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C H A P T E R 5
Potentials of vocational training
In this chapter we will exhibit our ideas over the trends and potentials of telelearning in vocational training. After the trends we will identify some barriers between the solutions (chapter 4) and the potentials.
5.1 Trends and opportunities in vocational training
Here we describe some general trends and opportunities for telelearning and vocational training. We are going...
5.1.1 Towards the information era
One of the first major trends that can be identified is the shift from an industrial era to an information era. In other terms: The industrial era provided tools for the body, the information era for the mind . It is not mere a question of who can produce the best products (quality upgrade costs don't exceed the quality benefit any more), but who can deliver the best suiting product the fastest way for end users. Information technology turns the world into one big shopping mall, where consumers can choose from products from all over the world. If a company wants to survive, they will have to meet these requirements. This has its reflection on the needed educational basis for employees: Intellectual skills will grow more important than psychical assets. Therefore, training of employees becomes even more important than today.
But what must companies do to make the step towards the information era? First, they must have the latest ideas and technologies [16]. That means constant innovation. Second, they have to be able to deliver products flawlessly around the globe at world quality standards and provide extra service to customers. Third and last, companies need to have a lot of connections: The best partners to extend the reach of the company and make use of economics of scale principles. These three things rely solely on human capabilities: Creativity and imagination, teaching and learning, trust and respect. Here lies an opportunity for telelearning, because it enhances these capabilities: For creativity an open sphere is required with no restrictions. As we have seen in the Chapter 4, Lotus Learningspace is also a groupware application. It provides a common memory, where people can see each others ideas and can be triggered by them. Groupware also provides anonymity, which can be important for generating ideas. In today's companies it is still a common situation that in a meeting everybody listens to the director, but don't listen if a lower employee tries to share an idea with the rest of a group. Anonymous ideas cannot be judged on the person who presented it, but only by the value of the idea itself. Trust can be built by letting people get to know each other. Teleconferences or instructions by video enables this: It lets people get to know each other as if they were in the same room.
5.1.2 Towards continuous learning
Another important trend that drives the need for continuous learning (with the advantages of telelearning), is the rapid ageing of knowledge. The time when knowledge an individual obtained with an university study becomes obsolete is rapidly shortening. We are close to the age where knowledge is 'old' after only 3 to 4 years. Here clearly lies an opportunity for telelearning to keep the knowledge of individuals up to date. Related to the subject is that (as already has been pointed out in Chapter 3) no longer have a life-long contract at companies. Employees come and go, new ones must learn fast and adapt themselves to the organisation.
5.1.3 Towards standardization
As learning costs become a larger factor on the budget, small and larger companies will strive to keep the costs down. The same trend as in any other 'booming' sector can be seen: standardization. By making courses interchangeable in a standard format (like with TopClass in HTML), courses can be maintained and components ported to other courses easily.
5.1.4 Towards an integrated IT policy
The telelearning concept and telelearning for vocational training begin to make their entrance into the university world and the corporate world, with the first pilot-studies and projects. We can expect that the use of telelearning will grow rapidly through its benefits. Governments slowly grow aware of it, and are doing studies what kind position they should take. If we look at the situation in the Netherlands, we see that there have been a few acts on ICT. Policy is still premature and scattered across many departments. Recently, a few voices in the parliament called for an entirely new department: The ICT department.
As ICT and its applications like telelearning grow in importance (and they do that very rapidly as we saw in Chapter 4), a good infrastructure becomes more and more important for the competitive position. Here lies an opportunity for the government to retain this competitive position by supporting the infrastructure. Large and small companies could both benefit from this: It could become more easily to acquire connections and built up a network. An infrastructure provided by the government is much more important for small companies than large companies. Large companies can carry the large investments better than the small companies, and also have economics for scale.
5.1.5 Towards more bandwidth and reliability
Throughout the piece we mentioned networks and the necessary bandwidth. Right now, we cannot say there is a high bandwidth network: Internet has become the victim of its own success. The World Wide Web is sometimes called the World Wide Wait. The problem lies with international networks, not with local networks. And these are the most important to telelearning. One of the most important international connections is the one between the United States and Europe across the Atlantic. The prospect for this is connection:
In total there was 22 Gbit/s available until May this year. In that month Worldcom and MCI added 30 Gbit/s to that with the Gemini sea-cable. In April there came the Atlantic Crossing-1 sea-cable to the Netherlands that added another 40 Gbit/s. The last cable that was connected to the Netherlands was the TAT-10 in 1992, which had a bandwidth of 3 x 565 Mbit/s. [20]
The available capacity on the North-Atlantic cables until the year 2000 is already known: 240 Gbit/s . One of the most ambitious projects is Project Oxygen, they plan to have a transatlantic connection of 640 Gbit/s at the end of the year 2000. There are two reasons why the available bandwidth is known two years in advance:
But what can we read from all this prospects and numbers? On first thoughts it looks like a great expansion, but what can we do with it? For example, the 640 Gbit/s of Project Oxygen is fully filled with 500.000 Europeans watching different television canals in MPEG-1 format from the US. We can conclude there is not enough bandwidth for the next 5-10 years available to provide teleconferencing to the whole European workforce.
Another issue, related to the bandwidth story, is the demand for more reliable connections. This structure and ideas in this document are primarily generated during short and long ICQ chat sessions. On say, a total of 7 chats, there were two network errors causing the chat to be broken. That is 30%! In telephone networks, an error rate of once in 30 years is usual. This is a huge contrast, and a major drawback for companies to rely on connections for the training of their employees.
5.1.6 Potential for individual optimized education
The traditional classroom can be seen as a instructor centred teaching method, where the objective is to transfer information and knowledge. Students learn by hearing and seeing (sheets, books), and everybody has to keep the same pace. But people retain only 20% of what they hear; 40% of what they see and hear; and 75% of what they see hear and do [14] . Furthermore, there is a difference in the way people learn at their best: People with left-brain dominance are believed to be primarily auditory learners, and those with right-brain dominance are believed to be primarily visual learners30. With telelearning it is possible to suit these individual requirements for the best learning process at acceptable costs. Here lies the opportunity for telelearning to get rid of abundant teaching (people only learn what they need to know), and teaching in the best possible individual way. This counts for small companies and large companies.
5.2 Barriers between solutions and potentials
In chapter 4 we saw the available technical solutions and in this chapter the trends in vocational training. Are there any gaps between the solutions and the potentials? In this section we sum up these barriers between the solutions and potentials:
And off course, the costs for connections play a role here. Databases can be easily accessed with low hardware costs. But to make a full-motion video connection available to any employee in the company is extremely expensive, yet.
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