UW News

December 4, 2003

e-Learning: A risk that’s paid off

At least one group at the UW has found a way to successfully expand services even during these tight budgetary times.

For one year now Training and Development has been offering hundreds of courses via the Internet. Users pay a flat fee of $120 and for one year they can access any of the courses at any time from any computer with an Internet connection.

The e-Learning program was considered something of a risk when it was launched in December 2002, but the result has been a huge success.

“This is a relatively new concept, particularly on the UW campus,” said Beth Warrick, the director of T&D. “E-learning has been used in businesses for more than five years. It’s had mixed success there. And when we started talking about e-Learning a lot of people were very concerned that the instructor-led courses were going to go away.”

That’s not the case at all. In fact, few instructor-led courses have been eliminated. But that initial fear among their clients on campus, Warrick says, had staff at T&D worried that, without some careful planning, e-Learning might flop.

The group did some intensive research, picked a business partner that had a history of success, educated customers on campus, and then forged ahead hoping to break even by attracting 500 subscribers in the first year. By March, just more than three months into the project, they had met that goal. At the end of one year, they’ve more than doubled it. In short, e-Learning has caught on with the speed of a super computer.

Courses for the program were developed by the SkillSoft Corporation and cover a range of professional skills, such as management, leadership, communication, finance and marketing. There are also courses designed to help individuals advance their own career goals as well as courses on personal development, like how to keep a healthy balance between work and family.

Within the curriculum there are a variety of educational approaches that appeal to different learning styles and needs. Say, for example, an employee needs to perform a task that’s not typically part of her job. She could spend a couple hours taking an entire course on successful presentations, for example, or she could browse through certain portions of the course in a few minutes. She could also just print out some of the reference material that goes along with the course. The software can even be downloaded for use on a computer that isn’t connected to the Web.

But the net effect is that employees who want to learn new skills have more options than they did a year ago, and the cost to the University was literally almost nothing.

“At this time last year we were just offering instructor-led training,” said Jamie Wilson. “Now we’re offering that plus e-Learning and linked learning. We’ve actually expanded our offerings — more courses and more formats.”

The linked learning option combines two instructor-led classroom meetings — one at the beginning and one at the end — with an e-Learning course. That format has been particularly successful and may be an area for future growth, according to Warrick.

T&D staffers are thrilled with the results so far and expect more and more people will start to use the program. But no one is planning to abandon the classroom learning anytime soon. For one thing, there’s no software available for the T&D instruction that is specific to the UW. And during the research phase, Warrick says, they determined that the most successful e-learning programs were paired with classroom learning and the support of a real-live person.

“Everybody has different learning styles,” Wilson said. “Some people love getting on the computer and learning things, some people still want to come into the classroom to learn. There’s always going to be those people who prefer an instructor-led course.”

But at the same time, Warrick says e-Learning has brought T&D’s services to a whole new segment of the campus population.

“I have a hunch that we have people who have signed up for e-Learning who would never ever take any other on-campus training; they might have to introduce themselves, they might have to do an icebreaker, or they just don’t have the time. I think a significant number of those people have signed up for e-Learning. It provides a way for them to improve themselves, but in a safe and self-paced environment.

“And it gives them exactly what they need. They don’t have to sit through a 12-hour communications class when all they really wanted was the last two hours. They can learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it.”

Warrick said the e-Learning classes are available to all employees. Those without regular computer access can use a lab available at the T&D offices in the Brooklyn Building or any other lab on campus.

For more information about e-Learning and other T&D programs, visit them online at http://www.washington.edu/admin/hr/traindev/.