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The e-learning Festival
Case study 1: Shell International
Burney Waring, Curriculum Director of Shell International, provided
an interesting case study on how to offer e-learning globally. With
over 120,000 technical and professional staff across the world there
is a need for hard and soft skills development on just about every
continent. The Shell Open University has 11,200 registered users
of 84 different nationalities and offers 220 courses, 350 e-learning
modules and 400 learning partner courses. The Docent Learning Management
application is used for enrolment, e-library access, blended sessions
with an additional billing module created to handle internal/external
payment.
A key driver for moving to an e-learning solution was the limited
internal resources available to reach - in a timely manner - all
employees across the world. Some employees would have to wait up
to 12 months before receiving crucial training. Indeed some regions
would lose out as the numbers of trainees would be too limited to
justify the travel time and expense. Those actually receiving classroom
instruction would suffer from information overload, and would be
at the mercy of the instructors pace, availability and viewpoint.
Additionally the instructor would suffer the 'passenger problem'
of certain students attending the sessions who were clearly not
engaged.
The move to e-learning reduces the need for travel and provides
a flexible and accessible resource that is always available irrespective
of time zones. Experience at Shell also revealed that the emphasis
needed to be on asynchronous e-learning rather than virtual classroom
and instant messaging methods. Time zones and other work pressures
on both the students and instructors conspire to make it largely
impossible for a real-time event to take place effectively.
Burney explained that they have moved away from using the term
e-learning, prefering a more blended approach where the technology
elements are integrated into a wider learning and development framework.
The mix of tools used included classroom lectures, online tutorials,
web-based slides, self-assessment quizzes, online collaboration,
field trip assignments, mentor support, in-course/post-course assessment.
Key learning points, then, from the fifteen courses now available
online within Shell are:
- Do not be afraid to shatter the traditional classroom model
- focus on asynchronous delivery and robustly question every assumption
made about what has to be delivered in the classroom
- Chunk your content so that it can be easily digested and accessed
- Create new materials designed for use in this blended manner
(old materials often do not work)
- Shorten the classroom sessions, in order to lengthen the self-learning
time
- Tutor more, lecture less (e-tutoring is highly recommended)
- Provide a diversity of content
- Give students the opportunity to learn from each other by giving
assignments that can be completed locally with the results shared
globally
- Provide access to courses just in time, when the student needs
it and where motivation is at its highest
The benefits yielded:
- Deeper questioning from students both within classroom sessions
and through online forums
- Better assignment results as they are locally focused using
the student's own data, and so have more meaningful context
- Less disruption to business flow since learning can fit around
local work demands
- The overall learning and development is now assessed and certified
uniformly across the organisation (completion of internal courses
can now lead to up to 65% credit on Masters degrees)
Next>>
Introduction
Case study 2: BP International
Case study 3: Unilever
The Future View
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