Case Study: Cisco Systems Ventures into the Land of Reusability
By Peg Maddocks
Here's how Cisco Systems transferred its instructor-led Career Certification courses into an e-learning format to better streamline lessons, allow thousands of employees to learn at their own pace, and arm its closest learning partners with reusable learning objects they could repurpose into customized course offerings.
In 2000, Cisco CEO John Chambers said that he wanted Cisco to be THE e-learning company, and he was looking to its Internet Learning Solutions Group to deliver that vision. To answer the call, the group decided to implement a reusable learning object strategy. At the time, Cisco Career Certification courses were delivered almost exclusively in an instructor-led training format, which included 1,000-plus page student guides that were available only in Microsoft PowerPoint and Word formats.
Enter Evolution, a new development and delivery tool produced by startup company OutStart that enables developers to author e-learning content in an application that automates the creation, tagging, storing, and searching of objects in a database environment. Instead of a traditional flat file in a desktop application such as Microsoft Word, Evolution is a Web-form, database-driven tool. Although development of traditional training entails programming at the back end to publish to the Web, Evolution enables authors to update content on the fly and immediately review a Web-based rendered result. However, that requires authors to write in a client-server environment--with associated server performance issues--rather than to the desktop. It also means that development and production work can occur in one tool rather than passing a storyboard to a production team for Web programming.
Through the use of a reusable learning object strategy coupled with OutStart’s Evolution authoring tool, we were able to redesign and rewrite all eight of our certification courses and create one content set, which ensured that courses were consistent in instructional design and technical accuracy, as well as globally. In addition, Cisco Learning Solution Partners who embraced a blended approach now can provide a package of offerings for each course: traditional classroom training, live virtual training, or self-paced e-learning. Partners also can take our source content and create customized solutions for their customers by combining a variety of RLOs into new offerings. Although many learning partners were reluctant to move to an e-learning format for delivery, they came to realize that their internal classroom instructors could benefit from a new authoring approach. Indeed, many instructors were already using the Web-based product in their classroom rather than their traditional overhead slides, taking advantage of high-quality graphics, animations, and interactive exercises.
Sound good? It is, but direct Web authoring requires a significant amount of preparation on the front end of course development, which required Cisco authors to make a fundamental change to how they developed content and to use a new, early-adopter application. Even though Evolution was already being used on a limited basis by a small group of developers within Cisco, the ILSG team needed meaningful user feedback before we extended the application to other internal groups. Key word: meaningful. So in the early implementation phase, management decided to include a gripe session during its weekly status meetings. We invited a group of Cisco course writers, editors, graphic designers, and reviewers to have lunch on us and offer feedback on Evolution. We deliberately included a group of non-technical employees to review the application because we thought they would give an unbiased opinion of the software.
In the first few meetings, we faced a frustrated and reluctant set of players who were more than happy to articulate their concerns. Authors worried about using a new tool to write courses and perform maintenance. Editors said they couldn’t imagine rewrites without redline paragraphs and call-outs. Subject matter experts balked at learning an entirely new application for submitting course feedback. Armed with that input, we realized two things: The development team needed to embrace a new way of doing work, and success required a close partnership with OutStart to improve Evolution’s features and capabilities.
Having gone through this type of implementation, here are some key steps that you can use to help ease the inevitable growing pains that come with moving to a database-driven e-learning environment.
Pilot content that isn't a top priority. That may sound backward, but converting less visible content lessens pressure and can give you more time to tweak problems that arise. Expectations are high for critical content, and the sheer breadth of the project can be overwhelming and time consuming, forcing costly shortcuts.
Choose developers eager to try new tools. Ultimately, developers are the people who must advocate conversion efforts. If you start with developers who are overtly adverse to change, then you will inevitably experience problems and potential failure.
Consult IT early and often. Invite IT support staff to meetings so that they have ongoing knowledge of development and implementation plans. This creates buy-in to the initiative, and you get the benefit of their expertise up front. For example, Cisco uses a global, distributed development model--meaning business unit engineers help write courses--but a consolidated deployment model that uses a host site for all of our customers and employees. Because of the enterprise scale of the Evolution application (Cisco has 35,000 employees and 40,000 channel partners), IT consulting and support was vital to success.
Adopt instructional design models as guides for those developing courseware. One of our e-learning goals was to author in a single environment but deliver to multiple media, such as paper-based student guides, the Web, and CDs. We also wanted to reduce development cycle time by reusing learning objects. This requires a structured content authoring format that makes learning objects interoperable. But agreeing on a consistent instructional design approach is often insurmountable for many learning organizations. They waste valuable time debating meta-tags, standards, lesson structure, and other design issues. As a result, companies often argue about dozens of instructional design models without ever reaching a consensus, delaying the start of their RLO projects. The key is to define a model that's acceptable to most, start to create learning objects, and collect feedback as you go. In our case, we chose Ruth Clark’s adaptation of Merrill’s Component Display model.
Involve stakeholders. That includes developers, editorial staff, proofreaders, graphic designers, SMEs, and reviewers. Many companies fail to include all team members in the process, which hinders the company’s ability to create a streamlined system that's acceptable to all.
Keep content consistent. Initially, course developers thought that training content had to be different for classroom and e-learning delivery. To be sure, e-learning needs such features as animation and audio to keep learners engaged, as well as more learner-driven interactions, such as click-to-see graphics and additional interactive exercises or quizzes. But course content and structure are basically the same for online and classroom-based courses--if the instructional design is good.
Bottom line
So what did we achieve by implementing a reusable learning object strategy?
Cisco had a vision of what it needed, but it depended heavily on partners. By using a build-and-buy approach that combined OutStart’s Evolution, our licensed learning management system, and internal custom applications, Cisco is achieving its goal: to enable all field staff to use e-learning to access on-demand, personalized training, in the media of their choice, to improve job performance. That's a huge step in the evolution of e-learning at Cisco.
Although it took time to train the course development teams, redesign courses into individual learning objects, and build a support infrastructure, the benefits are clear. Previously it could take nearly nine months to develop a course that now takes eight to 12 weeks to get up and running. From a financial standpoint, because of the capability to reuse content and a reduction in content development time, we expect to see a 500 percent return on investment. For example, we recently developed a course in half the time and budget by reusing learning objects, and over the past year, we developed more than 130 courses, 2,500 lessons, and 20,000 reusable learning objects. Likewise, with 150 authors spread throughout Cisco Systems and our ecosystem of external development partners, it's clear that the concept of a database-driven authoring environment has caught fire.
More important, because RLOs assist in making prescriptive learning a reality, there has been a collective attitude change among employees who now embrace e-learning as a critical career development tool. One of our favorite new mantras is "just-in-time and just-for-me." Cisco now is able to offer an assessment that prescribes the objects people need to achieve the desired performance. We don’t evaluate the number of click throughs or hours logged on, but whether learners fare well on post-learning assessments. From a learning perspective, what Cisco cares about is performance, and performance measurement is a core strategy.
In the end, I’m proud of what the Internet Learning Solutions Group has accomplished. We took a few key steps into uncharted territory, and then we stopped and asked for feedback from our various stakeholders. It was this collaborative process that gave us the foundation to build e-learning at Cisco that's globally scalable and reusable.
And we have a new feedback venue as well: lunch with management to share gripes and solutions!
Published: March 2002