To THE EDITOR:

After
working in the field of distance education for almost 20 years, I am
not surprised to read that very few programs are currently making
money. Almost no programs including the large and well-funded, as well
as the small and experimental have any of the right ingredients for
successful outcomes in terms of the educational experience or
reasonable financial returns….

The most significant reason that
distance-learning programs have failed is that they have not answered
the basic question of what will harness together people who are
separated in space and time to talk to each other, work together, and
teach one another. … The dominant platforms emphasize the
organization and management of content delivery, rather than the social
experience of learning. The chat rooms and bulletin boards are poorly
designed and impede communication rather than support and enhance it.
When you enter the areas where courses are marketed and promoted, you
feel like you are wandering in a silent, blank wilderness. There is no
sense of who else might be found in these courses….

When the
social aspect of the classroom is missing, student dissatisfaction
rises dramatically, as does the attrition rate. When it is present,
students value distance-learning programs more than their counterparts
do in-class programs. …

Another basic reason distance-learning
programs are not making money is that they have not followed the simple
laws of supply and demand…. We know from experience that people are
not likely to buy the commodity kinds of courses introduction to
finance, accounting, or marketing that most distance-learning programs
currently offer. These kinds of courses are not easily distinguished
from one another and generally can be found locally at a community
college or even at a branch of the University of Phoenix. Even with
prestigious names associated with them, they are unlikely to attract
large numbers of students.

The OTTER Group’s best-selling
courses have been those featuring faculty members, research, and
resources that are not widely available. … I am shocked to see that
some of the more well-funded efforts in the field have removed the
faculty members from their offerings. By taking out the faculty, the
courses have removed one of the most important elements of value for
the students. No wonder they are not doing well.

The OTTER Group
has also learned that it does not work well to separate the
universities from their faculty members. … Students are buying not
just content but an entire learning experience, defined by the cultural
values of the sponsoring institution…. Those values must be reflected
in the experience or it isn’t worth its purchase….

I believe
that the focus on learning objects and sophisticated interaction with
them is the wrong focus. More important is the ability to profile
students and use that information to create personal, meaningful,
unique learning experiences. …

One of the additional reasons
that distance-learning programs have not been profitable to date is
that they have not been priced strategically. Courses have typically
been priced based on what they cost to make, rather than on what they
cost in comparison with similar offerings, with premiums added for
prestigious brands or top-rated faculty members. With intelligent
pricing, these courses can be quite profitable over time…. Once the
fixed costs are recouped, the cost for adding additional students is
very low. …

The distance-learning field is very much in its
infancy, and a significant amount of work needs to be done to build the
models for how to teach and learn online, as well as the business and
financial models for how to do so profitably. To be successful will
require new approaches, tools, and ways of thinking about every aspect
of the learning experience.

KATHLEEN GILROYChairman and Chief Executive Officer OTTER GroupCambridge, Mass.

By Kathleen Gilroy, CEO
The OTTER Group

Table of
Contents

Introduction

Too Much Content, Too Little
Context

Pedagogy
+ Content + Community = Valued Learning
Experience

Courses
as Learning Communities

Personalization

An Open Source Technology
Strategy

We
are at a critical moment in the evolution of e-learning. After many
years of development, e-learning has become an important business
process for corporations, which are now exploring how to better educate
and manage their employees who rely on fresh knowledge to perform.
E-learning is also at the top of the agenda of public and private
universities, which are looking for ways to extend their influence and
reach new types of customers. And e-learning has attracted the
attention of the investment community as companies have emerged to
capture market opportunities in technology, content, and services.

Despite
all the recent activity, models for how people teach and learn online
are still immature. A new approach could take care of the long-standing
e-learning bugaboos: low enrollments and high attrition rates stemming
from user dissatisfaction. The cause of this problem is the separation
of people in time and space; but it can be overcome by building
environments where people talk to one another, build relationships, and
teach one another.

