Latest Leadership Thinking

Is e-learning green?

We are all acutely aware of the focus on the world’s use of energy, creation of greenhouse gases and the contribution to the global warming effect, although many in power still cynically dispute this. (Sorry, it’s the time of year for puns.) Energy consumption is rising astronomically on the back of world industrialisation, but do you realise how much those of us who are creating and consuming e-learning are also contributing to the situation? I doubt it, I certainly didn’t.

Take your average, everyday desk-based worker. How many computers, how many monitors? At least one each, I bet. All of them consuming power. Every person who uses online information – whether that’s stored inside or outside their organisation – probably connects to massive servers (they farm them, you know, but they are not at all organic), all consuming their share of power, generating heat and demanding powerful air conditioning to keep them arctically inclined. More power consumption than you should reasonably need to keep an Inuit family warm for a year.

In today’s connected, virtually socialising world, 24x7 operation is the game. Increasingly powerful computer chips create greater, not lesser, demands for power. Even though modern chips use less power there are more of them, they generate more heat and they run constantly, demanding electricity that needs to be generated –largely by consuming fossil fuels and adding to the pollution. It’s astronomical what the cost of generating that power is. If you’ve ever driven down Route 101 in Silicon Valley you may have seen the display billboard that counts the cost of electricity wasted by companies using power-hungry computers to power their search engines, their web servers, and their video streaming networks. It runs to billions of dollars.

I am pleased to read, however, that the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are relocating their data centres away from California to the Pacific west coast, where cheaper hydroelectric power is available. As ever, the bottom line is what will drive the change.

To put this into some sort of perspective, an energy analyst in the Digital Power Group, Washington DC, estimates that the creation, packaging, storage and movement of just ten megabytes of data (that’s making the hardware and running the systems to deliver it to you) requires the equivalent of the energy produced by burning 900 grams of coal. Phew! Typical e-learning programmes can be twice that size.

So you see, although we passionately believe in the power of the web and the phenomena of informal learning, it all has a cost. So, in the true spirit of the season, be safe, be happy and BE GREEN - switch off those power-hungry monsters – at least until January 2nd.

Next month, we will be back to Earth with a more serious review of the recently published Leitch Report on the future for skills in the UK and the global economy. But that can wait until 2007. Here’s to it being a prosperous one for us all.