TAKING LEARNING ONLINE MEANS
IT'S DELIVERED WHERE AND WHEN IT'S NEEDED.
With today's project teams crunched for time and often scattered across the globe, getting everyone in a classroom for training can be next to impossible. So more organizations are turning to e-learning. Almost anything remotely educational is fair game, including seminars, group discussions and articles written by colleagues.
The technology is not just enabling education in corporations—it's transforming it. When conducted via remote conferencing, e-learning can take on a collaborative flair with instructors and students interacting in group assignments—doing over a network connection what traditionally occurred over pushed-together classroom tables or in hotel conference rooms. Organizations can then record those sessions and put them online, letting team members do their training on demand, at times and locations that suit them. E-learning can also help grab the interest of younger workers accustomed to communicating through instant messages and social networking sites.
I recently tested two conferencing tools geared to corporate e-learning as well as a learning management system (LMS) designed to handle all the administrative tasks around developing, delivering, managing and tracking educational content.
LIVE!
Elluminate's Live! aims to make e-learning as interactive as possible—and lets companies make sure those e-students are paying attention in class. For example, course leaders can view students’ time-stamped notes. And an online polling feature provides a question-and-answer format that can double as a basic quiz tool.
Live! is the vendor's basic platform, a general-purpose conferencing tool available as a hosted web service or as software that companies can install on their own servers. Two optional programs also reside in Elluminate's e-learning suite. Plan! allows users to organize, script and package content ahead of time to make live sessions go more smoothly. Publish! records audio podcasts or standalone files from sessions for later playback.
Elluminate says a pending upgrade will add support for traditional phone lines, making audio conferencing easier. Right now, Live! only allows voice-overinternet-protocol (VoIP) calls, which are fine if users have the right Internet-based hardware, such as a PC headset and microphone or a VoIP handset. Not everyone does.
VYEW
At its heart, Simult Inc.’s Vyew is just another conferencing tool, but what a tool it is. It sets itself apart from the pack of better-known competitors by making it almost absurdly easy to import files—video and audio files, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, you name it—into a conference. Vyew's workspace ranks among the easiest to use I've ever tried.
Vyew is browser-based, which means users don't need to download client software (4 megabytes worth for Elluminate Live!, for example). But it does require the Adobe Flash plug-in. According to Simult, Vyew's browser-centricity has its advantages, one of which is the ability to bring students into a workspace, called a VyewBook, simply by sending them a web link via e-mail. Or, companies can add a link to their own site, making it the Vyew entry point for all employees. Vyew also has an interesting way of facilitating ondemand viewing: It maintains a record of all changes to the session and keeps them online rather than storing them in one file. And that means users can go back to see the VyewBook anytime.
GEOMAESTRO
As an LMS, GeoLearning's GeoMaestro looks and works differently than the conferencing tools reviewed above. GeoMaestro is all about the structure and delivery of content, not the content itself.
Rather than offering chat windows, whiteboards and videos, it focuses on course catalogs, student lists and administrative controls for deciding who should be notified about a course and who can access which one. A resource-management section helps administrators view and schedule available rooms—real rooms, not virtual ones. An automatic wait list enrolls the next person in line if someone drops out, sending them an e-mail announcing the change.
GeoMaestro does have direct integration with WebEx, which means users can set up conferences without leaving the software.
A drop-down list at the top lets users quickly change their view according to role, such as administrator, learner or instructor. A learner, for example, can see notices of required training and often access the courseware itself. The software also features “wizards” that walk users through prompts.
THE VERDICT
Of the conferencing tools, Live! has the most features explicitly dedicated to educational tasks and it comes in at a price comparable to Vyew's, so it's my e-learning pick of the two. But Vyew is more user-friendly and powerful if your primary need is generic conferencing and e-learning is just one of many uses.
On the LMS side, spend an hour with GeoMaestro, and you'll be planning your e-learning empire in no time.
Combine conferencing and an LMS and you'll tap the knowledge not just outside your organization, but within it as well. PM
QUICKFACTS
ELLUMINATE LIVE! 8.5
Requires: Windows 2000/2000 Server, Mac OS X 10.4, Solaris 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 4 for x86 or Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9/10 or higher; minimum 1-GHz Pentium 3, 2-GHz G5, or 750-MHz UltraSPARC II CPU, 512 MB RAM, 400 MB hard disk space; client requires standard Web browser for initial download, recent Windows, Mac OS, or Linux client, Internet connection (for hosted version)
Price: Free vRoom version (perpetual three connections/users, no recording), $999 per year hosted vOffice; vClass version (10 users, includes Elluminate Plan! and Publish!) or in-house server versions contact vendor
At-a-Glance Review (5 * is best)
Ease of Use: ****
Feature Richness: ****
Performance and Reliability: ***
Project Management Support: ***
Value: ****
VYEW
Requires: Windows ME/2000/XP/-2003/Vista, Mac OS X+/Leopard, or Linux, Mozilla Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 6 or Safari 2 or higher; optional features require Java 1.6 or higher and microphone, web cam
Price: Free (five, 50-page VyewBooks), $6.95 per month per subscriber Plus version (25 100-page VyewBooks), $13.95 Professional version (100 300-page VyewBooks), in-house appliance version, contact vendor
At-a-Glance Review (5 * is best)
Ease of Use: ****
Feature Richness: ***
Performance and Reliability: ****
Project Management Support: ***
Value: ***
GEOMAESTRO 5
Requires: Internet Explorer 5.5 or Mozilla Firefox 2 or higher; Internet connection
Price: $10 to $30 per user per year
At-a-Glance Review (5 * is best)
Ease of Use: ****
Feature Richness: *****
Performance and Reliability: ****
Project Management Support: **
Value: ****
David E. Essex is an Antrim, New Hampshire, USA-based journalist specializing in IT.