Need for Speed

In today’s business environment, “what’s now” has become a continuous stream of “what’s next,” challenging L&D organizations to keep pace with accelerating change. The flow of information has become so fast that the relevance of learning programs is based as much on speed and timeliness as it is on instructional rigor.

We have entered an era of borderless workplaces, one where employees collaborate and communicate internally and externally on a continuous basis. In order for companies to thrive in this kind of environment, L&D should build programs that encourage and celebrate innovation, knowledge sharing, collaboration and the development of deep expertise.

CLOs are wondering two things:

1. How can they rebuild their deep skills development strategies in a modern, virtual work environment? Deloitte, for example, is building a new brick-and-mortar corporate university to drive core skills development in its ever-growing workforce. How can organizations reinvest in such strategies but do it in a modern, blended way?

2. How can they build programs faster, using an agile learning model that enables continuous, rapid development of content? Learning is taking place everywhere: How can L&D develop programs that are flexible, rapid and timely?

Both of these issues can be addressed in the context of the virtual classroom.

In today’s connected business world, virtual classroom tools have become virtual learning and collaboration systems. They are always on; they include audio, video and screen sharing; and they offer a wide variety of learning tools to help people collaborate, share information, store and replay materials and catalog content. If you look at tools such as Adobe Connect, Cisco Telepresence, Centra, WebEx and GoToTraining, you see that they have become virtual work environments that replicate and improve upon many of the face-to-face meeting experiences we have in business.

How do these systems address the two issues mentioned above?

Virtual classrooms are both less expensive and can be more instructionally rich than physical in-class experiences. Last year Cisco used its own virtual technology to train its entire worldwide channel team — using local facilitators to manage the program — and found the learning outcomes and learner satisfaction were higher than when they ran the program in person. Studies have been conducted on the effect on technical training, IT training and sales training, and in all cases the instructional value of virtual programs, when delivered by a suitable instructor, are equal or better than in-class experiences.