Let's make the world just a little smaller....

Tanner Dabel

3^nd Opinion paper

Distance Training/Education/Conferencing

Years ago, if one wanted to watch TV, make a phone call, read a book or listen to music, they would have needed a TV, telephone, some books and a stereo system. Now all you need is a laptop and some internet access. The internet seems to be the place to be. Whether it is VoIP, Bit Torrent or Web-based TV, everything seems to be shifting to the internet. The computer is a one stop shopping for daily activities (very much like a Super Wal-mart). As one wonders what else can get digitized, three more business oriented activities are quickly adapting to meet the trend. Distance training, education and conferencing are all going digital. A company employee can now do all three from, well, anywhere!

Let’s first look at distance training and how it might benefit a business. Its Sally’s first day, working at the box factory in Denver, CO. Oh, and its also Dean’s first day on the job at the same company owned box factory in Phoenix, AZ. Now, let’s imagine 50 other new employees starting at the same company owned box factory all over the United States (it’s a BIG box company). Now, boxes can be confusing work if you don’t know what your doing; so box company policy dictates that everyone go through a four hours a day interactive training course for the first four days of working at the box company. Sally, Dean and the rest of the 50 new employees check in and are quickly whisked away to the super cool training suite. You see, the box company a few years back made a cost effective decision of creating an interactive training suite in each of its box factories. Before this time, they use to have to shuffle people all around the US to the Madison, WI branch because that was the companies training facility. This wasn’t cheap since the box company hires 50 new people on average every other week. The box company would have to pay all travel costs to shuffle all these new employees from point A to point B. Let’s also not forget, the cost in time it took, moving these people around. Box employees get about $25 an hour, so losing a person due to traveling one day there and one day back easily could cost the company hundreds of dollars per person per lost day!

But let’s get back to the story about Sally, Dean and the other 50 eager to start box employees. So they get to the on-site training suite, housed with training computers. These computers have special interfaces that are all tied to each others factory suite computers. This allows all 50 employees to see a training instructor (she’s in Seattle, WA). These computers also have special software to help simulate box machines, assembly flowcharts and everything you can think of that a person would need for training. So everyone sits down, the instructor goes live using say Sonic Foundries Mediasite and welcomes everyone to day one of training. Then there’s the four hours of interactive training. When the four hours are up, everyone goes to lunch, and then it’s off to a factory wide meeting that start right after lunch.

So, let’s look at this situation and see if we can spot any direct benefits. The first thing that should be apparent is the savings in travel cost, both time and money. The person is on-site and learning opposed to having to travel someone else, learn there and then come back. Less time is wasted because the person does not need to travel. Less money is wasted because arrangements were not needed for traveling. But wait, there’s more, how about indirect benefits, can we spot any? Of course we can, how about the fact that a new employee is able to learn the skills needed to do their job AT the place they will be working at for the next few year. Sometimes it can be stressful on a new employee who gets bounced around at the beginning, traveling, learning away from their base factory and then going back to the base factory, still out of the loop and having to play catch up. With distance training, the new employee has a less stressful transition from training to actual working. Notice the other indirect benefit I slip in there two sentences ago. I’ll repeat it again “still out of the loop and having to play catch up.” New employees might also have added stress put on them because of that wasted time traveling and training elsewhere before they are assimilated into the normal working staff. With the training suite situation provided above, everyone had training in the mid morning for two hours, then it was lunch and after lunch every new employee was able to attend the onsite factory wide meeting. This would allow the new employee to start getting assimilated on day one, rather then a week later. In addition, this adds less stress on the employee when it comes to their family. Say Sally has a husband and three kids. If she had to travel out to the Madison factory for training, that’s a weeks worth of time away from her family. This adds stress to Sally, her husband and her three kids. On the flip side, say Sally stays at her branch factory, does the training there and is able to go home to her family later that night. This arrangement causes less stress on her, less stress on her family and a better outcome for everyone.

Now is the time to discuss distance conferencing and its benefits for a business. Remember when Sally and Dean signed onto the training suite computers and the instructor from Seattle was on already waiting for them. Throughout that training, Sally, Dean and the instructor participated in a distance conference. This was in the form of training. Its two years later, Dean and Sally are still with the company. Both have moved up the ranks in the box company and they both now have global roles in brokering deals with manufacturing companies overseas that need boxes to ship their products out. Sally (who’s still lives in Denver, CO), Dean (who’s still lives in Phoenix, AZ) and Stuff Incorporated (our manufacturer who needs boxes) are set to meet in a global conference at 10 PM GMT today. With the power of distance conferencing, Dean who’s at home (his daughter was sick today) logs onto his computer at 3 PM MST, Sally who actually is on vacation in San Francisco signs onto her laptop at 2 PM WST and Jerry (our Stuff Incorporated Rep.) signs onto his computer at 11 PM WEZ (because he’s in Berlin, Germany). The three meet for an hour, come to an agreement and then all log off. Jerry heads home for bed (because it’s past midnight in Berlin), Sally goes back down to the resort pool (since its only 3 PM and she is on vacation) and Dean goes to fix supper for family (because it’s getting to be dinner time in Denver soon). Again, a lot of the benefits for distance training can be applied to distance conferencing. One additional bonus that was illustrated above, people can come together, anywhere and anytime. Dean was at home with his child, Sally was at a resort on vacation and Jerry, well he’s overseas in a different company!

Let’s say another year has gone by, Dean’s moved on to another company, but Sally, she’s interested in getting into the management level of the box company in Denver. She also saw a story the other day on TV about something called OpenCourseWare (OCW). It seems if one would like to study up on a subject, Open courseware is a free way to obtain university course level material online for free. And as you might have guessed, this brings us to the third and last topic; distance learning. OCW is one of many ways in which distance learning is being offered. Personally, I think this may be the way to offer distance (learning). Sally goes to the OpenCourseWare Consortium, where she sees MIT as a choice for materials. She’s heard of MIT and remembers it being a highly respected university in the US. She follows the link to MIT’s OCW and sees there is in fact a management department which offers many of the MIT management courses. She decides that evening that she’ll start reviewing all the course materials and slowly work her way through each course until she has a firm understanding of basic management. Then she can start to apply for internal management positions and she’ll have some basic knowledge of management.

Looking at OCW, this may not have as much direct benefit, but more of an indirect benefit through its employees. With the instance above, Sally was interested in moving up in the company, and OCW empowered her to have a good chance at moving up in the company, by giving her an affordable opportunity to learn the basic level management. It allowed understand some of the more basic aspects to management so that the company could then perhaps more formally train her in the specifics without having to cover those basics. This saves the company both time and money, while allow the employee to educate themselves in the comforts of their own home at a pace they work best at.

As you can see with all three causes, each one allowed the company to save time, save travel costs and lessened the time and stress costs of the employee. Though distance training, conferencing and learning may not fit every situation, I think it’s a good fit for most. Through the means computers, software and an internet connection, distance activities will aid in bringing people together no matter how far way they are. This will give people the ability to meet anytime, anyplace. How could a business not benefit from that? The power of this flexibility is endless and very little of it has been tapped thus far. Its time for business to make the investment and implement distance activates to aid in making the world just a little bit smaller while saving the company large sums of money.