Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
Stuart Garfield
MHT's Galen Moore: Six Mass. tech firms head to world economic forum
Online video firms target small video publishing companies
MHT's Rodney Brown: App developers see opportunity in new iPhone
Distance learning has broken down many barriers to obtaining a college degree, allowing almost anyone in the world to take a course and pass it, regardless of where they live or what their day job may be.
In business, some of the same technologies are changing the way people think about training and education. A handful of Boston-area startups and established companies are coming up with technologies that are forcing corporate managers to rethink the way they handle employee training.
Companies are replacing hours-long in-house training sessions with multimedia snippets and virtual-reality simulations, taking training out of conference rooms and onto their employees’ desktops, laptops and even their mobile devices.
They’re also changing the way they teach, cutting courses into short, targeted bits that make enterprise education more situational, on-demand and interactive. Gartner Inc. analyst Carol Rozwell said organizations are starting to rely primarily on multimodal education, which reaches trainees via more than one medium or context. Some settings may involve a teacher, others instead use a video or a quiz to do a fast refresher or accomplish a specific objective.
Changes to the medium for learning have brought about changes to the content as well, Rozwell said. “The courses are definitely getting shorter,” she said. “There’s the desire to give people more burst-oriented learning that’s very specifically related to job performance, rather than sitting somebody down for hours and hours.”
For OutStart Inc. CEO Massood Zarrabian, the word, “courses” has a double meaning. Zarrabian calls this kind of education “snack learning.” Backed by at least $20 million in venture funding from investors including Boston-based Sigma Partners, Cambridge-based General Catalyst Partners and Newton-based GrandBanks Capital, Boston-based OutStart makes software that lets organizations push out education to employees’ mobile devices. It has made a handful of acquisitions, and signed customers including the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Postal Service.
“I actually compare it to how humans consume food and get themselves energized,” Zarrabian said.
Breakfast, lunch and dinner are important — but healthy people keep those meals smaller by eating snacks in between, he said. In addition to more formal pieces of education, sending smaller bites helps learners learn: “If I train you on how to use PowerPoint, then I can use mobile devices to send to you tips and tricks. I can send to you tests,” he said. I can turn around and send you snacks that you use over two or three weeks in smaller pieces, to get you to remember things more, practice more. I can do a whole bunch of things that are complementary.”
The May Institute, a Randolph-based nonprofit that provides services for people with cognitive disabilities, uses another Massachusetts software company — Waltham-based Brainshark Inc. — to provide that kind of bite-sized learning. BrainShark’s software is designed to let training managers quickly create interactive education materials by adding voice-over to documents and PowerPoints. The software’s delivery mechanism also supports Adobe Flash video.
The May Institute maintains a national network of 200 schools and service locations, as well as staff placed in outside institutions. Compliance with government regulations and underwriters’ requirements is frequently a moving target, said Jean MacDonald, director of training and organizational development. Using Brainshark means changes in procedure can be pushed out quickly to staff, she said, along with interactive elements that ensure each employee understands the new rules. Previously, employees would come in for annual updates to these kinds of rules and regulations. After three-and-a-half hours of slide presentations, they would take a test, she said. “Now we can kind of put those questions within the presentation, closer to the information we’re talking about so it stresses some of the regulation and things we need to talk about,” she said. “And we’re finding that people are doing better on the exams.”
Companies are also using e-learning to train people outside the boundaries of their organizations. With 600 global employees, Czech data security software company AVG Technologies CZ, s.r.o., has opened a fast-growing office in Chelmsford. 100 percent of its U.S. business is coming through channel partners, said Jennifer Skinner, channel marketing manager at AVG Technologies USA.
When Skinner joined AVG, which was known as Grisoft until January 2008, she soon began training the company’s channel partners — mostly third-party telesales companies — using a distance learning software she’d become familiar with at her previous company, Virtual Iron Software Inc. (Lowell-based Virtual Iron sold to Oracle Corp. this summer for undisclosed terms.)
AVG’s direct-marketing channel partners are spread throughout the U.S., with 300 to 400 sales reps at each location, Skinner said. The reps typically want to spend no more than about 20 minutes getting trained on how to sell a product. Using Brainshark, she’s produced 15- to 20-minute presentations that give them the gist.
Use of the software is too early to track success at AVG, Skinner said — but at Virtual Iron, training for channel partners bumped conversion rates up 35 percent.
‘Hands-on’ training
Other health care institutions are adding a different kind of interactivity, still computer-based but not distance learning. At the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, resident surgeons have begun training on medical procedures using game-like simulators. Many surgeries are now undertaken through a computer-machine interface, said Dr. Charles Pozner, medical director for the Stratus Center for Medical Simulation at the Brigham and Women’s. The center is now 5 years old — and such simulations have in many cases replaced programs using cadavers or live animals to ensure surgeons have practical experience before entering the operating theatre, Pozner said.
“You can actually feel the tugging of the tissue,” Pozner said of the simulation. “You can lift up the gall bladder and feel it lifting up.” The Stratus Center is using such simulations for upper endoscopy, bronchoscopy and endoscopy operations. “We can do a colonoscopy and if we see a lesion we can actually biopsy the lesion and do the whole procedure graphically,” he said. “That feels like the real deal.”
At the Eye and Ear Infirmary, residents practice the dissection of the tiny temporal bones around the ear, using a haptic device — sort of a specialized, high-tech Nintendo Wii controller - to navigate a simulator, developed at the University of Ohio. Dr. Stacey Gray, assistant residency director, runs education and simulation programs for residents there. “One of the things that has changed over the last 10 years is there’s a push to figure out other ways to have residents in training practicing, without practicing on a human being,” Gray said, “which is the way medicine has been done forever.”
Hospitals are also using game-like simulations to educate staff in simpler, but equally sensitive, tasks. The Brigham’s Stratus Center is training emergency responders to decide what kind of care a patient should get most immediately. Role plays and scenarios that before might have been played out on paper or in a classroom, now take place on the computer screen, in a virtual environment complete with sounding alarms and patients exhibiting critical systems.
“I find it a very, very powerful engagement tool in bringing the learning to life,” Pozner said, “engaging the students in an interactive way, much like bedside learning, but in a much more predictable setting.”
A sampling of New England companies providing distance learning tech:
OutStart Inc.
Location: Boston
CEO: Massood Zarrabian
Business: Social and mobile learning software for business
BrainShark Inc.
Location: Waltham
CEO: Joe Gustafson
Business: Multimedia editing and delivery software for corporate e-learning
Starbak Communications Inc.
Location: Burlington
CEO: Gregory Casale
Business: Business video streaming & portal software and hardware
Sonexis Technology Inc.
Location: Tewksbury
President: Giorgio Coraluppi
Business: Business video conference software and hardware
Digitalmill Inc.
Location: Portland, Maine
Co-founder: Ben Sawyer
Business: Serious-games developer
Comments
If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.
RSS Feeds