While there is no simple answer,
there is
one key idea that has been overlooked in the design and implementation
of many of the e-learning programs on the market today:
Learning is fundamentally both social and experiential.
It is the context of the learning—all of the elements that
comprise the
experience around the content—that is most
important.

This paper
will lay out the OTTER Group's model for how best to teach and learn
online. It will look at many of the elements that must be managed to
create e-learning programs where real knowledge is gained, where
communities of learning are created, and where high levels of student
satisfaction are generated.

The
emphasis of most e-learning programs to date has been on the
accumulation, organization, and delivery of content. This is manifested
in all aspects of how the new sector has been organized: in the
business and operating models of the service and technology providers;
in the design and organization of the content and learning management
systems that are now widely used; and in the investments venture
capitalists, publishers, universities, and corporations have
made.

With
all of the information now available on the Web, it is possible to find
really good content on just about any subject. And once information
becomes digital, it wants to become free—so much so that MIT
is now
considering making the underlying content of all its 2,000 courses
available on the Internet without charge. In a recent article in
The Chronicle of Higher Education,
MIT's president, Charles Vest, was quoted as saying: “I think we're in
a kind of brief shining moment in general in that the World Wide Web is
making information available to the world for free. I would like to
think that, for at least a brief period of time, we could be a leading
source of higher education on the Web.” According to MIT Civil
Engineering Professor Steven Lerman, MIT can make this content
available free of charge because, “the syllabus and lecture notes are
not an education. The education is what you do with the
materials.”

MIT
is visionary in realizing that it can give away its syllabi and lecture
notes and retain what is of real value: the navigation through these
materials by superb teachers (the pedagogical process); the social
aspect of learning with incredibly smart peers (the learning
community); and the knitting together of content, pedagogy, and
community into a unique learning experience, which is what people are
buying when they step on to the MIT campus.

Former
OTTER
students, even when working with the best professors at Harvard and
MIT, have told us that they value their interaction with one another as
much as they value the content being delivered by their professors.
Thus, the ideal class is organized around what we call the 50/50 rule.
At least 50 percent of the time students spend in the virtual classroom
is spent interacting with and learning about other students. When the
social aspect of the classroom is missing, student dissatisfaction
rises dramatically, as does the attrition rate.

When
we think
about our own learning experiences, we remember not only what we
learned, but how and where we learned. A very large part of the value
we derive from our educational experiences comes socially and
informally—from the context. It comes from the relationships
we build
around the substance of what we are learning. In college, it's the
late-night study sessions, the interesting conversations around the
lunch table, an informal chat during a professor's office hours, the
insights of our classmates in a case study discussion. At conferences,
seminars and off-site meetings it's the networking. The rich context
that we gain from informal, peer-to-peer conversation is often what
helps us make the content more memorable and useful.

In most
e-learning programs offered today, the burden for learning is placed
wholly on the shoulders of the learner. When a learner goes to a course
web site, she enters a grid that does not vary from course to course,
consisting of a menu of activities: announcements, documents,
assignments, external links, communications, and tools. The course is
served up as content that is devoid of any context. She is expected to
navigate this material on her own, without much support. She is offered
email links to faculty and other students, but not much more.

E-learning
should be first and foremost about creating a social space that must be
managed for the teaching and learning needs of the particular group of
people inhabiting that space. This requires a platform that can be
easily modified to take into consideration the needs of the particular
learners in the course. In an optimal arrangement, a student will know
a great deal about his fellow students and faculty before he begins
working through the material. He will be prompted with questions that
have been very carefully designed to encourage him to link the material
he is learning to his own knowledge and experience, as well as
stimulate him to interact with other students and the faculty via email
and chat. This model will use the database underlying the course to
link people and information in new ways that will help him understand
the community of learners he has joined, as well as affect his
relationship with the material itself.

