Corporate Training Vendors Must Re-tool to Survive

If your corporate training activities rely on the traditional face-to-face interaction in a classroom, you may go out of business completely as the novel coronavirus continues its spread.

Along with the news of companies big and small canceling key conferences and meetings throughout the world, what is left out is the mass cancellations of training workshops of all sorts. If you were a training vendor at Apple, your scheduled workshop at Apple HQ in Cupertino was cancelled until further notice. If you trained Facebook employees – canceled. Google? – Cancelled. Salesforce? – That business is gone for now. The grim reality is that ALL face-to-face training has been cancelled.

The antiquated world of traditional training vendors is crumbling, and there is no going back to business as usual. First, responsible corporations are limiting most business-related trips to ensure the safety of their employees, and this limitation is likely to stay for long. Second, training vendors themselves also need to ground their personnel for the same reasons. So on the one hand, the vendors’ customers are afraid and don’t want to meet in one room with them, and on the other hand, their employees don’t want to travel and are afraid to meet the customers. The circle of doom is complete.

The future of the corporate training industry belongs to technology-enabled training vendor

  1. The ongoing battle with the novel coronavirus reveals the vulnerability of many business models and training approaches. The impact of the virus is already shaping up to influence the corporate training industry in at least three profound ways:
    a major market shakeout in favor of the more technologically advanced training vendors
  2. Scalable online training delivery becoming the default standard of corporate training
  3. Further growth of Learning Experience Platform (LXP) market as companies start to understand the value of internal expertise vs. third-party vendors

Let’s look at these in more detail.

Traditional training vendors are officially obsolete
If the current situation is not a wakeup call, what is? Traditions are good until they are not. The traditional “conference-room-and-pencil” training vendors are going to suffer the most in 2020 and beyond.

Those who have for so many years denied or postponed the obvious need to introduce technology-enabled distance training programs, will lose a lot of business. Many will go out of business altogether if they do not re-tool quickly.

These vendors need to act promptly to roll out three types of training program:

A. Instructor-led live online training

This is the first and logical step in the tech-enabled transformation. First of all, this approach is just as high-touch as the good old face-to-face training. Second of all, the approach is similar in scale and logistics: small groups of trainees need to cancel work, and gather at a predefined time to get the training.

While this approach is the cheapest to implement, it is also arguably the most valuable in this situation because instructors are able to implement it with relative ease. The biggest value comes from data: the vendors are quickly able to analyze what works best for them and their customers with online training delivery mode. This knowledge helps roll-out progressively better programs.

It’s still a face-to-face training program, but since there are no limits of the classroom’s physical space anymore, it can now be scaled to larger audiences.

B. Instructor-led blended online training

One of our company’s secret insights that can be shared here is related to this: our data clearly shows that **the holy grail of effective, scalable corporate training at this time is the instructor-led blended training program**. In the next decade, that’s where things are going. The “blend” will change in quality as more and more technological assistance will be thrown in the mix. However, our data shows that the key to success and effectiveness is the instructor. The human thought and personal touch and is then enhanced with technology, off-line activities, data, etc – to produce a super effective and scalable training programs that truly work.

A subset of this type of training is the Bootcamp: fast, intensive, laser-focused training that provides a big boost and a quick shot of essential new skills. Bootcamps work exceptionally well for groups up to about 50 trainees.

C. Self-paced training

Due to increasing affordability of high-quality video recording, the cost of producing a self-paced course has been going down. However, the time required to build a course—those with experience would agree that “build” is the better verb describign the process of course production—remains steady: depending on complexity, it takes at least a couple of weeks for a relatively simple scenario. Nevermind the technology: what matters most is course design and user testing.

There are quite a few popular coaches out there that re-package Steve Blank’s advice about product discovery and customer development as the best way to design a self-paced course. The very bad news is that the customer development process is too complex, too messy, and it is not for everyone. In our view at RKK LXP is that this process does not work for course development at all, and these consultants should be honest with their audiences about the limitations of the process that they repackage as the ultimate solution.

The good news is that rolling out a high-quality self-paced training program is much easier than finding a product-market fit for a business.

That said, some companies are still stuck in the ancient past with their e-learning modules for the antiquated world of LMS that’s shrinking fast in front of our eyes.

