Thus, to make ELearning succeed beyond your wildest dreams, students or employees must see that they will suffer pain if they do not participate. There are many ways to motivate people to take ELearning courses in this manner – making it a pre-requisite for promotion (the employee knows he will fail to get promoted if he does not take course) is an effective one, or for graduation/certification (the student knows they will fail to get their degree/certification if they do not take course, and will suffer inability to get a good job, or simply suffer embarrassment as a result) is another.

However, there are some courses which are not ‘required’ in this way, and a good way to motivate students to take such courses is to show them that if they do not they will suffer public humiliation! Publicising results of ELearning courses and ranking participants publicly against one another is a very effective means of ‘encouraging’ people to take ELearning courses – For example, for an employee at Coca Cola, knowing that employees at PepsiCo were scoring far higher on average in Sales/Marketing courses, would be a good incentive to Coca Cola employee to increase his/her score! Also, Coca Cola’s HR department would encourage staff to take courses and to do well in them also.

Brainbench.com is one ELearning provider that has benefited greatly from idea of ranking ELearners. IT ELearners purportedly have large egos, so Brainbench’s facility that enables them to compare their own scores in certification tests with those of others in same city, state or country as themselves means that instead of simply taking certification tests until they pass, Brainbenchers are instead repeatedly taking same certification tests in hope that they can improve on their previous score(s) and push themselves higher in ranking.

Another way in which Brainbench encourages huge numbers of people to take its ELearning courses and certification tests is by getting students ‘hooked’ by offering some courses and certification tests for free. This is a ‘loss leader’ approach that has been employed by a number of successful ELearning organizations – SmartCertify, LearnKeyDirect, Certy.com – but is especially appropriate in IT ELearning.

3.How can you ensure it is good ELearning?

There are a number of different types of ELearning. It is important to use most appropriate type of ELearning for skill/subject area concerned.

Simulations are a good way of teaching students how to carry out a business process or a technical process or to develop a skill for a number of reasons – perhaps because ‘real life’ situation is not an appropriate learning environment, or because it takes a great deal of practice to perfect a required skill.

For example, airline pilots are trained on simulators to ensure that mistakes made during training do not lead to plane crashes and deaths of passengers.

Interactive learning is a great way to teach language skills.

For example, a number of audio-visual interactive language courses now provide student with feedback of how closely student’s pronunciation matches ‘correct pronunciation’ of words by displaying their voice patterns mapped against ‘correct’ voice patterns.

Live online training, webinars or online events (though costly) may be appropriate where specialist participants are dispersed over a wide geographic area and they all need to see same specialist instructor/presentation/seminar to get latest research or thought on a particular subject area.

For example, NetRoadshow , Webex and Gartner employ live online training/seminars/webinars for a wide variety of specialist subjects.

Virtual classrooms are a great way to make a course and its instructor available to a great number of students dispersed over a wide geographic area, and still allow students to interact with instructor, discuss coursework and so on.

For example, virtual classrooms are used by those who use LMS at Blackboard.com as a means to teach subjects as wide in range as ‘Wicca 101’ through to ‘American Literature’ and ‘Molecular Biology’ through to ‘AstroPhysics’.

4.How to show that it is succeeding?

So, once you have good ELearning that is succeeding, how do you show that to management?

Of course, simplest way to show that ELearning is improving knowledge and skill-level within organization is through providing students with a quizzes, a pre-test and a post-test for each ELearning module (such as pre-test below from Apogee Interactive’s Fundamentals of Electricity course in Study-Center.com) and reporting on improvements.

All good ELearning systems such as Blackboard, WebCT and TheLearningManager offer management and reporting facilities that allow flexibility of reporting such improvements.

ELearning audits and surveys can be used to report where organization was before an ELearning course was implemented, how training was rated then, and comparing that to where organization is after it is implemented and how training/skills/knowledge/job satisfaction are rated afterwards.

However, most important part of measuring ELearning Return On Investment is to develop meaningful measurements that are directly linked to strategic business drivers, so that management can see that ELearning leads to dramatic improvements that affect ‘bottom line’.

For example, show success of an ‘Effective Sales Meetings’ course by comparing sales before course went ‘live’ with sales after course went live.

Compare software development times, and bug/defect rates before and after an ‘Effective Software Development’ course went live.

Show success of a Health and Safety course by comparing accident/injury rates prior to course going ‘live’ with those after course went live.

And, most importantly, compare costs of running traditional paper-based, location-based courses to cost of running ELearning replacement course.

5. How do you promote ELearning in Your Organization?

It is important to make ELearning inspirational – make students feel that they can make a big difference to their own future and that of organization by embarking on ELearning.

