E-Learning's New Pupil: the Government

"Not only is it expensive for Alaska police to travel for classroom training, but they are few and far between, leaving the state unpoliced when they leave," says Ned Futoran, program manager for the distributed learning program for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Ga. "Distance learning is the only way we can do it."

Futoran, detailed to the Department of Homeland Security, says that distance learning is more important than ever for law enforcement. As the nation's security needs are being beefed up, police need even more training, yet budgets are still tight. Most important, police officers don't have the time to leave their areas. "If you take three or four of them away to go to class, it hurts their ability to do their work," he says. Since the 1970s, thousands of local and state law-enforcement officers traveled to the federal training center's 4,000-acre campus headquarters for training. But now officers can use the more than 2,000 courses that are available online, around the clock, from anywhere. Futoran says interest is growing rapidly: 25,000 law-enforcement officers were distance trained in 2002, 38,000 so far this year, and an expected 55,000 will be trained in 2004.

Students can tap into training through www.golearn.gov, the federal government's 1-year-old virtual schoolhouse that serves all federal employees, which just added the federal training center to its list of seven agency partners. Eventually, the Office of Management and Budget would like all federal agencies to move their online training systems to golearn.

So far, golearn has been an educational hit. Almost one year since its launch, more than 100,000 registered users have completed more than 60,000 classes, says Mike Fitzgerald, program manager for the E-Training Initiative at the Office of Personnel Management, which administers the site.

Now, golearn has matured from offering 40 free courses to offering nearly 3,000 free and fee-based courses. Agencies have shown a willingness to pay for the courses, too, with 40,000 fee-based classes completed, compared with 20,000 free ones. Prices are based on the number of agency employees taking courses. For example, if an agency buys a total library of around 1,500 courses, the cost is pennies per course, Fitzgerald says.

The most popular courses are those teaching desktop software such as Word or Excel. But Fitzgerald is seeing a trend toward project-management courses, designed to raise the skill level of managers, and courses concerning IT security. All courses are customized for an agency's specific needs. "Golearn really helps an agency stretch training dollars," he says.

The learning-management system or E-learning platform used to serve up courses is usually provided by outside vendors such as GeoLearning Inc., which had to learn the idiosyncrasies of the federal government when it comes to online training. "There is a great emphasis on '508 compliance' [accessibility for disabled employees] in the federal government, much more than you see in corporate America," says Frank Russell, president and CEO of the company, which snagged a five-year contract with golearn. "The federal government is also hypersensitive to security, and even people who do our programming must have background checks."

Content providers are another integral piece of the E-learning puzzle, and Kevin Duffer, director of government and education markets at SkillSoft Corp. sees the same trends. "The feds are leaders in disability standards, which is a good thing because it starts with the government and will end up everywhere," he says. Duffer, whose company counts the Defense and Treasury departments, the Social Security Administration, and other government agencies as customers, also sees a big demand for leadership and management courses on all levels. "We're getting requests for role-playing simulations to complement a management course. Things like conflict resolution on the management level are popular." The company offers about 900 business-skills courses and more than 1,000 information-technology courses.

There's little doubt that E-learning provides many benefits: Students can learn at a time and pace of their own choosing; the costs are low compared with classroom instruction; and agencies can quickly "borrow" and integrate already-popular instructional snippets from other agencies' courses. Still, distance learning faces challenges. "We often assume that everyone has a desktop with broadband, but that's just not the case," says Jerry Sparks, director of distance learning for the Federal Aviation Administration. Air traffic controllers, for example, don't use a desktop computer in their work. "We need to serve these people, too." He adds: "We also need to push towards less proprietary and more universal courseware so it doesn't matter where content comes from or what [learning-management system] is used." Sometimes, content is pegged for use on a specific learning-management system, but the growing use of SCORM, or Sharable Content Object Reference Model protocol, championed by the federal government will allow content to be used on a wide spectrum of hardware, operating systems, and Web browsers.

Joy Hunter, acting dean of the Veterans Affairs Learning University, concurs. "I would like to see an integration of all distance-learning modalities and choices," she says. The VA has an extensive distance-learning program for its 250,000 employees, including Web-based instruction, CD-ROMs, interactive and noninteractive satellite, video to the desktop, facilitated Web-based courses, and traditional classroom instruction. "E-Learning is not a an either-or situation. It's a blended solution," Hunter says.

What's the next big thing to watch for in E-Learning? The integration of learning and work objects in courseware so a worker can go quickly to one particular section of instructional material without having to wade through the whole course. "You don't have to touch every page in the course just to answer one question or learn something new that you need right now," Fitzgerald says. "You get right to what you need, then get right back to work."

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