Elearning - April/May 2008 - (Page 17)

Employees need to be able to access learning in the context of their daily jobs. To this end, Saba supports a variety of ways for customers to make learning available: They can prompt learners via e-mail to link directly to a course offering or curriculum that has been assigned; employees can view their ‘My Success Plan’ on the Saba portal; or components of Saba interface can be embedded in customer portals to enable training to be presented with broader customer Website information. ZARRABIAN: Rather than vendor convenience, let’s look at users’ convenience. Having Web portals as the go-to-place for anything an employee, customer or partner needs is clearly a great idea. Pooling should provide a wide variety of necessary services like connecting employees to IT services or providing support for customers. E-learning can and should be a part of the Web portal. But keep in mind that a Web portal is really only as good as the content within it. This will equally apply to an LMS or to e-learning. Pooling makes useful content better. If there is no useful content, then pooling won’t matter much. DUQUETTE: I refer to this as the portalization of learning, which is significantly more efficient for accessing learning and development needs. Today, it is critical to be able to get the information you need when you need it from a centralized place. Our approach is to create a learning or talent management portal, allowing a unified ‘It is exciting to see this movement in the marketplace.’ —Sanjay Dholakia, SumTotal build communities of practice, share team projects and foster collaboration. DHOLAKIA: Both methods need to exist for a business to operate efficiently. Employees need to be able to ‘pull’ quickly when they need something, and the company needs to be able to ‘push’ efficiently to deal with compliance measures and business-critical information. In knowledge-intensive industries where schedules are less uniform, it is more convenient to have employees access a pool of training through a portal of their choice. This self-directed development gives younger employees a more Web-2.0 feel in terms of access, but with the LMS providing the platform, or ‘engine’ behind the portal. However, in labor-intensive industries or highly scheduled environments, our customers find it more efficient to have directive learning. SHAW: [With] numerous LMS systems, content silos hide available content from different parts of the organization, leading to unnecessary duplication. The schedule tools or collaboration platforms, and/or subscription-based information services. On-demand, just-in-time, just-enough learning is generally believed to be more efficient and more effective. For most organizations, on-demand learning is a dream, not a reality. They simply do not have the right technology of infrastructure to make the dream reality. RUSSELL: Anything that makes it easier, faster and more efficient for customers and their learners to access training resources will undoubtedly increase their overall satisfaction. Creating Web portals into the larger company’s LMS can be done in several ways, most commonly by user groups or domains. User groups require a technology platform with very advanced permission capabilities in order to be flexible enough to meet an organization’s business rules. Creating a new domain is essentially like creating a ‘miniLMS’ or ‘storefront’ for a particular division or entity. It should enable each new portal to have its own look, feel and business rules. It can also be set up with ecommerce functionality to facilitate training commerce transactions. To that end, is it your impression that on-demand learning is becoming more critical to the success of your customers’ overall e-learning programs? If so, why? OGILVIE: As learning becomes more aligned with business needs, the need for on-demand learning and information is increasing dramatically. [This need] has been a driving force in our continued investment in ‘informal learning’’ products, as well as our Open Learning Services Architecture (OLSA) that allows learning of all kinds to be embedded into Elearning! April / May 2008 17 ‘Portals are effective vehicles for personalizing Web content.’ —Don Duquette, General Physics Corp. view of multiple applications that are important to the user. Portals are effective vehicles for personalizing Web content and directing applications and application outputs to target groups and individuals. In their most active form, portals can also be used to for mounting new courses or replacing existing courses with updated versions is largely determined by the schedules of IT or LMS administrators, not the needs or requirements of learners. Users must often access different systems: an HR system, an LMS system, separate virtual classroom

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Elearning - April/May 2008

Elearning - April/May 2008 Editor's Note Contents News Targeting Africa Locating Courseware People in the News Upcoming Events Deals Trendlines Web Services Building a Learning Culture Measuring the Learning Experience Making Learning Fun and Social LMS's 2008: What You Need To Know Learning Leader: CA Case Study: AVI Case Study: IBM Case Study: QualComm WBS Case Study: National Center for State Courts Case Study: Grundfos Pumps Case Study: Virginia Tech Pop Quiz Last Word

Elearning - April/May 2008

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