E-learning has been touted as a way to cut expensive travel to offsite classes, better integrate training and production schedules, and generally tailor pedagogy to the needs of the business.
In its favor, e-learning is a well-established training vehicle, and training needs are systemic--from getting new employees up to speed and adding skills for specific projects to keeping business partners informed.
But now, with nearly every aspect of IT under the budgetary microscope, e-learning is being asked to stand and deliver, or at least make the case for continued enrollment.
"I don't think anything is safe right now, in terms of budgets. People are scrambling to justify every expense," says John Dalton, an analyst with Forrester Research.
That e-learning can fare well in tight fiscal times is probably more a reflection of the technology's potential for trimming expenses than of its grander promise, Dalton notes.
"The budgets for e-learning, within the budgets for training, are going up. And that's an interesting data point, as long as you realise that one of the real drivers is just saving money," he says.
Large corporations, which might once have dispatched hordes of workers to off-site training sessions, can now more easily opt to keep things intramural.
"They do a lot of desktop broadcasts. They do Web-inars. They do some distributed learning and knowledge transfer of core corporate assets. The savings there can be in the tens of millions of dollars a year," he says.
Still, return on investment (ROI) metrics for e-learning are hard to come by, given the ambiguous nature of the technology--some applications are dedicated teaching tools, others run in multifunction configurations, and all tap into core IT resources. And investments made by one department might provide benefits throughout the company, although payback is usually calculated more narrowly.
Although few companies have been able to crunch the ROI numbers for e-learning, the current fiscal climate provides incentive to try.
"Sales and marketing, because all their audience is remote, have some definite cost savings in being able to deliver a good deal of [training] without anyone having to travel," says Harris Hof, director of e-learning at high-concept furniture maker, Herman Miller.
Herman Miller has built an extensive e-learning system around Lotus' LearningSpace. The system is available to the company's internal users and its far-flung distributors.
"My [IT and corporate] audience is more local. For online courses, we probably have about an hour's worth of an instructor's time over the period of each course. If we delivered that truly instructor-led, then we'd have eight hours of that person's time," she says.
Since payback depends on participation, departments championing e-learning must overcome a certain amount of resistance to the unfamiliar teaching methods employed with the technology.
But, in this slowdown, "people are finding opportunities to take [online] classes, and also trying to build some new skill sets to make themselves a little more marketable," Hof says.
Although it's safe to say companies won't disavow training just because the financial markets are fluttering, they can be expected to pare back, or delay adoption of the more ambitious facets of e-learning, such as sophisticated simulation technology, according to Forrester's Dalton.
"For some e-learning applications, one-off purchases will be more attractive, simply because the ROI is so obvious, but for extended enterprise development of e-learning infrastructure, people are taking a step back," Dalton says.
This might mean less in-house content development, fewer infrastructure investments, and more interest in outsourced, or hosted e-learning options, according to Dalton.
But, some companies that have already invested in infrastructure justify maintaining and even increasing e-learning infusions in fallow periods.
"It's perhaps the only way to economically do some of this training," says Mehrdad Laghaeian, CIO of lighting manufacturer Osram Sylvania. "Speaking for IT, I am hoping that this is going to help us with our cost proposition for the future. If we are better equipped to let everybody know the intricacies of the systems we're deploying, we're going to have less support costs."
Osram Sylvania's Web-based e-learning platform, which is centered on Click2learn's Ingenium, serves internal and external audiences, dispensing a combination of IT support and product information.
"The base application wasn't really that expensive, so the ROI wasn't that critical for just enabling the company to have training. Beyond that, the courses are being developed by people that are involved in internal training, anyway," he says.
Proving that economic vicissitudes don't always dictate purchase plans, Herman Miller recently added 3,000 seats to its e-learning system, and continues its in-house course development.
"I am starting to get quite a bit of interest from other groups in the company who are rolling out projects, and they do want to do their training with this type of delivery method," Hof notes. "And, it's not going to cost them any money to do it, because we've already footed the bill."
Although it's difficult to make a case for additional spending on e-learning during an economic downturn, it can look fairly recession-proof if established as a long-term strategy.
