Cisco E-Learning Allows Partners To Train On-site

That's the word from Kevin MacRitchie, vice president of worldwide channels operations at the networking hardware vendor, based here.

In his role at Cisco, MacRitchie is charged with the mission of leveraging the Internet to increase partner productivity by some 5 percent per year, he said.

A major part of that effort is Cisco's Partner E-Learning Connection (PEC) site. Launched in March 2000, PEC provides online courses for all Cisco technology specializations.

The move to online-based courses was a huge productivity enhancement, said Tom Adams, vice president of strategy and partnerships at Calence, a Tempe, Ariz.-based Cisco Gold partner. "It saves significant time and money, especially on travel costs," he said.

Cisco's e-learning site is currently in its second generation. The first generation basically consisted of books and PowerPoint slides converted to HTML, MacRitchie said. The second generation provides "prescriptive learning," where students take a test before each course, and based on the results of the test, the PEC recommends which modules of the course a student needs to take, he said. Prescriptive learning cuts the number of course modules by between 40 percent and 60 percent, he said.

Calence's Adams said the prescriptive learning system is a timesaver, but the pre-course test isn't always the same as the official certification test. "It's a situation a lot like the SAT," Adams said. "You can ace the SAT prep test and think you are prepared, but when you go for the real test, it's a whole different animal."

The next stage in development of the PEC will be third-generation e-learning, or curriculum-based prescriptive learning, MacRitchie said. Under that scenario, a student enters certification objectives, such as IP telephony and wireless certification, and the system creates a test based on the entire curriculum for those certifications. Then, based on test results, the system determines which modules of which courses the student needs to meet those objectives.

MacRitchie said Cisco expects to test the third generation of the PEC within the next six months and to roll it out within a year.

"We need the time to test it because we need to make sure that the recommendations the system makes are actually what the students need to pass the certification tests," he said.

The PEC also contains a 3-D virtual equipment lab, where students without access to a particular piece of Cisco equipment can view virtual equivalents. "You can give somebody all the course training in the world, but if they have never actually seen the router or the switch they will be working with, you can run into problems," MacRitchie said.

In the virtual lab, students can view all sides of the equipment and zoom in on particular parts as well as remove and install interface cards, he added.

MacRitchie plans to have all of Cisco's equipment represented in the 3-D lab within six months.

Another online productivity project at Cisco is Partner Access Online (PAL), through which partners can send customer satisfaction surveys and view their own customer satisfaction results on PAL. Cisco recently added attach rates for sales of its SmartNet maintenance program as well as tracking information on calls to its technical assistance center.