Carbon trade-offs
John Helmer looks at the trade-offs at the heart of the carbon issue, and describes how the '3D internet' is promising a greener future.
Two key trade-offs lie at the heart of the debate around training and sustainability - energy consumption and quality of experience.
Energy consumption
As an e-learning supplier you would expect us to say that doing more of your training online will cut carbon emissions - but even we recognise that when it comes to climate change, nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems.
More e-learning means less travel, fewer towels washed in hotels, etc. but it also means more servers using more electricity. Do we really save anything at the end of the day?
While environmentally-based research is thin on the ground in this area, there is evidence to suggest that we do.
In the education sector, a study by the Open University found that on average 'distance/open learning courses used 90% less energy consumption and produced 90% fewer CO2 emissions than the conventional campus-based university courses.' The major factors in this fairly huge saving were travel and the energy consumption associated with housing students on campus - both factors that can relate directly to the realm of organisational training, where learners often have to travel and be housed at remote training centres or hotels.
There is a sizeable amount of literature which weighs up the relative financial costs involved in training - through both online and offline means - and helps identify energy inputs for those wishing to use e-learning to reduce their organisation's 'learning footprint'. Many of these papers are available on Learning Light's website: www.e-learningcentre.co.uk
Numerous carbon emissions calculators are also available to help with these calculations, including those below:
Interestingly, the OU study (which dates from 2003) found less dramatic savings when comparing an electronically-delivered distance learning course with its print-based equivalent. It transpires that these starter e-learners were printing out large amounts of the online materials - and staying up late to access the internet, causing more fuel consumption through keeping the heating on longer at home. Four years on, the average e-learning programme (not to mention the average e-learner) would be much less dependent on printable materials; however, the example indicates what a swings-and-roundabouts world it is we're talking about here.
Clearly, though, the need to travel involved in much traditional training and learning has a major impact. Travel is clearly the biggest single factor to tackle in reducing energy consumption. E-learning necessarily means fewer train, plane and car journeys, and therefore less of a contribution to CO2 emissions. Add to that the reduced need for paper in cutting out manuals, handouts, flipcharts, exercise books, etc. - as well as the energy impact of accommodating learners off-site, which includes heating, lighting, and the environmental costs associated with building training centres - and the argument becomes a compelling one.
As a company with a longstanding commitment to blended learning, however, Epic does not foresee a world in which nobody ever gets to learn face-to-face again. Far from it. Face-to-face interaction currently represents some 95%+ of learning delivery, and while that percentage will inevitably be reduced, it is unlikely ever to disappear. Our recommendation would be for a pragmatic, 360-degree approach that looks at how environmental impact can be reduced across all learning interventions within the mix. To help with this, a recent Training Zone article gives useful tips for making face-to-face training more sustainable: www.trainingzone.co.uk
Quality of experience
OK, so what is getting left out of this calculation? There is a danger, in this argument, that we might ignore the issue of quality.
Perhaps we do save energy by doing more learning and collaborative working online, but does that apparent saving in energy have a submerged cost in terms of quality of experience? Isn't there a necessary loss involved when we take learning, an essentially human activity, online? This is the second of our areas of trade-off.
The water is often muddied here by sloppy definitions of e-learning. If your idea of e-learning is putting a series of PowerPoints online and tracking them through a learning management system then yes, going online means losing quality. We would argue (and there is plentiful evidence to back this up) that well-designed, engaging, instructionally-sound e-learning can be every bit as effective as face-to face instruction, and in some circumstances has advantages over human delivery - i.e. no loss of quality.
Secondly, it should be said that e-learning is not just about human/computer interaction, and neither is it just about replicating the trainer/trainee dynamic online. Technology provides a plethora of ways in which people can be connected to share information, knowledge and experiences - and it is precisely this area of technology-enabled human-to-human contact that is currently experiencing a rapid growth surge, with greater environmental awareness being one of the considerations driving it forward.
Rapidly improving bandwidth is enabling more sophisticated ways of interacting online, which benefits both training and communications. Having begun with email and bulletin boards, we now have a wide variety of collaborative online technologies covering a spectrum of interaction from simple to highly immersive. All of these technologies, from collaborative working tools such as Connect, to portal-based public service provision, to 'virtual classroom' products such as Centra and Webex, to social networking tools like Facebook, to simulated 3D environments such as Second Life and Fronterra, have functionality that can benefit learning.
So marked is this development that it is collapsing former skills boundaries, even within Epic. We no longer have a separate web development function within our production capability for e-learning. E-learning is the web, the web is e-learning.
At the immersive end of things, human interaction in simulated environments can be remarkably 'real' - as evidenced by Second Life see July's feature on Learning in Second Life, an eight million-strong community of users who make real money, form friendships, have sex - and even enact online marriages which occasionally translate into real-world marriages. If you can do all those things in an online environment, you can probably learn in it too, and indeed many sl 'residents' speak of the emotional intensity of their in-world experiences.
So the saving in energy from using e-learning is not necessarily purchased at the cost of lack of 'quality' in training and communications - just more efficiently targeted at areas where human interaction can really make a difference.
The 'swings and roundabouts' of virtual environments
However, it wouldn't be entirely honest to leave this subject without making some reference to the increased energy cost that goes with enhanced online interactivity. Doing some back-of-envelope calculations based on the energy used by the servers that support Second Life, writer Nick Carr estimated that in a year, 'your average Second Life avatar consumes as much electricity as a Brazilian'.
A fascinating (if slightly mind-numbing) exchange followed on his blog www.roughtype.com, the upshot of which was a recalculation which came up with a considerably smaller consumption figure, estimating that your avatar would in fact consume annually 'less energy than is needed to drive an average US-made automobile 100 miles'. For a Brightonian, that's a round trip to IKEA (something most of us would gladly forego, I'm sure).
The 3D internet and the environment
Organisations like IBM, Intel and Cisco have enthusiastically embraced what is coming to be known as 'the 3D internet' (online worlds such as Second Life) as a way of cutting down on business travel, and descriptions of their activities in this area pepper their statements on corporate social responsibility and carbon footprints. Training in these new environments naturally follows on the coat-tails of communications.
Second Life was originally conceived as an immersive simulation of the real world, with weather and a working ecosystem of flora and fauna. For an illustration of the educational possibilities offered by sl in environmental studies, check out the island of Svarga - a self-contained island, created by a British programmer, which has 'physics-driven rain clouds that water plants and bees that pollinate flowers'*. Various blogs describe environmental projects in sl, showing that it has become a sandbox for environmental R&D with real world outputs (check out IBMer Andy Stanford-Clark's Llama-mapping project at: www.ugotrade.com.
Blog rumours say that IBM has also been doing development work on linking Second Life to other virtual realms such as World of Warcraft, something which, taken to its logical conclusion, might eventually result in the creation of a global metaverse of linked simulated worlds. Such developments support the view that we are seeing the birth of the next phase of the internet in developments like Second Life - the 3D internet.
Some of the net's 'uber-visionaries' see virtualised worlds as holding the key to sustainable development. They talk about a future where the metaverse could eliminate the need to build anything at all in the real world - an end to the era of industrial production.
But in the meantime… just keep composting those tea bags!
* Wagner James Au, www.earth2tech.com
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