Captain's Blog

This is officially my first blog. I am going to boldly go where ever it is that my interest takes me to investigate this ginormous field that is e-learning. My journey begins with you fine people in my last semester of grad school.

Starting this voyage off is in search of an internship, job or project, the start of a new career. I came across an interesting e Magazine article on the eLearning Guild’s website http://www.elearningguild.com/. Their e Magazine is named "Learning Solutions" and is dubbed as practical applications of technology for learning. Bill Brandon wrote the article “9 Trends That Will Shape e-Learning in 2008” which caught my eye.

Of the nine listed a couple in particular pertained to me in some way, shape or manner. The first one on the list “Business Conditions: Recession” reminded me of my choice to make the career change to this line of work. I previously sold mortgage for a company that worked with both prime and sub-prime lending (people with high to low range credit). The meltdown (people writing shady loans) of the sub-prime industry forced the company that I worked for to be sold and merged with another. I also think this began the domino effect that could possibly result in a recession. The company sale felt like a depression to the people whom worked at this company. I thought of this as I read the following

“Sometimes mere apprehension about the possibility of a downturn is enough to make organizations cautious in their planning and budgets. The most likely overall effects of recession will be to chill the consumer markets, to slow product releases and technology adoption, to negatively affect job growth, and to reduce or reverse the growth of budgets for training, including e-Learning. At the same time, in some organizations a business downturn could actually drive some instruction out of the classroom and onto the network. If you are in a business or an organization likely to be affected by a recession, you can expect closer scrutiny of your budget, and probably a freeze on hiring. Paradoxically, you may also see more opportunities to provide online learning in support of strategies put in place to deal with business conditions. You may find increased pressure to develop e-Learning faster, and to be more flexible in development and delivery. You may also experience pressure to outsource development rather than add staff or technology.”

During this transition right before I left the company I noticed some changes. The in house trainers were laid off (along with hundreds of others) and our managers seemed to have more meetings about how we can keep our sessions going. After brainstorming we had all began to work as individual teams to find information that would help us learn instead of selling selling selling.

We found that the new company we worked for had an intra net system with some great potential for e-learning. Although not very concise, they could have been effective to people who were very enthusiastic for learning, considering that sales people needed to keep the competitive edge to stay fed.

They had great information but it was scattered all over their system. They had recorded sales calls that could have been converted to a podcast type of tool as well as some training modules that if properly formatted, could have been delivered to everyone at their desks during down time. Now I think back to these events and wonder, will a recession slow the growth of instructional design or provide an opportunity to become more efficient? What do you think? Could this company had taken advantage and invested in some cost effective e-learning to help the people driving their business?