New Horizons for Software: Back to School

THE trumpets have been sounded for the Top 20 and Nasscom has

declared that the worst is over for the Indian software industry and all of us

in the IT profession can now settle back to the task of building new businesses,

discovering new technical capabilities or just looking for new jobs, whichever

state of mind we are in! But there is also an opportunity, now that the IT

industry has been subjected to the reality check of a global economic slowdown–a

relook at some opportunity areas in the business environment.

Over the next three to four fortnights, we will examine some

opportunity areas that emerged with much hype in the mid- to late nineties, only

to be swept out like the baby with the Internet bathwater, especially when panic

set in with the demise of dot-coms. One of the key areas was e-learning, and its

e-avatar called Web-based training. Let us revisit the fundamentals of WBT to

see what it constitutes and where the opportunities lie in this space.

A comprehensive WBT solution has multiple components–while

it is important to develop a customized solution for each organization, a

generic framework would be applicable in most cases. The focus is primarily on

an asynchronous system since this constitutes the more significant part of

on-line learning today.

At the heart of the system lies the LMS, or the learning

management system. This will need to interface with authoring tools for content

creation. The process of content creation, per se, is a very involved one,

requiring subject matter experts, instructional designers and tools, visualizers,

graphic designers and so on. Content needs to be delivered and tracked and

performance monitored and evaluated. Depending on whether learning is completely

on-line (which assumes good connectivity), part of the content might have to be

made available offline, either through a download or through CDs. The learner

data might have to be interfaced with other back office systems within an

organization. The different categories of people interacting through the LMS

would be content providers, administrators, tutors, experts, and of course, the

learners themselves. LMS would also, therefore, need to interface with

collaboration tools (be they asynchronous or synchronous) which will allow all

these people to come together, based on predefined access rights.

Layered approach to learning

Depending on the vendor, the technologies used could be

different and they would follow their own architectures for implementation. But

generally, there are three layers. There is usually a ‘learning object

repository’ that houses all the content. By content, one obviously refers to

multimedia content which could be text, graphics, images, audios, videos, etc.

There is then the middle-ware component in the form of ‘learning object

brokers’. This operates between the tools layer and the learning repository

— a software layer that maps data in and out of the learning object

repository. Finally, the data is displayed in the browser window and this could

use various technologies like DHTML, ActiveX controls etc.

Let us look at each component of our framework and understand

what is the functionality they provide within the overall solution.

Content Creation: Content creation by itself is a vast

area. There is a widely-held misconception that authoring tools take care of

everything that has anything to do with content creation. This is not so. What

most authoring tools help with is content assembling. This presupposes that many

activities would have taken place prior to this. This includes user profile

analysis for setting training goals, curriculum design for translating training

goals into learning objectives, instructional design, story boarding, and

courseware design for carrying the learning objectives forward into session

plans, modules and courses. Today, there are tools that automate most of these

tasks. Use of templates for content creation greatly enhances both ease and

speed of large-volume content generation.

Content Delivery and Tracking: This is one of the

primary functions of the learning management system. It begins with the

necessary user interface (generally provided to authorized authors/tutors) for

uploading and maintaining content in the ‘content’ or ‘learning object

repository’. A learner determines his requirements and chooses his learning

path based on which learning modules are delivered to him. A good LMS would have

the facility for enforcing a learning model based on skills pre-requisites

(judged through pre-tests), study chronology, etc. It would also track the

progress of the student, enabling him to start from where he stopped the last

time. Different vendors provide a varying number of features to the student,

from a home page and clock to bookmarks and personal comments. It might have an

in-built assessment tool or could be interfaced to one.

Assessment: This component of on-line training takes

care of the complete process of evaluation of the learner’s performance. This

could include pre-tests, post-tests, in-line tests, assignments and so on. It

could have facilities for creating a question bank and generating questions at

random based on various parameters. Quizzes could have multiple-choice

questions, true or false, drag and drop, hot spots, match the columns, etc.

Certain courses, especially in technical areas, might warrant simulation

exercises. There are tools available today that facilitate these. Besides, it

would have reporting features for generating progress reports and other

analytical reports.

Administration: Any training system, whether manual or

on-line, has an inevitable administrative element associated with it. In the

case of Web-based systems, this includes facilities for on-line registration,

enrollment, maintenance of different user profiles and associated access rights.

It also takes care of security issues and even billing through an e-commerce

component. Other important aspects would be facilities for replication across

multiple servers and locations, installation, configuration and customization,

and other housekeeping jobs like archiving. This module would include course

administration as well and, therefore, provide the necessary user interface to

the application administrator for going about all these tasks. It would also

provide interfaces for other user profiles like tutors and experts to track

student progress and generate necessary reports.

The challenge is not in mastering and managing each of these

components. It is more in ensuring that the summation of the parts provides a

learning value, which is significant. In the early days of on-line learning, a

group of practitioners, in a discussion in the US, concluded that real learning

effectiveness could be measured only if one compared the effectiveness against a

Tom Peters Seminar, where the charisma, energy and rhetoric of the speaker had

as much impact as the content itself. At that time, we estimated that with the

contemporary methodologies and technologies, the effectiveness could never be

more than eighty percent against such a benchmark. Today, both methodologies and

technologies have improved substantially and with a wise combination of optimism

and tools, on-line learning can play a major role in tomorrow’s learning

processes.

Business Opportunities in Web-Based Training

The three key components of the WBT business are content

provision and repurposing, learner management systems and content delivery.

There are opportunities for entrepreneurs and companies already engaged in the

knowledge business to look at each of these areas in isolation or as an

integrated learning solutions business. There are already successful companies

like NIIT and Tata Interactive in the Indian e-learning space, Saba and Educomp

in the LMS area and a host of new companies like UTV Interactive and others like

Zee in the learning delivery arena. Each of these have the potential to build

value in the national and international segments. Whether they do or not will

depend on the speed with which they seize emerging broadband opportunities and

make e-learning simple and cost-effective.

Ganesh Natarajan is

deputy chairman and managing director of Zensar Technologies and the global CEO

of Zensar