With the
right enabling
technologies, the learner can take advantage of the context in
interesting new ways: if she thinks that someone has posted something
particularly insightful, she can choose to automatically filter out
every posting that individual has contributed to the course. She can
rate her fellow students' postings and emails and have the system mine
the data for the most highly rated information. Even in an online
discussion with thousands of comments posted by hundreds of students,
the most valued information will automatically be recognized by the
professors and read by all of the learners. Such a system also allows
for something that is often overlooked in the e-classroom: recognizing
and acknowledging the most valuable contributors.

When
the focus is no longer content but rather the management of the
learning experience, then the pedagogical process becomes the most
important factor in the design and support of that experience. And that
process is fundamentally idiosyncratic. It's also what makes learning
pleasurable and beautiful. To experience a wonderful teacher's pedagogy
is to be inside her mind.

To be effective, each
course must be
customized both to the pedagogical process of the teacher or
subject-matter expert and to the individual needs of the learner.
Currently, customization of online learning programs often amounts to
changing color schemes or turning features of the platform on or off.

But
customization at a deeper level can mean changing the fundamental
organizing principles of the course space. In a pilot course the OTTER
Group is currently running, we wanted an organization that reflected
the functional tasks of a global securities trader with very little
time. The design was for a small group of people (30) focused on very
specific tasks. Many complex ideas were presented in a linear fashion,
and the students needed to be guided by specific questions. This tight
focus demanded a course environment reflecting that task-oriented need.
To guide students, we made class discussion the most prominent object
on the screen, followed by the group project area. Document
exchange—relatively unimportant for this course–was
placed in the least
prominent spot. We employed simple page designs, making them
task-oriented rather than information-oriented by emphasizing both the
names of the task areas within the course space and deliberately
organizing the functions that were accessible in each of those areas.
Rather than have a “home” page, we made “discussion” the root page of
the class. We also created a directory page called “Who’s
Who” because
we wanted to encourage students to get to know each
other.

The importance of these types of contextual
changes is best illustrated in one of my favorite books of 2000:
The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. In his
chapter on “The Stickiness Factor” he explains how the producers of
Sesame Street
made television sticky: “They discovered that by making small but
critical adjustments in how they presented ideas to preschoolers, they
could overcome television’s weakness as a teaching tool and
make what
they had to say memorable. Sesame Street succeeded
because it learned how to make television sticky.”

Gladwell
analyzes two Sesame Street segments to see how the context and
formatting affect learning and retention. One involves the spelling of
the word HUG by a female Muppet. In this segment the
letters HUG are the central feature on the screen.
In a second segment involving the spelling the word
CAT,
Oscar is the central feature. Researchers at Harvard's School of
Education tracked pre-schoolers’ eye movements and found that
the
students focused on the letters in the HUG segment
but on Oscar in the CAT
segment. The kids weren't watching the letters because Oscar was so
interesting: “Oscar was sticky. The lesson wasn't.” This seemingly
small adjustment in the context of how the information was presented
had enormous implications for how much was actually
learned.

In
another example of how to create stickiness, Gladwell cites an
experiment done at Yale in the 1960s on increasing the likelihood that
students would get tetanus shots. It turns out that variations in the
type of information given the students about the dangers of tetanus had
no impact whatsoever on the likelihood of their getting vaccinated.
Only one thing dramatically raised the rates of vaccination from 3 to
28 percent: “including a map of the campus, with the university health
building circled and the times that shots were available clearly
listed.”

Gladwell's analysis of the importance of
contextual and
formatting innovations should be mandatory reading for anyone thinking
about using the Internet as a teaching tool. These small but critical
adjustments in context and format are just as important to the learning
process of global traders as they are to pre-schoolers.

An
enormous amount of lip service has been paid to the creation of
learning communities in the e-learning arena. Most of the services
promoted as communities are really just transactional: fronts for the
sale of content. The truth is that a community is very difficult, if
not impossible, to create from scratch—at least without
enormous
resources (time and/or money) matched with deep social and structural
understanding. It is much easier to recruit and organize an existing
community into a learning community than to start fresh.

