Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
10tips The hubs would support demand com-
ing from several satellite operations, or spokes. In satellite operations, you would only provide the top five or 10 most popu- lar courses. This, in effect, increases class sizes for the less popular or more advanced courses, because students from various spokes would travel to the hubs to take them. In the hub-and-spoke methodology, you
maximize where you deploy your delivery resources. This is a favorite technique for deploying customer and partner training, although virtual instruction is starting to obsolete brick-and-mortar strategies when hands-on training isn't a requirement. Efficiency in classroom deployment also
considers classroom capacity issues. A cost-effective approach is to configure classrooms of varying sizes, creating class- rooms that can hold 12, 18, or 24 students. This allows a much more effective use of the training facility's square footage. And if you keep the classroom sizes in
even numbers, additional cost savings can be achieved by having two students share the same computer, which, as a by-prod- uct, stimulates collaboration. Implementing shared classrooms pro- vides even more flexibility. Let's say that
you need to be prepared to flex your oper- ation from 50 to 100 classrooms, depend- ing on business conditions. Instead of building 100 classrooms, you could build 50 classrooms, utilize shared conference rooms for another 30, and then arrange for outside classrooms for the remaining 20. With classroom build-outs costing between $60,000 and $150,000 each, you can reduce your costs considerably by leveraging shared facilities.
Tip #8: If you look around
your organiza- tion you will find hundreds
of ways to lever- age another
organization's talents.
TIP #6
TASKED WITH MULTIPLE CHARTERS? THINK VIRTUAL LEARNING
ENVIRONMENTS (VLES) In the private sector, over 44 percent of our readers reported that they have had to take on additional charters. Internal audi- ences, customers, and partners are now all being trained by one learning organiza- tion. Whether the driver of this movement was the economy or efficiency, taking on multiple charters was the number one trend in the public sector as well. Let's say that you're one of those organi-
zations that just picked up a charter to teach multiple partners, each with thou- sands of employees. Generally, mixing the partner crowd in with an internal or cus- tomer audience needs to be tempered with rules of engagement. Appropriate rules might include "no solicitation of clients" in a customer venue or "no marketing or sales challenges will be discussed" in an internal training venue. But beyond these considerations, the
new charter will certainly strain existing classroom and instructor resources. To manage this, some learning organizations are setting up Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). The VLE can operate 24/7, show presen-
tations on demand, provide collaboration rooms, libraries of documentation, and can even offer "office hours" where an expert can be made available to answer questions. The VLE works well for a part- ner audience that is trying to balance their need for your product knowledge with their own company's need for sales and implementations.
TIP #7
NOT ALL COURSES REQUIRE THE SAME DEVELOPMENT
RESOURCES With curriculum development times aver- aging 25-40 days to produce one day of classroom training, or 100 hours to pro- duce one hour of online training, you have to think about how you want your limited curriculum development staff spending their time. Should your best attended course get equal time with your worst attended course, just because they are both the same length? Well, you're going to protest that it still
36 May / June 2012 Elearning!