Online learning
By Simon Williams
You can learn face-to-face or from books, but there’s a third way which can be cheaper than a seminar and more interactive than a manual. Simon Williams goes online.
HardCopy Issue: 53 | Found In: Business | Published: 14/09/2011 | Last Revision: 14/09/2011
As software grows more feature-rich, it automatically becomes more complex. Sitting down to learn the features of a new version, or to pick up a new application from scratch, becomes more long-winded too. We can all do with whatever assistance is available, to make learning more enjoyable and so more effective.
Online with LearnKey
We tried two LearnKey courses in ‘Helping Customers Through Quality Service’ and ‘JavaScript Fundamentals’. Both take a different approach from Microsoft with each having a trainer on-screen, talking you through the subject.
Both tutors start with an introduction, and the customer service course then moves off into a number of example scenarios in a hardware store tele-support helpdesks, illustrating the importance of acting naturally and finding out exactly what a customer wants.
This is your tutor for LearnKey’s JavaScript Fundamentals. Top marks for graphic effort, but what message does the peeling plaster give?
The JavaScript course runs through a brief history of the scripting language which helps to position it in relation to Java and other tools, before starting with a ‘Hello World’ example with the tutor typing code on screen (with more than a few typos and corrections). This approach helps maintain interest in what could be a very dry subject.
These courses don’t progress at the breakneck speed of some of the Microsoft offerings and make good use of the multimedia available in online training. The multiple-choice self tests at the end of the Connecting with Customers modules suffer a little from having fairly obvious answers, but they do help push home the points LearnKey wants to reinforce.
Online learning has all the benefits of a multimedia presentation with slides, video, animated walkthroughs, audio and text, while leaving learners to progress at their own pace and from wherever they choose to log on. This method of learning can have cost advantages too, as even dedicated courses in specialist subjects can be taken in modules, from a place of work. They don’t require time off-site at a specialist venue, where an entire subject is covered in an intense cramming session.
Where online learning fits
The simplest but also the most passive of learning techniques is the book. The learner has to be motivated enough to read through its pages, selecting those chapters or sections which are relevant to what they want to learn and having only static pictures as illustrations. Books are, however, the most portable and accessible media, needing no power or Internet access. They’re also the least expensive form of learning and training can be suspended at any point and restarted with only the aid of a bookmark.
Disk-based learning, with course content provided on CD or DVD, is similar to online learning. Course materials can be text, photos, animations and videos, all of which can be accessed from any device with a suitable drive. This means you have to have such a device with you to be able to start or continue training. The main advantage is that the materials are available anywhere you have the disk and you don’t need access to the Internet.
Online training removes the need to carry disks, though in their place you do need Internet access. The same forms of media should be available through online as through disk-based learning and there’s the potential for interaction, in the form of online chat. That said, two-way communication has yet to be exploited by many of the online learning providers.
The least flexible form of training is the face-to-face course. This is nearly always available only at a set time and location, involves one-to-many tuition and learners have to be able to absorb all the information in a fixed number of sessions. Since face-to-face courses normally involve specialist trainers, working with comparatively few learners, they are also likely to be the most expensive option.
The advantage of face-to-face training is direct interaction, where learners can ask questions to clarify points they are uncertain about. None of the other forms of training offer this very useful aspect of question and answer.
Here are just some examples of the courses that are available online, in both general business and specialist technical subject areas.
Microsoft Training 365
With the huge range of products available from Microsoft, you’d expect the company to offer a large number of training courses, and it does. From mainstream applications like those in the Office Suite, to Windows itself, to specialist languages and backroom software, there are over 1,650 courses on how to use Microsoft software and how to get the best from it.
Microsoft Training 365 in action
We tried out a couple of courses, namely a mainstream application course called ‘Intermediate Skills in Microsoft Word 2010’ and a fairly technical course ‘Introducing Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) using .NET 3.5’.
The WCF course starts with an audio introduction from a Microsoft Technical Product Planner, who explains what the module covers. A transcript of the introduction is available to print out. Each module is divided into a number of screens which are either text or video-based. In this case, a video is an animated diagram, used to illustrate the spoken text of the instruction, which is again available as a transcript. The text appears to be spoken by a text-to-speech synthesiser (apologies if this a human tutor).