Sociologist Amitai Etzioni, in a recent article in
Contemporary Sociology, (http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/etzioni/A276.html)
defines communities as having the following attributes:

1. A web of affect-laden
   relationships
   among a group of individuals, relationships that often crisscross and
   reinforce one another (rather than merely one-on-one or chainlike
   individual relationships).
2. A measure of commitment
   to a set
   of shared values, norms, and meanings and a shared history and
   identification within a particular culture.

Etzioni
expands this definition to say that communities need not be
territorial: “many ethnic, professional, gay, and other communities are
geographically dispersed.” Also, the bonds that are found within
communities go beyond the instrumental into the realm of
affection. And they are at some level
exclusive.

It
is important to keep these definitions in mind when developing learning
communities. In the OTTER Group’s work with universities, for
example,
we have been most successful when we have drawn upon alumni as the
starting place for marketing and managing e-learning programs. An
alumni group fulfills all of the criteria Etzioni lays out: an
exclusive group whose relationships crisscross and reinforce one
another, by virtue of common cultural experience, with a set of shared
values, norms, and meanings, linked together with bonds of
affection.

In
the early pre-web 1990s, we developed Harvard Business School's first
distance learning program, a seminar via satellite on service
management, marketed to HBS's 50,000 alumni. This proved to be an
extraordinarily successful program, in part because it tapped into the
affiliations and knowledge that were already in place within this
tightly-knit community. First and foremost the learning experience was
very simple to market: we conducted one direct postal mailing to the
HBS alumni list of 50,000. Our extremely high conversion rate of 7,000
participants has only been replicated when we were marketing to
communities of similarly high degrees of affiliation: other alumni
groups and the extremely tightly bound American Library
Association.

For
HBS service management program, only 1 in 6 of the attendees were
actual HBS alumni. The rest were “guests”—colleagues,
employees, and
friends that the alumni had referred of their own accord. The service
management learning experience was extremely well received by this
community of participants, with an overall satisfaction rating of 9 out
of 10. Over 90% of the 7,000 participants said that they would buy
similar e-learning programs from HBS. We would not expect to find such
loyalty among students derived from a random
sample.

In a current
pilot program on the science of persuasion as a social skill, the
learning community begins with the marketing of the course. We are
sending emails to the students who have taken the course and asking
them to go to our web site where they can add comments about how they
have successfully used the material in the course in their personal and
professional lives. Specifically, we are asking them to debunk the
three major misconceptions people have about the mastery of persuasion:
that it is innate and cannot be learned; that it is self-evident and
therefore trivial; and that its practice is unethical.

This
inquiry is intended to reactivate and engage the community of course
alumni who will themselves refer us to interested buyers within their
organizations. Further, the responses of former students will build a
set of multiple points of view about the course to be read by
prospective students. By reading testimonials that are focused on the
alumni’s successful experiences in applying the course
knowledge,
prospective students will have a chance to see the existing community
around the course and imagine themselves fitting into it. The same
process applies to working with corporations: draw from a pool of
people who are already affiliated with one another; make selection for
the course exclusive; and tap into the connecting and selling energy of
managers and sponsors.

To make all of this work, a
new category
of community manager is needed: the Learning Director. For university
programs, Learning Directors are drawn from the alumni of the school or
course. In corporations, they are drawn from the ranks of key managers
and/or the training and education departments. They are trained to act
in the role of what Howard Gardner calls
pedagogistas. Learning
Directors have some knowledge of the content, but their expertise is
really in the context: they understand the personal and organizational
issues around engaging the students. Learning Directors make sure the
students feel connected to the professor, material, and one another.
They highlight student comments that are very insightful or relevant,
and they prod someone who has not spoken up in three weeks.

In
our course on financial technology for global traders, the Learning
Director understands the course materials; he is also a bank insider
who knows how the course is going to be received by the learners. He
knows what will interest them, and how they can apply what they are
learning to their business practices. He acts as a mediator between the
professor and the students. He selects the most relevant of the
professor’s questions to highlight for student discussions.
He also
selects the best comments and ideas to flow back to the professor.

