What is E-Learning All About

Your best bet is to finish reading the rest of this Adeak articles. Or, you can look on the Internet. There are hundreds of place to look, but you can start by looking at only a handful of Web sites. Tell Me More I’ve tried to keep this chapter short—as well as keeping the entire [...]

E-learning fits into a long tradition of learning at a distance. Tell Me More Learning at a distance is not new. That’s what correspondence courses do. That’s what “how to” books do. That’s what public television programs at 5:30 A.M. do. Apprenticeships, classroom courses, books, and correspondence courses were the way everyone learned until the [...]

Knowledge management is related to e-learning, but it’s not the same thing. Knowledge management is aimed at keeping facts, data, and information at people’s fingertips—for those people who are already skilled at doing the job. Tell Me More Knowledge management (KM) attempts to codify and make retrievable all of the knowledge that floats around a [...]

E-learning always has a specific instructional objective. You might learn things as a side-effect from other interactive experiences on the Internet, but that doesn’t make those experiences e-learning. Tell Me More One way to tell e-learning from other interactive activities on the Internet is that e-learning has a specific instructional objective. With e-learning, an instructional [...]

It’s different—just as learning to speak French is different from looking into an English-French dictionary. But if you already know how to speak French, having an online dictionary for looking up the words you’ve forgotten can be very handy. Tell Me More E-learning is different from putting together a typical Web site that holds lots [...]

Nothing. They’ll continue to work. Don’t throw them away. Nothing was wrong with radio or movies either. While TV took over mass entertainment, radio programs and movies still exist for specific market segments. Tell Me More The traditional learning solution that still leaps to the mind of most companies is to gather everyone in a [...]

Yes, e-learning doesn’t always require a large budget. One approach is to "lease" or "rent" your e-learning capability instead of building it and maintaining it yourself. Another approach is to operate a Chevy instead of a Porsche. Tell Me More You might get the impression that e-learning is only for the really large corporations with [...]

It’s safe to say that, in the long term, from five to ten years, all companies are good candidates for using e learning. In the short term, from right now to a year or so from now, you have to think about whether your company’s training situations are a good fit with today’s strengths of [...]

What we’re talking about in this book is not knowledge for the sake of knowledge. We’re talking about knowledge and skills for the sake of your business. This is not the university environment, or even the secondary-school environment. This is training aimed at supporting the goals of your business. Tell Me More Thinking of learning [...]

Yes, research shows that e-learning works just as well as classroom learning. Some things can be more effective when done in a class- room environment. You can use e-learning to teach almost anything that a business needs to teach. Tell Me More Research studies sponsored by businesses and universities indicate that e-learning works about as [...]

E-learning as described in the previous question/ answer section (the IBM management development training curriculum) is certainly not “the only way” to do e-learning. The e-learning approach you take will depend on understanding what learning situation you need to address from a business point of view and then adjusting e-learning to meet the needs of [...]

IBM’s management development training is a good example for starting to see how to apply a robust, successful e-learning program. This program trains 30,000 new managers per year worldwide. The program comprises extensive online learning modules, online learning support from designated management coaches, and learner collaboration. This extremely effective program is a blended solution; besides [...]

E-learning can help your business so that: Employees can learn without traveling to class—the training is delivered right to their computer. This means that you can save on travel costs and that employees don’t have to be away from work for extended periods of time. Employees can learn at their own convenience—many e-learning courses don’t [...]

The Internet provides a delivery infrastructure that enables e-learning to be effective in the business world. Tell Me More The Internet makes all the difference. Since the Internet is changing almost everything about modern life, we shouldn’t be too surprised that it’s changing how people learn in the workplace. (I am using “Internet” here in [...]

E-learning is learning at a distance that uses computer technology (usually the Internet). E-learning enables employees to learn at their work computers without traveling to a classroom. E-learning can be a scheduled session with an instructor and other students, or it can be an on-demand course that the employee can take for self-directed learning at [...]