Interview?A new world: Ann Boland, president of Digital Learning Organization

Ann Boland

President, Digital Learning Organization

www.digitallearning.org



If being a visionary means understanding the past and embracing the future, Ann Boland certainly qualifies for the title. The new president of the Digital Learning Organization (DLO), a trade association for the creators and distributors of business learning and the hardware companies that support them, has spent 35 years in the training industry. For 11 of those, she was general manager of Video Arts, the John Cleese company that was known for using humor in its training programs. Boland is currently president of Integrated Learning Solutions in Tucson, Ariz., a consulting firm specializing in distributed learning for business. Amy Sitze, editor of Online Learning Magazine, recently chatted with her about what lies ahead for e-learning suppliers and buyers.



OLL: What are the biggest opportunities for e-learning suppliers right now?



AB: Dealing with all the opportunities out there is actually one of the biggest challenges. There's a tremendous convergence of the market right now. The person who used to buy safety training now has users who are saying, "Why can't we have office productivity skills [courses] on the same computer where we have our safety skills training? And why can't we do teamwork training too?" But we still have technical training buyers out there, who, when you talk to them about soft skills, say, "Oh, you have to go to HR about that." And there are still HR people who say, "Buy a Microsoft certified engineer program for someone? I could never do that."



The customer doesn't want these separate towers. There is a tremendous need for convergence, and I think there will be a crumbling of the towers that will benefit everyone. A lot of that is being pushed by companies like click2learn.com and NETg that offer everything or others like SmartForce and DigitalThink that are moving into soft skills. These big market leaders are definitely going to pull the buyer that way, and the rest of us need to pay attention.



OLL: What are suppliers? other challenges?



AB: Money. Everything costs more. I go back to the days when training was a garage business. You could develop a video program for $25,000, and it could hit a nerve and be a huge seller and your profit margins on that little puppy could be 75 to 80 percent. These days, it's hard to distinguish between companies based on courseware, because there is very little difference. The distinguishing characteristic increasingly becomes service and the ease of the sales process. That costs money, especially the back-end service. There is very little service involved with a video, but there's a lot of service involved if someone can't get up on the Web or can't load the course.



We're only going to make more money if we grow our bases substantially. The beauty of the Web-based environment, of course, is that we have the opportunity to reach millions of people. Now how do we reach out and tap those millions to make them buy? That's the challenge, and I don't think many people have cracked that yet.



OLL: If, as you say, it's hard to differentiate between e-learning providers, what advice do you have for people trying to buy e-learning products and services?



AB: Well, for heaven's sake, take an e-learning course. It's absolutely staggeringly amazing when you talk to people who sell e-learning and manage e-learning, and you ask them how many e-learning courses they have taken from beginning to end for their own education, and they say, "None." And yet we're forcing this on other people? That's horrible.



Eat your own dog food, and find out whether you can live with it. Keep eating it until you find one that tastes good. I think too many people make their buying decisions based on price. If you do that, you're going to get what you pay for, because it costs money to provide the back-end support.



If you're making a decision, go on the Web and take courses , and don't sit in your office on a T1 line. Take it at 28.8 and find out what works. In any company, the majority of people taking e-learning courses are on the road or they're at home. So even if everyone in the office has a T1 line, I can guarantee you they don't have time at the office to take the course. They're going to be taking it on the weekend or in a hotel room.



OLL: So you think most people are taking online courses outside of work hours?



AB: Most employees don't have time at the office. It's one of the e-learning fallacies we've always predicted. There's a huge cry from managers to give their people training at the desktop. Well, they don't really want training at the desktop , what they want is for their employees to not go away for training.



I've never been an advocate of learning at the desktop, unless it's a just-in-time five-minute course. Being able to sit and do this at my desk is pretty rare, unless I have a way of notifying the people around me and putting the phone on auto-answer without making people mad. If those conditions are there, then it'll work , but usually they're not.



The people I see taking e-learning on the job are hourly workers, whose employers are required [by law] to pay them to take the training. But if salaried workers are taking online courses at work, I would guess that they're not completing the job, not completing the course, or they're learning in some other way.



OLL: When you worked for Video Arts, the company was well-known for using humor in training. How does humor translate to technology-based training?



AB: Humor is very difficult to use, period. One of the reasons the British are very good at it is that they understand that humor is situational. If you watch a British comedy, as compared with an American comedy, you will notice that our humor is based on much more slapstick , we slip on a banana peel. A British film, in order to get that same laugh, will spend 15 minutes building up to the story. The humor arises from a situation as opposed to a pratfall. I'm not sure you have the time to build in situational humor in technology-based training. Simply putting a cartoon up every five minutes is not going to be the answer.



I don't think we look enough to this type of relief, but the problem is that it's also extremely expensive. Humor is difficult to write, and in order to get someone to write it well, you have to pay a lot of money. You have to look at your value proposition: Am I really going to sell that many more courses because I'm providing a seductive tool? If I'm not going to see that type of return, then dull and boring is going to do the job.



OLL: Where do you plan to take DLO in the next few years?



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