The screen is sub-divided with a course outline down the left-hand side, a diagram of the module content at bottom left and room for your notes bottom right. You can type into this panel at any point, so you can refer to personal notes at any time you return to the module. The course is broken into a three-stage introduction, four stages describing the creation of a WCF service and a further six exploring WCF features.
This Microsoft Training 365 course module provides an introduction to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in easy stages.
The Word course works on much the same principles, though there are fewer components to the screen – there’s no module diagram or notes pane – and the animated diagrams are replaced by screen grabs, with the steps and options highlighted and operations described on a voice-track. Interspersed with these sections of tuition are tasks, designed to be performed in a copy of Word using prepared documents downloaded from the Labs section of the course module.
This particular course looks at customising Word, enhancing and reviewing documents, sharing and protecting documents and creating complex documents. Once you’ve worked through each module in the course, there’s a multiple-choice self-test so you can assess what you’ve learned and, if necessary, revisit parts of it.
These courses are by no means all intended for advanced users, there are beginner, intermediate and advanced level modules in most subjects, so you can start from scratch in even complex topics, such as programming languages. If you are already familiar with an application such as Word or Excel, there are advanced level modules on, for example, creating macros with VBA.
The various training modules run through your browser (Internet Explorer 6 or above as they don’t run well in Chrome) which means they don’t rely on special client software. You pay for the number of licences you need and can access and run the courses on any suitable computing device. Furthermore the technical courses give you access to live installations of the relevant tools, running remotely in a virtual environment.
Most of the Microsoft Training courses are available individually at prices ranging from six or seven pounds up to a couple of hundred pounds. If you are responsible for organising training within a company, you should try and plan the number and types of courses you’re likely to need in a year. If this works out at more than seven or eight individual courses, it will probably prove more economic to consider the subscription-based model offered by Microsoft Training 365.
As the name suggests, the subscription lasts for one year and, depending on the level of subscription, you can access as many courses as you need within that time. Any of the courses can be rerun at any time during the subscription, and you get access to any new content as it becomes available.
There are six levels of subscription, ranging from Desktop at £99 up to Premium at £1,049, with the more expensive including IT Pro, Developer and Dynamics courses, as well as those for desktop applications. The more expensive subscriptions cover a wider range of topics, including the less mainstream, more developer and IT support-led subjects.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are a number of shorter courses that bring you up to date with the latest versions of Microsoft applications. These can be very useful if you’re considering buying new versions of existing applications as part of an upgrade cycle.
Most courses take between one and two hours to complete, but you can pause at any point and continue where you left off. You can also run the courses from several different PCs and devices, if that suits you, so you could start on your work PC, continue on a laptop or tablet during a commute and finish on a home PC, as long as you have Internet access at each location.
LearnKey
These courses are available individually, rather than on subscription, and cover both IT-related subjects and more general topics, such as customer service. They use professionally filmed video to illustrate their subject matter and trainers who appear well used to leading face-to-face training courses. As with Microsoft’s courses, all tutors are American.
They include the same tuition, practice and test elements as Microsoft’s courses, reinforcing each topic to check what’s been learned. Single user licences for LearnKey courses cost from £30 to £910 depending on subject.
Things to check
The main drawback of pulling your training from the cloud is that you need a reasonably fast broadband connection to cope with the videos and animations. If your business is based out of town, with limited download speeds, you should trial the packages before buying them. Both Microsoft and LearnKey offer demos, so you can try a sample module or two and check they run smoothly. LearnKey products are also available on disk if this proves to be a problem. It’s also important to have a training professional on hand from within your organisation who can field questions that may crop up during the online training sessions.
If you’re running a 64-bit version of Windows, you may also have trouble running some courses within Microsoft Training 365, which require Silverlight for animation and videos. There’s currently no 64-bit version of Silverlight so you need to run them with a 32-bit browser.
Online learning can provide an excellent balance between the flexibility of multimedia courses and the convenience of cloud computing. It provides the ability to learn in just about any environment that has networked, Wi-Fi or 3G access to the Internet.