Our advice to the training industry is to stay away from the Learning Management System world altogether – it is a an expensive sinking ship. Companies who still use an LMS should think of cutting costs by shutting it down and implementing a better, more flexible solution: the Learning Experience Platform (LXP) like the one we offer on RUKUKU.com for a tiny fraction of the cost of an LMS.

In order to survive, these vendors will have to change their business model. They will need to transition to technology-enabled distance training delivery. The good news is that it is the future of corporate training anyway, and now is the good time to invest resources to implement this transition to stay relevant. The bad news is that, any delay will be fatal to many training vendors.

Traditions are good, and conservative approaches work well until they don’t work at all: not only the face-to-face training approach may be putting people’s lives at risk, the sheer life of many traditional training businesses may be facing an immininent end!

Future Corporate Training is scalable and online

Forget about cookies and coffee in a sleepy training office. It is naive to expect a change in policy after Covid-19 from most L&D managers. The virus may subside and go away, but the company regulations will stay unchanged for a long time. It is reasonable to think that corporations will generally do two things:

a) Businesses will move most corporate training in-house. This means that Learning Experience Platforms will grow in popularity as corporations will seek to tap into their internal expertise to deliver training. LXPs enable easy knowledge sharing among employees – now suddenly EVERYONE in a company or firm has the tools to deliver training to colleagues. RUKUKU.com is one example of such toolset.

b) Companies will require that all external training programming be delivered at scale and online. This means that outside training vendors must find a way to integrate into the client’s infrastructure or lose business.

We expect a burst in popularity of instructor-led corporate bootcamps.

To stay relevant, training vendors will have to be present on different platforms or use a tool like RUKUKU.com that allows an easy, inexpensive and secure integration with their customers’ IT infrastructure.

Agile training content development model will dominate

With all of the above, it is inevitable that corporations will spend more time and effort on obtaining and developing high-quality training programs that suit their goals best. Training vendors will have to innovate and iterate quickly to customize their offerings for different clients.

This means that vendors need to figure out how to do high-quality content development cheaply, quickly and constantly. Think YouTube channel style: agile, to-the point, always fresh.

Corporations, who embrace the LXP approach where all employees can easily become trainers, will soon discover that most of the content pieces in the crowd-sourced will be the following formats: text, video, pdf, video-conference, quiz, presentation and shared documents. One really does not need anything else to deliver great training.

This means very expensive e-learning modules of the past, running on your 90’s-era LMS are the thing of the past. They are going away for good as most training programs do not need to be in a specialized “SCORM” enabled Adobe Flash (what?) container. E-learning modules have never been sexy, but they should be pretty dead in the new age of corporate training.

To sum it all up, in order to stay relevant, corporate instruction must be digital, remote, and scalable. And put the instructor back into the training programs, get rid of boring, inefficient e-learning modules.

Rukuku Offers Free Service To Unsafe Schools

Safe Connection Program

Recent barbaric attacks on school children have made headlines around the world and shocked everyone.

As our contribution to world piece, we at Rukuku decided to launch the “Safe Connection” program for schools and training organizations where student and instructor safety is a concern. If you represent such a school or training organization please email us with an explanation of your needs. We will then contact you to discuss technology issues and to assess the possibility of connecting every instructor and student at your school to Rukuku free of charge. Obviously, we can only help if your instructors and students can access the internet.

Our software products and services effectively enable live and asynchronous instructor-led and self-paced training programs, which eliminate the need for students and teachers to meet in a classroom. We are certain that Rukuku technology products can help schools and training centers in unsafe or war torn regions deal with some of the safety issues by enabling more distance programs.

Technology, Tests, and the Art of the Essay

Should computers grade essays?

The Common Core is trying to shift the emphasis of education toward more complex forms of thinking. Evaluating more complex thinking, however, requires more complex forms of assessment. I think most people would agree that written essays are better indicators of a students’ understanding than multiple choice, fill-in-the-bubble tests, but they are also more time-consuming and expensive to mark. Multiple choice tests can be fed into a computer and instantly graded, whereas essays require a teacher or professor or test center professional to read and evaluate them. Or maybe they don’t.

edtech, assessment, education

Can computers properly assess essays?

Several studies in recent years, like this one for example, have shown that computers can mark essays with the same accuracy and consistency as humans. In fact, computers are often more consistent than human readers. As states struggle to put together new assessments, without breaking budgets, computerized essay grading holds some obvious attraction. Namely, it’s much cheaper.

