Take charge of training

by Ana Orubeondo

April 13, 2001 —

COMPANIES THAT WANT to stay competitive in today's global economy must make sure their employees stay up to speed on the latest and greatest technologies, whether they are getting Cisco-certified training or WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) programming skills. IT administrators, managers, sales staff, and field technicians need to stay current to do their jobs accurately. In addition, promoting training as a core value will help your business attract and retain employees.

In general, instructor-led classroom training is expensive, often costing thousands of dollars plus the price of travel. Training can be a significant burden on the bottom line for companies, such as those with constantly evolving product lines, that rely on an up-to-date work force to generate profits.

In response, many companies with high training demands are opting to set up and support e-learning servers and create the training content themselves by purchasing e-learning systems like Centra Symposium 5.0. But this solution doesn't come cheap. Companies that invest $50,000 in an e-learning platform will need to dedicate the time and resources to train their work force, maintain the servers, and stay current with the latest training content.

Centra Symposium 5.0

BUSINESS CASE

Companies with highly educated work forces will prosper. If the Symposium training platform is properly implemented, improved sales and service performance with faster product launches and application deployments are almost assured.

TECHNOLOGY CASE

Companies employing Symposium will need to dedicate training time for all their internal and geographically dispersed employees, partners, and customers and maintain up-to-date content to keep employees interested and skills sharp.

PROS

+ Provides employees with real-time data and training access

+ Allows companies to control training materials

+ Supports rich content

CONS

- Supports only Windows systems

- At 28.8Kbps, course downloads can be slow

COST

Typical configuration starts at $50,000

PLATFORMS

Server: Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000; client: Windows 95, 98, Me, Windows 2000, and Windows NT

Centra Software Inc., Lexington, Mass.; (781) 861-7000, www.centra.com

In addition to being less expensive than outside training, the Web-based aspect of these solutions allows you to offer your employees the chance to learn at their own pace and from any location.

Centra Symposium 5.0 is a Web-based virtual classroom that allows companies to maintain and create their own training content.

Centra Symposium can be deployed on any Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 server. It integrates with Microsoft BackOffice, thereby extending the threaded discussion forums and making use of Outlook calendar notifications and the database management and reporting tools available in SQL Server. The client component can be downloaded to any Windows 95, 98, Me, Windows 2000, or Windows NT 4.0 desktop with bandwidth as low as 28.8Kbps.

Centra Symposium offers an easy-to-use management console, good content creation tools, and a broad array of services, and it can enable effective individual-or group-oriented learning experiences. For those reasons, we gave Centra Symposium 5.0 a score of Very Good.

Due to its complexity, each Centra Symposium purchase comes with professional training on the system. Centra personnel will assist IT administrators, instructors, and marketing executives by providing on-site and virtual-classroom training courses. The training time required to use Centra Symposium varies depending on your company's needs because the solution provides a wide range of functions, for managing users, creating content, and getting the most from your choice of instructional method.

Administrators responsible for users and events use Symposium's Event Manager. We found Event Manger easy to use, and we were able to manage all of the users, groups, and events on the CentraOne 5.0 server.

Depending on the course, instructors can create an evaluation form to gauge the level of learning, obtain feedback on the effectiveness of course instruction, and solicit participant input.

Companies can create evaluation forms with multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank questions in a variety of ways, and course instructors have the option to record evaluation results along with the user's identity, record them anonymously, or not record them at all. Some courses such as an introduction to marketing may not need to be graded, but others that are more product-specific can be. Instructors can grade the forms and display the results to the course participants, grade them and not display the results, or not grade the forms at all.

Individuals responsible for creating and maintaining the training material work with Agenda Builder to assemble, sequence, and package the content. Having been through this process, we recommend developing content and getting it in order before using Agenda Builder. For example, if you are creating an agenda for a corporate overview, you might plan to include a link to the company's Web site, a PowerPoint presentation, and an evaluation to solicit participant feedback on the effectiveness of the presentation. The Agenda Builder is best used to modify, add, or edit content or to test events rather than to create content from scratch.

The end-user tools employ graphical interfaces, making it easy to participate and respond in a class. In addition, the tools helped to cut down on training time. We also liked the self-paced learning option, which allows students to stop and resume as duty dictates.

The flexibility offered to students, the good management tools, and the variety of content options makes Centra Symposium 5.0 not only useful but enjoyable. Its instructor-led and self-paced e-learning options offer viable ways to educate a company's work force.

InfoWorld