FIND ONLINE TRAINING THAT PAYS OFF
By Anne Fisher

(FORTUNE Magazine) – IN 2003 THE MAYO Clinic, along with every other health-care organization in the land, faced an April deadline for training all 50,000 of its doctors, nurses, and staff on the fine points of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), including new rules on health-care privacy. Trying to get all those folks into classrooms, and then to reschedule when they had to miss training sessions to care for patients, would have been a logistical nightmare. So Mayo offered an online course that medical personnel could get from their own PCs, at their own pace. Only 1% of employees opted for the classroom version, and the clinic met its deadline with ease. More and more, all kinds of companies are relying on e-learning for everything from briefing CEOs on Sarbanes-Oxley, to upgrading engineers' IT certifications, to teaching safety techniques to assembly-line workers. Great--but as in any fast-growing field, there's fool's gold aplenty in them thar hills. How can you tell which online courses are a waste of time and which will really help your employees get the knowledge they need?

Lee Maxey, chief learning officer at Pathlore Software, which has designed online curriculums for Lucent, American Express, and Microsoft, among others, recommends a three-stage approach. "First ask yourself, Does this course or program solve a real-world problem my organization is facing?" One national store chain, with typically high employee turnover, called Maxey in to figure out how to cut the time managers spent training new hires. Pathlore developed an online class, delivered via kiosks in break rooms, that took the place of instruction from live managers. Meanwhile an added safety course chopped workplace injuries by 47%. You can get results like that, Maxey says, only if you shop for an e-curriculum with a clear idea of exactly what you're trying to achieve.

Then look for a vendor that will let you test-drive before you buy. Ask for a "hosted solution," in which any courses you're considering would reside on the vendor's computers until you've taken them for a spin. "A hosted solution can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars, because you don't have to pay to have the e-learning materials and supporting infrastructure integrated with your existing computer systems," says Maxey. "It also lets you see whether your employees can launch the courses from their PCs or laptops. Even a really great course won't do any good if the technology is beyond what your users can view."

The third step: Have a test group try it and see what they get out of it. "Assess their level of knowledge before and after," says Maxey. "Most good e-learning courses will have tests embedded throughout the online sessions." That raises another point: The more interactive an online course is, the more effective it's likely to be. Says Kevin Kruse, an author and e-learning expert: "To engage people in a meaningful way, you want pictures, animation, photos, and audio as well as text. If you open up a course and it's just [a plain text] presentation, you know you've got a clunker."