Learning
directors also serve as the beta testers for our pilot programs,
allowing us to create programs that are highly interactive at large
scale. We like to think of them as the Avon Ladies of the knowledge
economy.

One
of the great advantages of the web is that it can organize information
so that it is personalized to an individual's needs. But today's
e-learning programs are often organized around the needs of the content
providers, not around those of the individual learners: students are
served up homogenized, standardized content “course cartridges” and
“e-packs.” In the physical world, people organize their own notebooks,
choose their study techniques and even pick where they will sit in the
classroom based on their own needs. Personalization is an area where
the power of databases can rival offerings in the physical classroom.
Information can be organized in such a way that learners are given only
what they need when they need it. They also can be given total control
over their learning environments. Meaningful user-controlled
personalization
is something that needs to be incorporated into e-learning design from
the beginning, rather than as a frill or
afterthought.

The Web
offers the ability to create deep profiles of students and use that
information to create personal, unique learning experiences. Profiling
is more than just finding out what skill and information gaps the
students have. It is about understanding the learner’s
context as a
whole human being and shaping the content and course experience
accordingly.

Sophisticated polling methods can be
used to build
a set of independent variables about students that can later be
cross-referenced with questions that deepen their understanding of one
another and the material they are studying. In the OTTER
Group’s course
on persuasion, we have students take a 360-degree evaluation over the
Internet. They assess themselves along several key metrics and then
they have ten people (bosses, spouses, subordinates, clients) assess
them along those same metrics. This assessment is handled anonymously
via email and then collated in a central database on the web. Once
these profiles are built, they can be used as reference points in
teaching case materials.

For instance, because it
turns out
that the buyers of SUVs and Minivans are very different
psychologically, one of the questions we asked students in the
persuasion course is which they’d prefer to buy. According to
an
article in The New York Times, “Sport utility buyers
tend to be
more restless, more sybaritic, less social people who are
‘self-oriented,’ to use the automakers' words, and
who have strong
conscious or subconscious fears of crime. Minivan buyers tend to be
more self-confident and more
‘other-oriented’—more involved with
family, friends and their communities.” The SUV vs. Minivan distinction
proved to be an interesting variable in how groups of students made
decisions about retaining or firing struggling managers in our case
study discussions. In a case in the course, a manager ineptly handled a
politically charged situation with two warring bosses. After reading
the case, students were asked to decide whether the manager should have
been fired or retained. The class was equally divided. Interestingly,
SUV drivers—i.e., those who were more
self-oriented—were more likely to
want her fired than minivan drivers. This exercise ended by asking
students what they thought her job title is today, ten years later.
Most students placed her as either VP of Manufacturing or unemployed.
(She is currently the CEO of Handspring.) Cross-referencing unusual and
compelling personal data not only helped this particular “learning
community” understand itself better, but it also changed the students'
relationship with the material itself by giving them insight into their
own decision-making processes.

The
technology platform that the OTTER Group prefers for our e-learning
programs is both free and open source. It was originally developed by
an MIT computer scientist, Philip Greenspun, to support collaboration
and knowledge-sharing among a community of amateur photographers. It is
worth studying the operation of this true learning community (http://photo.net),
as there are many lessons to be learned there for teaching and learning
online. (It is also worth reading Philip Greenspun's book,
Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, which can
be read online at http://www.arsdigita.com/books/panda/ or
found at Amazon
or at a local bookstore.) Greenspun first created Photo.net to share
what he knew about photography. He started by writing a 30-page story
about a trip to Berlin and Prague, illustrated with about 60 photos. He
then invited people to contribute their experiences. By simply
including an “add-a-comment” link at the bottom of every article, he
helped users build a great repository of photographic knowledge.

