Reviews ASTD Members Only
Primed for Learning
By Bill Ellet
The online course provider PrimeLearning currently offers 300 hours of coursework. That quantity of content puts it somewhere between the big online supermarkets such as the SmartForce-SkillSoft colossus or Element K and niche players such as Harvard Business Online and Advance Online Institute. PrimeLearning has a selection of business and professional courses with a slant toward soft skills issues. It has no information technology or desktop training courses.
The company
PrimeLearning's founders have a proven track record. Terry and Mary O'Brien founded Mindware in 1986 and sold it 10 years later to Gartner, a prominent IT consultancy. In January 1999, they formed PrimeLearning in Limerick, Ireland, as well as a U.S. office in New York City.
Currently, PrimeLearning is privately held. Investors include 3i Group (Europe's largest venture capital company), Independent News & Media, Dr. A.J.F. O' Reilly, and Peter Goulandris. As a private company, PrimeLearning’s financial strength can't be evaluated. But founders with one successful startup under their belts give some comfort. The company has made strategic partnerships with major publishers, including Jossey-Bass, and with such prominent learning management vendors as Saba, Click2learn, THINQ, and GeoLearning. The LMS alliances help ensure that PrimeLearning courses will plug-and-play on the systems with no costly tweaking.
The product
Prime Learning offers a curriculum of 10-12 courses in the following content areas: communications, customer service, human resources, management, marketing, professional development, project management, and sales.
The Training Media Review team evaluated the courses listed below.
- PrimeCustomer Care 860
- PrimeDiversity Management 735
- PrimeE-marketing Overview
- PrimeManager 862
- PrimeProblem Solving 861
- PrimeProject Management Fundamentals 742
- The individual reviews are available to ASTD E-learning segment members at www.tmreview.com/astd. (Segment members, please remember to use the special ASTD link to the TMR site.)
Recommendation
The merger between SmartForce and SkillSoft could hurt PrimeLearning. It has courses in many of the same areas that the merged company. Presumably, PrimeLearning doesn’t have the financial resources of a SmartForce, and it might not have the wherewithal to persist if it loses customers to bigger players. A key competitive factor will be whether customers buy on price and quantity or on quality.
It’s hard to compare the pricing of online vendors because of the many variables involved. In fact, the convoluted pricing may be an obstacle for e-learning suppliers. PrimeLearning’s prices do appear to be higher than SmartForce’s, however.
On the other hand, our reviewers give PrimeLearning the nod on quality. They weren’t unconditional in their praise, though. One reviewer couldn't access the virtual classroom portion of a course even though her computer met the required specifications. Another reviewer went further and questioned the effectiveness of parts of the course design in the customer service curriculum. He found that some of the collaboration tools didn't increase learning much because few learners were using them. It’s hard to collaborate when there's no one at the other end of the line.
Two other reviewers cautioned that off-the-shelf content can have a useful role in training, but it will not by itself develop skills or, in the case of diversity training, change attitudes.
On the whole, reviewers found PrimeLearning’s basic content and course sequencing first class. The collaborative tools have potential, but they need to be promoted and managed by the customer. We didn't test the virtual classroom courses; TMR will update this review when it does.
We stress that our evaluation can't be automatically generalized to include everything in PrimeLearning’s curriculum. In the end, your own personal trial and judgment are critical.
The star ratings shown below are averages. PrimeLearning’s overall rating is 3 or “Good.” Most of the other ratings are "Good" as well, with Interactivity being the exception.
Published: September 2002