But it is also controversial and it’s not hard to imagine why. Computers can’t really measure creativity or originality. And the values placed on certain features, like longer words and more complex phrases, open possibilities for manipulating the scoring system.  To see more on this argument, check out this statement from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

What do you think, dear readers? Do you see any problems with computers grading essays? Leave comments below!

Hot for Teaching: Education Attracts More Qualified Candidates

Teaching is attracting better qualified candidates. That is the conclusion of a study by Dan Goldhaber and Joe Walch of the Center of Education Data and Research (CEDR).  In this article published in the Winter 2014 issue of Education Next, Messrs. Goldhaber and Walch not only discuss the results of their research but also outline the historical trends that led to the initial decline in the academic qualifications of teachers.

Teaching, class

A young teacher helps one of her students in class.

The story goes something like this. A few decades ago, teaching was the most popular career choice for well-educated women. Then came the women’s liberation movement, and new opportunities in varying fields pulled qualified women away from teaching. The talent pool shrank, and academic qualifications for teachers overall fell.

To illustrate, the percentage of teaching candidates graduating in the top 10% of their high school class declined from 25% in 1964 to 11% in 2000.  During the same time period, the percentage of teachers that scored in the lowest 60% in standardized testing increased from 32-35% to 42%. Check out that research here.

Then came No Child Left Behind, passed in 2001. The law put in several new requirements on teaching, like making teachers complete certain required courses or pass competency tests in the subject areas which they teach. NCLB also introduced a ton of new testing. Many predicted that the stricter requirements and emphasis on testing would deter qualified candidates from applying.

The research presented in the article, however, suggests the opposite trend. Teacher qualifications are improving. Unlike in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, graduates entering the teaching profession had slightly higher SAT test scores on average than peers entering other professions. Those  teachers scored in the 50th percentile in 2008-09, compared to the 45th percentile and 42nd percentile for new teachers in 1993-94 and 2000-01 respectively.

New teachers also spend more time in school than in the past. The number of teachers holding master’s degrees increased from 47% to 51% from the 1987-88 school year to the 2007-08 year, and the percentage of prospective teachers formally training in graduate programs rather than undergraduate programs rose from around 45% in 1990 to 63% in 2010.

Can we take encouragement from these figures? Maybe. The numbers are somewhat outdated and may reflect tougher economics conditions rather than stronger interest among qualified applicants. Teaching could be a more attractive option only because it offers more security and more opportunities in a challenging job market. At the same time, these are long term trends and figures from 2008 would only reflect the very beginning of the financial crisis.

What do you think? What’s behind the rise in the number of qualified teachers? Please let us know in the comment section below.

Cool in School: Socialization and Technology in the classroom

I’m a social person. I’m also a little nerdy. For those reasons, one point in particular stood out for me in our recent interview with Michael Horn. His experiences observing technology in the classroom suggest that, rather than isolating students, personalizing education has contributed to a sort of learning-centered socialization.

edtech, socialization, school

Technology and personalization in school may contribute to more learning-based social interactions.

Here’s why. While kids may be plugged into individual monitors, studying lessons personalized to their individual strengths and weaknesses, they still jump up now and then to help each other out. As Mr. Horn points out, that’s a much healthier type of socialization than most of us experienced when we were younger.

It’s a nice image, right? Students chatting away in class, not about the school dance, the weekend football game, or so-n-so’s new boyfriend, but about math and history and school subjects instead. Ok, maybe not instead, but in addition to sports, social events, and gossip, maybe more students will talk about school subjects. This could be the development that nerdy kids around the world have been waiting for. Those students that understand class material and are willing to help others will have many more opportunities to socialize.

There are some big assumptions there, though. One is that teachers will allow such socialization to take place. That means a looser classroom environment with which some teachers may not be comfortable. Second, kids are competitive, especially academically oriented ones. Taking time to peer tutor other students may be less attractive as kids get older and competition for top spots intensifies.

Even with those considerations in mind, I am still hopeful. Is it possible that being a good student in school could turn into a social asset in grade school rather than a liability? Or is that just the wishful thinking of a nerdy guy? I’m interested to hear thoughts from our readers. To what extend does academic strength improve, impair or have absolutely nothing to do with grade school socializing? Is technology changing it?