The
company that has built our platform of choice, ArsDigita, was founded
by Greenspun and evolved out of Photo.net. The toolkit upon which the
platform rests, the ArsDigita Community System, places social
interaction and collaboration—the management of the learning
experience—at the center not only of its design, but also of
its
operating philosophy. One of the great strengths of the open source
software movement and the reason that it yields superior
programs—programs that reflect the specific needs of the
communities of
people and individuals who are using the software–is that you
have
access to a large community of developers with many ideas. With closed
source software, you only have as many ideas as the group of people who
created the program generates or as their lawyers will allow.

For
example, the next version of the ArsDigita software will contain chat
protocol that is written with academic exchange and collaboration in
mind: chat postings can be threaded as they are posted so that inquiry
and answers between students and professors can be well documented.
Automatic transcripts of chats are generated that can be organized by
time and by thread. Because the software is open source, this kind of
enhancement can be readily added to the functionality of the platform
by any of the many people working on the system, and this best practice
of archiving threaded chat can then be used freely by others.

As more users adopt the software and adapt it for
their specific needs, the best practices in e-learning will be shared
by getting built into the software itself. In
the past year, the ArsDigita Community System has been developed as a
content and learning management system, now called ACES (the ArsDigita
Community Education System). You can read the case study about its use
at MIT's Sloan School of Management, as well as download the software,
at: http://www.arsdigita.com/customers/casestudies/mit.

We
believe open source to be the best technology strategy for the
development of shared knowledge and learning. In a recently published
book on the open source software movement, Rebel Code: Inside
Linux and the Open Source Revolution,
author Glyn Moody talks about the values that have driven the
development of the Internet: “as the Internet moves closer to the heart
of the modern world, it inevitably carries with it the free programs
that drive it, and seeds the values that led to their creation.
Its
basic code of openness, sharing and cooperation is starting to spread
outside the confines of one or two high-tech industries.”

We
believe that the code of openness, sharing, and cooperation that is at
the heart of the e-learning process is also at the heart of successful
academic institutions and corporations. At OTTER, openness is a pivotal
part of our company's technology and operating strategies and value
system. Sharing knowledge and ideas is one of the
great joys of
being human. We take advantage of that phenomenon in our course design.
We pay careful attention to it in the technology platform we choose. We
have the most meaningful jobs in the world: we connect
people–including
some of the world’s great teachers–across time and
space to share
ideas, knowledge, and wisdom so that they can teach and learn from one
another. And we learn so much in the
process.

Cambridge,
Massachusetts

March 28,
2001

Acknowledgements:

Michael
Feldstein made many significant contributions and helped write sections
of the paper. Sarah Milstein's editing gave it clarity and focus.
Philip Greenspun's book and seminar also greatly helped refine my
thinking about the topics
covered.

By
Glen Mohr, 
Chief Operating Officer
The Otter Group

 


Designing Collaborative E-learning For Results

The technologies that enable us to teach and learn online paradoxically increase our isolation.

Because we can communicate by email and over the web, we no longer need
to meet face to face. The more connected we are, the more isolated we
are. The connectivity/isolation paradox is manifesting itself in many
aspects of our professional and personal lives and is a fundamental
reason why e-learning programs can be unsatisfying to teachers and
learners. 

This paper will explore how to design e-learning programs to overcome
the connectivity/isolation paradox. Using a case study of a program
that we adapted from a lunch seminar and then re-engineered for
synchronous online delivery, we will demonstrate strategies for
building connection, interactivity, and relationships via learning
online.

Our case study involves CDM, a global consulting, engineering,
construction, and operations firm headquartered in Cambridge,
Massachusetts with over 3,000 employees in 90 offices. With project
managers responsible for both large, complex projects and small but
numerous ones, and with the daily client demands always increasing, the
need for better conflict resolution and management became evident. To
begin to address this need, the firm developed an internal two-hour
lunch seminar on conflict management. However, to reach several hundred
managers dispersed globally, and to save time and expense, we wanted to
try an online approach.

