not set up to produce results that quickly."

Taking the lead. "There’s a lot involved with e-learning programs—like the need for HTML programmers and instructional course designers," adds Blagriff. "Our members provide us assistance with content development, but there is no way that they can take on all of the pieces of course development, implementation, and launch. And if I had tried to do our program internally it never would have gotten off the ground. We simply don’t have sufficient staffing support."

Instead, Blagriff conducted exhaustive Internet research to evaluate the many alternative vendor technology solutions. Working with key members of the ASAE staff, Blagriff eventually chose to partner with two ASPs. "We’re using KRM Information Services, Eau Claire, Wisconsin," says Blagriff, "for our 90-minute telephone and Web-based

virtual seminars (www.krm.com/asae), and CertiLearn, Falls Church, Virginia, for the online, instructor-led School of Association Management (desktopasae.certilearn.com).

"The success of the programs speaks to the value of our partnerships," says Blagriff. "At a cost of $149 per site for our members, the virtual seminars have grown from an initial base of about 100 listeners to more than 400 for recent programs." Meanwhile, the first term (February–April 2001) of the School of Association Management attracted more than 60 students—popularity that supported the plan to offer future courses on a quarterly basis. "While it is unlikely that distance learning will ever replace live education programs and in-person networking," concludes Blagriff, "the addition of distance learning programs to association offerings is a growing and promising phenomenon."

Collaborating with colleagues. The American Society of Consulting Arborists (ASCA), Rockville, Maryland, is taking a slightly different path in putting together its distance learning program. The 419-member association’s traditional education workshops had been bleeding red ink for years despite their apparent affordability and accessibility. That was enough for executive director Beth W. Palys, CAE, to decide that she needed to create an affordable, accessible, and meaningful educational experience that would attract both insiders and outsiders. (See www.asca-consultants.org.)

But Palys didn’t want to do it herself. So she contacted organizations with the same raison d’etre for making a whole that would be greater than the sum of its parts. She invited the 15,000-member International Society of Arboriculture, Champaign, Illinois, and the 2,000-member National Arborist Association, Manchester, New Hampshire, to join ASCA in developing and delivering distance learning to their members. The trio debated its partnership agreement for nine months before signing it in March 2001 to begin what Palys calls "a new educational delivery vehicle that will enhance the groups’ member services and expand its nondues revenue." Each association’s home page will display the program’s common features and will link to the others’ sites. The application is expected to go online approximately June 1.

After comparing several vendors’ prices, customer responsiveness, and products, the group chose CertiLearn, Inc., which provides e-learning services and consulting exclusively for not-for-profit associations. With doing the application in-house "never a consideration," Palys chose CertiLearn for its flexibility, its editing abilities, and its proven performance history. And having former ASAE vice president for professional development Gary LaBranche, CAE, as the company’s president didn’t exactly hurt its chances for selection.

"We know Gary and we trust him," Palys says. "I think that makes a difference when you’re instituting a new educational vehicle—even when your members are as highly connected, computer literate, and ’net savvy as ours.

"We know where we’re going with this. We’ve all budgeted to succeed. Crafting the partnership agreement took some time in order to work out all of the details. But there hasn’t been any friction among us. Our challenge now is to get our members to try it. And our risk is that once we’ve built it, will they come?"

Adding alternatives. The same question haunts CertiLearn customer Ken Reid, CAE, executive vice president of the American Water Resources Association (AWRA), Middleburg, Virginia. His organization’s traditional two-day, stand-up-presenter-centered course was no longer ready for prime time. With the association’s nearly 2,400 members scattered around the planet and working on their own 24/7 clocks, he had to respond to his members by giving them as many alternatives as possible for delivering quality continuing education. After putting several vendors through their paces, his selection committee chose CertilLearn for many of the same reasons as Palys.

"We have nothing [educational] on our site (www.awra.org) because we’re still developing the course," Reid says. "But the risk about its long-term viability and success are always on my mind. We’ve got evaluation criteria to help us decide that, but I’m still not sure we can quantify success. And we’re not going to know that until we get some experience under our belt."

There probably will be several hitches before Reid can close the buckle. Like many of his peers who are making their initial foray into online education, Reid may not recognize most of the obstacles until he confronts them.

Caveats and kudos

But LaBranche, who admits he "made every mistake in the book" while launching ASAE’s first online education effort in 1996, can ease his pain.

LaBranche’s top two bugaboos are content readiness and content development and approval. Traditional educational content is rarely ready to immediately go online. The things that go bump in the night are

the content may be too old;
the content may lack defined learning objectives;
the content may be only partially available in digital format; and
copyright disputes may raise the issue of whether the association or the presenter owns the content.

So the content must be timely, accurate, properly referenced, and correctly copyrighted.

A small cadre who live and breathe content creation should develop the content. Associations using the traditional consensus-based decision-making model are begging for endless rewrites and editing, constant tweaking of material, and all-night debates about layout and design. Streamlining the process and establishing firm goals and deadlines will avoid the content gridlock that always accompanies group development.

"Associations’ biggest mistake is thinking online content is a replication of the real world," LaBranche says. "But it’s ultimately about digital fluidity. You’ve got to reconceptualize the content for an e-learning environment. That’s more than just duplicating a seminar or convention online. It means adding related links and resources to the original content and creating exercises and interactions that engage the online learner. The content then becomes more learning-centered than presenter-centered."

Associations doing that—most likely with an ASP’s assistance—will be primed to reap the benefits of using an ASP: speed to market; reduced up-front development costs; access to skilled professionals without bringing them in-house; per-use-basis payment; up-to-date, technological advances; and instant availability of instructional providers and content creators.

But there are downsides to leaving the driving to an ASP. Many associations

underestimate the time it takes to manage an e-learning initiative that has been outsourced;
don’t do their homework before hiring an ASP;
aren’t savvy enough to manage the contract with the ASP; and
leave themselves open to their partner stealing their content or accessing their data.

So before you call your first ASP, practice what the Boy Scouts preach: Be prepared.

ASAE’s Blagriff notes, "After a while, the technology begins to look the same across the selection of vendors. It is important to explore not only the product capabilities of your ASP, but the unwritten services—such as refining content to achieve the best experience for your members—that your partners can provide.

"Sometimes, however, ASP partnerships may not be so great," Blagriff cautions. "So association professionals need to know enough to be dangerous. You want to remain on the cutting edge, so you’ve got to keep up with what’s happening. And you’ve got to analyze your needs and goals. If you don’t know those, how can you pick the right technology vehicle to get you where you want to go?" n

Willie Schatz is president of The Schatz Group, Washington, D.C., a company that provides editorial coverage and analysis of technology, policy, and communication issues.

E-mail: willie@his.com.