Virtual Learning

ew people would want to trade places with George Wolohojian right now. The director of employee development and training at the Veterans Benefits Administration is facing a major human resources crisis: Between 40 percent and 45 percent of his agency's workforce will be eligible to retire during the next three years. That means the agency-which employs 12,000 workers-could be forced to fill nearly 4,000 jobs, including 196 information technology positions.

The situation leaves Wolohojian and his staff in the unenviable position of having to recruit, assess and train thousands of new employees. But that is not all. VBA, like most agencies, is under increased pressure to improve performance.

"Our customers, the General Accounting Office, the White House, Congress-they all have said that our processing of pensions is not what they would like it to be," Wolohojian admits.

Add to that the fact that rapid advances in technology are changing the way federal agencies operate, and you have a situation in which employees are being asked to meet increased expectations, all the while being handed new tools to do their jobs. "We are interacting with each other and our customers in entirely new ways," Wolohojian adds. "Our incumbent employees need to learn new jobs in a new way." Many trainers feel Wolohojian's pain. After all, these are the days of a dwindling federal workforce, shrinking budgets and increased demands. In this new world order, agency heads are trying to find affordable, flexible and timely training programs for large numbers of workers. They also are seeking training programs that will enable employees to make use of technological advances. Gone are the days of sending someone halfway across the country to spend five days in a hotel conference room. That's old school.

The new school solution is distance learning. The concept itself is nothing new. It has been around for years in the form of correspondence courses and teleconferencing. In more recent years, agencies have turned to satellite-based interactive television and video conferencing. From the Energy Department to the Housing and Urban Development Department, everyone is utilizing the technology. But a sea change is coming. It's called the Internet.

There is little doubt that e-learning, as it is called, has caught fire. Revenues for companies doing Web-based training for both the private sector and government will jump to $11.4 billion by 2003, up from $550 million in 1998, according to Michael Moe, director of global growth research for the Knowledge Enterprise Group, a San Francisco-based division of investment house Merrill Lynch. That is an 84 percent increase. Moe's group tracks education and training trends from kindergarten to the corporate and government levels. Last year alone, companies that develop, sell and implement e-learning products had revenues totaling $1.1 billion, the group found.

Moe notes that the most common reason employers turn to distance learning is to cut down on travel expenses. But, he adds, "This is not just about cost savings." Employers are demanding highly skilled workers, and employees are demanding that bosses provide them with the tools they need to succeed. It's not enough, Moe says, to offer a few training courses a year and send a worker to some remote hotel. It's critical that employees have immediate access to the most up-to-date training and technology. "They need just-in-time training. That is what is driving the market today," he says.

Executive Mandate
Some agencies, such as the General Services Administration and the Defense Department, are far ahead in adopting e-learning techniques, having already launched their own online training centers. Others, such as the Social Security Administration and VBA are in the early stages of figuring out how to best harness the technology. Those agencies trailing behind, however, may soon be forced to step up their pace. In September, the President's Task Force on Federal Training Technology was expected to urge President Clinton to make the Web an integral part of all federal employee training initiatives.

And lest anyone think that the November election will alter the government's commitment to online training, task force Executive Director Emzell Blanton offers this assessment: "These issues are not issues that fall on political lines. I don't know any congressman who doesn't want a better-trained employee. Nobody is against cutting costs either."

The task force, which has been meeting since March 1999 and is housed at the Office of Personnel Management, was created by Executive Order 13111 in January 1999. In that order, President Clinton wrote: "Advances in technology and increased skills needs are changing the workplace at an ever increasing rate. We need to ensure that we continue to train federal employees to take full advantage of these technological advances and to acquire the skills and learning needed to succeed in a changing workplace." With that as the foundation, Clinton pulled together senior officials from all the Cabinet-level departments as well as such agencies as the Small Business Administration, OPM and GSA. "[The executive order] also did something unique for a task force on training," says Blanton. "People who were not just in training were appointed. This included the chief information officer who has to deploy the technology, the head of human resources who has to come up with the content and the chief financial officer who has to finance it."

For too long, Blanton says, these disciplines have been operating in their own worlds, coming together only when it was time to make a purchase. That makes it more difficult for agencies to aggressively pursue innovative training programs. "The people who are going to make the case for this are the human resources people," Blanton says. "They are not always up to speed on how to best make a business case for [training outside a classroom]. It's not that they can't do it; they just are not up to speed. If they don't get up to speed, we will fall behind."

Forging Ahead
GSA officials are moving rapidly to integrate the Web into their training tool chest. In April 1999, GSA launched its Online University, which offers employees a catalog of 250 courses ranging from Excel and Microsoft Word to advanced mathematics to human resources training. All the courses are licensed or published by Reston, Va.-based VCampus Corp., which also works with the Veterans Affairs Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the first year, GSA employees signed up for more than 3,000 courses. In the third quarter of this year, demand increased by 60 percent every month. "Literally in the last few months, we've seen it increase from 400 people to 1,100 people. That is quite an incredible statement," says Elaine Lowry, program manager at GSA's Online University.