The Otter Group was called in because we had developed successful
conflict management e-learning programs and because of our emphasis on
the social aspects of learning in our programs. Our initial review of
the lunch seminar found it lacking in a number of critical factors.
Participants met once briefly and spent almost no time engaging with
one another. There was little meaningful interaction among
participants, and no opportunity for participants to practice or
discuss applying the ideas they were learning. Participants left the
class without a clear understanding of what their next steps should be
and without any sense of a learning community.

Our proposed e-learning solution had to maintain the high touch level
of the face-to-face seminar within the constraints imposed by the
physical separation of the participants and the technologies used to
connect them. Our re-design converted the lunchtime seminar into six
synchronous online sessions of 75 minutes each delivered over
VisionCast (a version of Microsoft LiveMeeting provided by Premiere
Conferencing) and a phone conference.
We incorporated the following design elements:

- We solicited numerous case examples from participants and their coworkers for use throughout the course.
- We included a well-respected assessment tool and a
survey designed especially for the course to generate rich profiles of
the participants from which they could learn about themselves and their
coworkers. The resulting data was woven throughout the course to
connect theory with practical reality.
- We designed a team project that engaged
participants in applying new tactics and strategies to a real case
example provided by senior management.
- We invited senior executives in the company to join
the course at the beginning and end to reinforce the importance of the
course to the company and to critique students’ work and motivate them
to integrate what they learned into their daily practice.
- Throughout the sessions we made extensive use of
interactive features of the technology including polling and breakout
sessions.

Our re-design proved successful in overcoming the constraints of
physical separation and the limitations of distance learning
technology. In the most recent cohort to complete the re-designed
conflict management program, one hundred percent of the participants
rated it as valuable to highly valuable. One hundred percent of the
participants found that the course helped them recognize and deal with
their own and other conflict styles. Participants cited as an advantage
the flexibility in scheduling that comes from an online delivery
platform, but they also valued the interactive communications that were
built into the program design. One participant told us, “I am the last
person normally to be impressed with computer technology, but I have to
admit the technology was extremely impressive and effective.”

CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
In dealing with the connectivity/isolation paradox we have defined a
number of critical success factors. We have summarized them in the
sidebar and describe some in more detail below.

1.    Manage Expectations
Participant expectations must be managed on a number of levels. First
and foremost, participants need to know what the company expects them
to achieve in the course as well as more specifically what the
instructor expects from them. On a practical note, participants need to
know what the technology can do and what it cannot, and this should be
reinforced periodically to make sure that if a particular interactive
feature, for example, typing in a question privately, has not been used
in a while, participants do not forget it is available. Lastly but very
important, they need to know how much time everything is going to take
before they commit. This is possibly the most common complaint – “no
one told me how much time it was going to take.”

We needed to educate participants that this course was of great
importance to senior management and to the company’s bottom line. We
considered that crucial to setting participants’ expectations from the
outset. It was not enough to include a welcome letter in the front of
the materials packet. We invited a senior manager in the company (in
one cohort an EVP and in another cohort the President) to introduce the
course during the first session.

We coached the senior executive on both the content of his presentation
and the most effective style. For example, we encouraged him to
identify people in the class he knew by name and thank them personally
for participating. He spoke from his own experience and gave specific
examples of when the skills covered in the course were instrumental to
successful resolution of a serious problem. He also gave at least one
example of an unsuccessful conflict resolution, which led to a
discussion of what strategies would have been useful. The senior
manager also supplied the case studies used for the team project and he
attended the final session of the course and critiqued the
participants’ work.  It raised the stakes for participants by an order of magnitude when
they learned that a senior manager cared enough about the outcome of
the program to make time in his schedule to participate in person. This
is more easily accomplished with an e-learning offering, as the senior
manager can participate from any location.

2.    Make synchronous sessions highly interactive
Successful interactivity in a synchronous distance learning session
results from a combination of the instructor’s skill at managing the
class and keeping participants engaged, a curriculum design that
emphasizes student input and feedback, and technology that makes it
seamless and fluid.