Everyone knows that a great way to motivate people to take ELearning is to tie it in to their salary and promotion – such that it is not possible to rise to next level of seniority in company without having taken certain ELearning courses. A way of taking this further is to publish ‘job roles’ which list ELearning courses and pass marks required in order to be considered for that particular role within an organization.

Another extra incentive is to provide a certificate (or an ECertificate/EResume – a URL which an employer could visit to see that student is certified) to certify that student has passed course, providing date, score and pass mark.

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In addition, it is key that proper testing procedures, source code/change control and defect tracking procedures are in place.

It should go without saying that internet applications which carry out transactions should be thoroughly tested and yet it is incredible how many ‘holes’ are created on Ecommerce web sites due to shoddy programming and testing. Preferably web applications should be tried out by ‘professional hackers’ who can look for loopholes in programs written on web. Silicon.com reported in October that Marks and Spencer’s website (marksandspencer.com) had an error on it caused by a broken link, that when activated caused an error message which contained confidential material such as passwords, credit card dummies and other log-in information.

Testing of internet applications should be supported by systems which enable changes to code to be made easily and effectively, so that unauthorized/untested changes do not slip through into production system and that changes made to source code are not later ‘undone’ accidentally due to poor source code control.

Internet Specific Issues

While security should be a concern for any IT organization, there are some aspects of security which are specific to internet-based activities.

Authentication, non repudiation, encryption, privacy, and integrity of data are all issues made more important by use of web technologies, inherently an open and anonymous form of communication.

The internet provides added security issues, because there is no centralised infrastructure, it operates 24 x 7, over a huge global scale and therefore has millions of potential users, of whom any one could at any time attempt to access non-public information. Some will do so by accident, some just out of curiosity and some using malicious intent will relentlessly test out every aspect of your system until they find a security hole through which they can create havoc.

Security is also a moving target, as new methods become available to hackers all time, with technology increasing rapidly. By its very nature, internet was developed to allow openness and this makes it all more complex to implement security over top of internet without making it difficult for authorized parties to access data you wish them to be able to access. Severe damage is often detected too late.

Technologies

Access controls and cryptography can help to prevent unauthorized access to information, but they are only part of picture.

Organizations are now employing complete PKI and CA infrastructures, such as Onsite Managed Trust Services provided by Verisign, in order to provide them with flexibility and control they need throughout enterprise, allowing them to issue their own digital certificates, secure access to extranets/intranets, secure transactions, encrypt email and to carry out authentication.

Access Controls

Hidden URLs –one easy way to restrict access to information and services is to put information at unpublished URLs and provide URL only to those who should have access to information at that address. Clearly this is not a high security option and is unacceptable for most purposes. There are various tools open to serious hackers that enable them to ‘find’ hidden URLs (spiders etc.), and of course it is possible that locations of URLs are passed on to others by those who are authorized to access URLs.

Host-based Restrictions – it is possible to restrict access to a web address (or to a web server, if using a firewall) by IP address or DNS hostname. This method can enforce that only web users operating from within a particular domain or network can access web page. This is useful if an external web site contains some pages which should only be accessed by employees of company, as it can be used to deny access to anyone not operating from within company’s network. This method is not totally foolproof as it cannot deal with unauthorized access due to ‘spoofing’ (whereby a user ‘pretends’ to come from an authorized network address).

Identity-based Controls The most common method of access control on websites is via usernames and passwords. However, passwords are so easily shared/forgotten, often users select easily-guessed passwords and there are a number of tools available to serious hackers to enable them to easily guess most passwords. Thus, alternative identity-based controls have been developed. Many companies now implement a VPN (Virtual Public Network) to enable employees to connect to internal networks from outside of company, though these can be costly and troublesome to implement. Smart cards, or software, containing an encrypted public key, to identify valid users are one of many other options in this area.

Authentication Single Sign-on – this technology allows same user to sign on to multiple Ebusiness applications without having to type in their userid/password for each site. There are a number of offerings of this kind of technology. The most common names in this field are Netegrity SiteMinder and X at top end, and Gator Ewallet and RoboForms at lower end of market.

Integrated Authentication – The best known offering in this area is Nt/Windows 2000/3 authentication. This, in effect, provides single sign-on to Microsoft applications that support it – such as SQL Server and any of Windows operating systems.

Cryptography

Cryptography can be implemented through encryption of data sent to and from a website and through digital signatures and certificates which ‘prove’ that sender and recipient are who they claim to be.

Non-repudiation – cryptographic receipts are created so that author of a message cannot falsely deny sending message.

Code Signing – a digital certificate can be enclosed within a Jar file (for java code) or a Cab file (for activex controls) to indicate that code was created by a trusted party and has not been tampered with since being created.

Confidentiality- encryption can scramble information sent over internet so that eavesdroppers cannot access data’s content.

Integrity – digitally signed message digest codes can be used to verify that a message has not been modified while in transit.

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