Eddie Patterson, Global Competency Systems gives his opinions.

To help with some terms you may not know!

Shoot outs -vendor competitions at corporate conferences
Telcos -telecommunication provider
D-base -database
Two and three letter acronyms -used instead of the names of the organisations for confidentiality reasons.

Marie
I’m talking to Eddie Patterson, Director of Strategic Development for Global Competency Systems based in Sydney.  I thought I’d find out from Eddie where the corporate world is heading with e-learning.  So, welcome to LearnScope.  Eddie!

Eddie
Thank you very much and I welcome the opportunity to share my experience and some opinions.

Marie
Eddie you have quite a diverse background and to put you in context, and also Global Competency Systems in context, can you tell us about your background?

Eddie
My background was principally with the army in a multitude of roles there. But in the last 4 or 5 years of my service, I was focusing on applications of technology based learning for individual and collective performance, looking at particularly computer simulations and modelling for operations research and planning purposes.

After that probably in 1996 I left and went into the wonderful world of business re-engineering in the corporate sector, looking after the human face of all those massive changes.  Part of that process was looking at how we could help people improve performance and reduce the stress and trauma of major systems implementation and change programs through use of technology, particularly performance support and e-learning - although it wasn't quite called that in those days.  After that in 2000 I joined Global Competency systems, looking once again at the application of leading edge technology to satisfy business and individual needs.

I wouldn't pretend to be an expert in where all the corporate sector is going – there’s certainly a multi-faceted approach to that  - but I can provide a snapshot of what I understand the case to be.

Marie
I understand that Global Competency Systems itself is exploring some new intriguing concept in the world of e-learning.  Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Eddie
I certainly can! Global Competency Systems is the company that has developed its own Australian e-learning authoring tool calledRADAuthor, and with that we have also instituted a device called interactive email or ActifMail.  That's the ability to be able to embed e-learning content, with all its interactions, into the body of email. [When you] send it to a recipient, you know when the person has received it, you know when they have accessed it and once they have completed the interactive content, the results can either be returned by either email or to a URL.

So it works within a learning management system or d-base applications.  We have also taken it into the e-messaging, e-marketing arena, and signed some very interesting global deals with the one of the major telcos and that is proving to be very, very popular.  The accepted statistics for broadcasting advertising or within a broadcast email is about 1%.   We were hoping to get about a 4% response rate; in fact we have been getting a 14%.

Marie
Is that what led you to explore email and the potential of email over some of the other emerging technologies?

Eddie
Well that’s a complement to the normal means of delivering e-learning.  If you look at a web-based application, it really is a ‘pull’ technology.  You have to motivate the learners to go to the Web site, access that information, pull it down and complete it.  There is a lot to be done in that in getting the learner actually engaged and staying with it.  Whereas the interactive email, ActifMail represents a ‘push’ technology, where you push it out to the individuals.  Think of it as mobile website sent out to someone.

Marie
That's a good way of thinking about it.  And in fact, you’ve been recognised recently for several awards for this product. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Eddie
Well it's not just the product; it is the authoring tool itself, RADAuthor. We have taken it to the world, in terms of international competitions run by Branden Hall. We finished third in the competition in the United Kingdom, and that was for the fastest tool for creating software training. We did that as a general-purpose tool, not as a specialist software training development application.

We also won the shoot outs in Singapore and in Las Vegas for the fastest tool in re-purposing legacy content.  We were short listed for the Australian Technology Showcase and unfortunately whilst we didn't win, being short listed in itself was an honour.  When you are put up against all emerging technologies that can add value to society and bring a dollar into Australia, we found that very pleasing. I might add that the one of the companies that won, developed a means of reducing fuel consumption by heavy vehicles by 40%, which obviously has environmental and social benefits

Marie
So that was a worthy winner?

Eddie
I think it was a worthy winner.

Marie
So basically what you are saying Eddie, is email has been revitalised, refreshed, you’ve rethought how you can use it more effectively to keep up-to-date in the world of email.

Eddie
Yes very much. We have a lot of people who are still exploring the opportunities as to where it can be used.  Obviously with e-messaging and e-marketing it’s an interactive means and it’s engaging and it’s proving very popular with the commercial areas.  But to move it back into the e-learning field, if you look at the trends within e-learning, the big growth areas are in the customer relationship management field, in particular customer education and call centre use.  Well this is a means where you can go out to the customer with the learning, to respond to their requirements.  It can be done for product training; it can be done for vendor management.  It can be used in terms ‘how do I do this’ when people phone up a call centre.  Rather than being explained over a telephone, which I personally find very difficult to do, you can actually simply go and grab a learning object, send it out with RADAuthor using the ActifMail component and there is the demonstration of how the person can do it.

Marie
You talked about call centre and customer education as two areas of growth.  Can you tell us more about customer education?

Eddie
I suppose it is two fold. There is one capacity where organisations are providing training out to their customer base, and it’s a way I think that corporations are trying to embed a complete relationship with that organisation.  There is evidence that a number of telcos that are actually providing free Microsoft Office and other types of IT training to their alliance partners and it’s a way to confirm and consolidate that relationship. 

The other way is you avoid the customer dissatisfaction with products. There is a much greater take up rate, they know how to use the product and therefore there [less] likelihood there is going to be any bad referrals.  It obviates the calls or a number of calls into the call centres which the last time I engineered call centre was about $40 - $50 per cost per call, and obviously everybody try's to reduce that cost.  So it is a means to provide a tool where the learner can actually access it.  They saySend me an email on this, and they get the demonstration on the product, they get product information. It’s fun, it’s engaging, it’s interactive! You can embed the normal multiple choice, type in the answer responses - they are very simple to do, the drag and drops, your hot spots - you can even do software simulations.

Marie
So what you are really saying here is that e-learning is much more than simply product.  It is also a value-adding service to the users of the product.

Eddie
Yes it is very much so.  And that perhaps leads on to another area where the trend is going.  We have been doing a lot of work in the learning objects field under the SCORM or the industry standards organisation.  The trend is that there is a convergence of emerging technologies - your knowledge management systems, your electronic performance, your support systems, your e-learning.

The boundaries between the two are diminishing, and they’re talking about reusable content which you can grab, match up, formed into new courses put up on the web and sent out using active mail.  It is an interesting field. We are still trying to wrestle - and I think a lot of organisations are - is what the difference is between a knowledge object and a learning object other than the fact that learning object should have a confirmation that something has changed so therefore you are looking at assessments built into that. 

The field is extremely interesting in the capacity to send out information to PDAs.  We are actually working with a “two letter acronym” [company] out of the UK with a “3 letter acronym” [company] in the US to provide distributed training out to another “three letter acronym” [company].  There a lot of agents in the field may or may not be for various reasons be able to get back to classroom, and giventhat it is now September 12th one day after Sept 11th that’s probably and indication of where we are looking.

Marie
You’ve raised so much that we could just go on and talk about all day Eddie.  But we have to invite you back and talk about some of these other intriguing things that you have mentioned this morning.  So thank you very much for sharing about RADAuthor, the whole area of active email and looking at the whole push technology and value-added service. You’ve really provided us with a lot of stuff to think about.  So thank you very much for spending some time with us today.

Eddie
Marie my pleasure, thank you.