We have found that a two-person team of moderator and subject matter
expert or faculty is highly effective. The moderator focuses on
maximizing interaction by calling on participants, filtering/answering
text chat questions, and operating polls while the subject matter
expert focuses on the content.

In this course we made use of multiple means of connecting the
participants with one another:  polling, discussion, participant
feedback (ratings/ranking), simulations and breakout sessions.
Throughout the synchronous sessions, the moderator made frequent use of
the platform’s polling capability. Poll questions stimulated
participants’ thinking and showed them whether their classmates were
thinking the same way. They provided a quick way to assess the group’s
experience after a breakout session and also enabled us to record
participant perceptions at the beginning of class and compare them to
answers at the end of class.

We provided options for asking questions publicly and privately both
during and in between sessions. We explained when participants could
volunteer examples and how we would use them. We also regularly
redirected interaction from between instructor and participant to
between participants.

We wanted the environment to approximate the flexible and dynamic
qualities of a live classroom and so we pre-arranged with the
conference call vendor to rapidly shift participants into breakout
sessions and then back to the full group on the instructor’s cue. Using
this technology, the instructor could give participants a role-play
scenario, send them off to work in pairs, visit the pairs to coach them
and answer questions, and then bring everyone back for a group
discussion. It was the virtual equivalent of “turn to the person next
to you and take the role of….” It also gave us the advantage of
pre-determining the pairings so that we could ensure that participants
got to meet and work with nearly every other member of the class.

3.    Use student-generated data
The lunchtime seminar had participants complete a conflict style survey
but only included limited use of the data collected. Participant
evaluations of the program confirmed that learning about their conflict
style was the part of the course they liked best and wanted expanded.
In the re-designed course we asked participants to take the Thomas
Kilman instrument (TKI, http://www.cpp-db.com/products/tki/index.asp)
before the first session. We also gave them a specially designed survey
eliciting perceptions of how conflict occurs and is managed in the
company.

We summarized the results of the TKI profiles and presented these
results in a series of graphs, sometimes polling the participants about
their perceptions before revealing the data. Participants gained a
richer view of their learning community and were able to compare their
individual results to the aggregate. We also summarized the results of
the conflict survey to give a picture of conflict management across the
company. Finally we correlated the results and wove the two sets of
data throughout the course as a means of connecting theory to
individual and group practice.
As part of the re-design we conducted interviews with company employees
in the same position as the participants and also with others in the
company with whom they were most likely to share conflict. From these
interviews we generated a number of mini-cases rich in detail. These
scenarios generated much discussion and engaged the participants
encouraging them to volunteer their own examples. Hearing the breadth
of examples from across the company emphasized the importance that even
small changes in conflict management behavior could make when
multiplied across the company.

Combining the profile and survey data with detailed personal examples
demonstrated for participants that their peers with very different
profiles were addressing similar problems to their own and that
sometimes one approach was more effective than another. This reinforced
in the strongest way possible the core lesson of the class: that it is
possible to consciously choose a strategic approach to dealing with
conflict.

6.    Closure and Next Steps
Because the course was designed to be conducted entirely in a distance
learning format, we developed a closing online session that gave
participants the greatest opportunity for interaction with one another
and with senior management. We used the review of team projects as a
starting point for discussion. We also asked the senior manager to
comment on the profile data and to reinforce, through discussion, the
point that incremental improvement in conflict resolution skills across
the company could result in large improvement to the bottom line.

We asked participants for examples of current situations in which they
could envision applying what they learned in the class. This brought
current issues into the discussion and, with the presence of the senior
manager, gave participants the sense that they were experiencing a
unique opportunity to talk about the company rather than just taking a
course.


CONCLUSION
By applying all of the techniques outlined in this paper, we have been
able to achieve a dynamic, interactive learning environment where
participants can achieve mastery of the material while building
relationships with one another and with their firm.  As part of
ongoing skills development within this company, participants are
tracked six months out to see how well they are doing.  Past
participants continue to cite great value from the program.  The
company views it as a great investment in time and resources and a
model for e-learning initiatives.