By Rick Nigol
In the course of helping a company
devise an eLearning strategy, we were interviewing a number of key
stakeholders in the organization. These interviews are an important
part of the process of gathering information on the best ways of
better integrating eLearning into the organization's training
mix.
When we asked interviewees why the company wanted
to better utilize eLearning, we heard many of the usual and quite
predictable answers: they need learning on demand and at the point
of need; they need to reach a highly dispersed workforce; they need
to keep up with the rapid pace of change; they need a consistent
approach to training across the organization, etc. However, we also
heard from two Vice-Presidents who said that replacing a lot of
classroom-based training with various eLearning approaches (e.g.
online courses, webinars, knowledge repositories, online
communities, etc.) will help them meet their strategic focus of
becoming an environmentally sustainable company.
This was something of an "aha" moment for me. It
is so obvious now, but I never really stopped to consider it before.
eLearning is a green industry! They talked about reducing their
"training footprint." These two VPs could see how more eLearning
meant less carbon expended on planes, cars, taxis, training rooms
(to ferry and house trainers and trainees across the country) and
fewer trees expended on three-inch thick training manuals (which
seem to be de rigueur for in-person training sessions).
I'm not the expert on environmental questions,
but I am sure there must be some formula out there for calculating
an organization's carbon footprint, and the amount that their
current training efforts contribute to this. If anyone has seen any
literature out there on this question, please pass it on.
So, if you are looking for more potential
benefits to list when convincing decision-makers to invest in
eLearning, be sure to mention its green nature. This, however,
cannot be the only reason for doing eLearning, or the only measure
of success. If you reduce your organization's training footprint,
but fail to provide training that is focused on real value creation
for the organization, you are not really any farther ahead. You may
end up helping save the planet a little in the short-run, but lose
the company in the long-run.
