Taking Business Training Online: Lessons from Academe

Executive Summary This article presents the combined experience of two business professors who have developed and taught online graduate and undergraduate courses for more than four years. They have also used online course delivery in the corporate training environment. The article reviews the evolution of both online education and online corporate training up to 2003. The authors then present a series of ten recommendations based on their experience teaching nearly 100 online business courses since 1998, and suggest these lessons can be directly applied to the online corporate training world as well. Introduction For most of the 20th century, classroom-based instruction was the primary delivery mode for both university education and corporate training. This format was supplemented in corporations primarily by on-the-job training and in universities by a comparatively small number of correspondence courses. It was not until the late 1970s that the rubric of "distance education" began to show up regularly in the literature. At that time, a minority of universities began widespread experimentation with off-campus programs usually offered in classrooms at satellite locations. In the next decade, distance education became a common term used for such programs as well as programs with video links to the main campus. It wasn't until the last decade of the century that the proliferation of the Internet and the World Wide Web launched a revolution-education via online classes. As with any revolution, change was rapid. According to the 1997 Peter son's Guide to U. S. Colleges, 762 institutions were offering electronic distance education courses (Guberneck & Ebling, 1997). A year later, the U. S. Department of Education found that about 1,680 schools were offering a total of about 54,000 online courses to 1.6 million students (Carnevale, 2000). Since the turn of the millennium, growth in online delivery of university classes has accelerated. Since the U.S. Army launched its e-learning program in January of 2001,10,400 soldiers are taking online courses from 24 participating colleges. One major player in online education, The University of Maryland University College watched its online student body soar by 50% to over 60,000 students in 2001 (Symonds, 2001). Nor was Corporate America left out of the metamorphosis in distance education. Forbes reported that in 2001 corporations spent $1.1 billion on online training. Merrill Lynch forecasts that this number will grow to $11 billion by 2003 (Setton, 2000). E-learning companies have quickly materialized to supply corporations with the courses that they need. One, Corpedia, was founded by management guru, Peter Drucker, so the link between corporate training and academia is obvious. This article reviews the evolution of online education and training and examines the state of the art as of early 2003. It then extrapolates the online pedagogical experience of its two business professor authors to the delivery of corporate management education and development. Each of the authors is a senior faculty member who has had extensive undergraduate and graduate teaching experience both in traditional and online environments as well as considerable consulting and training experience in Corporate America. The authors suggest that the lessons they have learned in cyberspace are directly applicable to the corporate training environment, and guidelines are provided for corporate trainers and those developing online courseware. The article begins with a closer examination of the state of the art in online education and the reminder by the authors that the "train has left the station." Peter Drucker has been quoted as saying: Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast. (Gubemick & Ebeling, 1997) State of the Art: Business Education in Cyberspace Early in the evolution of online business learning, some traditional business schools were dabbling in online education, but at that time, many programs were offered by for-profit universities with little in the way of a track record or recognizable brand name (Dash, 2000). …