While Lowry acknowledges that cost savings is a factor in promoting the online university, she says it is not the driving force. It's difficult to quantify exactly how much GSA actually saves through online learning. Sending an employee to a classroom session can cost as little as $100 per day or as much as a few thousand dollars, depending on travel, hotel and per diem expenses. For an online course, GSA pays VCampus between $50 and $150 per student. The average is about $60, according to GSA officials.

Lowry says GSA is not trying to get rid of classroom training. Rather, the online courses are viewed as another tool in the arsenal. "We wanted to be able to offer training when employees needed and wanted it," she says. "We wanted to make it more accessible, especially in the field offices. We have so many employees who are with their customers in remote locations or who work at home. We wanted just-in-time training.

"We also wanted to be able to deliver training to a diverse population-in skill set and geographic location-and get the same message to them," she adds. "If we did that in classrooms, even with one vendor, you could have different classrooms getting different messages."

For the most part, employees have nothing but high praise for the online university. GSA's Amy Gareis, who is in the agency's human resources management program, took online courses on Microsoft Access and Excel software programs and says the experience was better than going to a classroom. The major benefit was that she could work on course material at her pace and return to learning modules any time she wanted. Despite the early success, Lowry says GSA has to do a better job of promoting the online university so the entire agency is aware of its availability. And, adds Gareis, a better system is needed for receiving feedback from users. GSA is moving down that road by adding a survey to the end of every online course.

Just Starting Out
At the other end of the online spectrum are such agencies as VBA, which is preparing to kick off an e-learning program. The agency last September commissioned Saba Software Inc. of Redwood Shores, Calif., to test an online training program. The two are still putting the final touches on the business plan, so the pilot test has yet to be launched. It will focus on employees in the education services division and information technology specialists. About 1,200 employees will be involved. Officials heading those business units still are deciding exactly what training courses they want online, but Jeff Goetz, a program analyst with VBA's office of employee development and training, says they could include anything from mandatory classes on sexual harassment to introductory classes on Windows 2000. If the program is successful, VBA officials will expand online training agencywide.

To make e-learning a success, Wolohojian knows that employees and managers must go into the training with an open mind. They can't view Web-based training in the same light as a classroom setting or even a CD-ROM. Using the Web, with its interactivity and ability to be custom-designed for specific applications, requires a culture change. Web-based training is more focused on the individual than traditional forms of training. It allows employees to test their skills and continually track improvement as they move through a program. Programs can be tailored to an individual's preferred mode of learning. More visual learners can log on to graphic-intensive courses, for example. Employees with an Internet connection can access Web-based programs at any time and from nearly any place. "With the Web, training is profiled for me," says Blanton, agreeing that a culture change is needed. "Right now, the first question people are asking is 'Where can we hold this training?' The first question ought to be, 'Can we do this with learning technology?'"

Digital Divide
A culture change is not the only barrier to broad adoption of e-training. Before charging ahead with a governmentwide online initiative, several other hurdles must be jumped. For starters, the President's task force has discovered a need for a one-stop shop for federal training technology. According to Blanton, the government needs a resource center that will promote the use of new training technologies across departments. The idea is to coordinate efforts so agencies are not reinventing the wheel.

Another problem is the lack of industrywide standards for software. As Blanton puts it, agencies are at the Beta vs. VHS stage: Many software products are competing, but no one knows which one will win and set the industry standard. That has agency leaders at a loss. Do they rush out now and buy a software package, only to have it end up as the e-learning equivalent of now-extinct Betamax video recording technology?

What's needed is a set of standards to help guide e-learning vendors, content providers and users, says Michael Parmentier, a senior advisor adviser for training to the Secretary of Defense. An effort to develop specifications has been under way for the past year at the Defense Department's Advanced Distributed Learning Association (ADL).

The standards-setting group has pulled together vendors, academics, and government and military trainers. The group's most significant achievement so far has been the release of its Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model, or SCORM. It's designed to enable e-learning products to work together regardless of their manufacturers. The model also is designed to reuse learning objects, or content.

"It's very expensive to convert courseware to new delivery," says Parmentier, who heads the ADL initiative. "If we all built to the same platform . . . if I build a learning object to SCORM [standards] then I can move it around." The ADL group successfully tested the first version of SCORM in July during a seminar in Alexandria, Va. There, content from various providers was passed from one software program to another without a hitch.

A second so-called Plugfest in early August brought more than 700 people to Madison, Wis., to view more demonstrations of SCORM's interoperability. The ADL group also announced that five colleges-Pennsylvania State University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Nebraska and the University of Washington-agreed to help in the standards-setting process. They join the University of Wisconsin, which came on board as a partner in January.

Not everyone is ready to give DoD's efforts a ringing endorsement, though. Philip Westfall, network director for the Air Force's distance learning office, and a member of the United States Distance Learning Association's executive committee, worries that people are in too big a hurry transform distance learning into e-learning. His concern is that the Web is acting much like a siren song-luring people in with scintillating effects, bells and whistles. "DoD is not seeing the walking wounded," he says. "It sounds like we are applying a solution [but] we don't know what the problem is yet. I'm not resisting online, but it is not the panacea. We need to look at what the learning objective is and then make a decision about what to use. Right now, people are looking at the media and not the learning objective."