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We asked:

Anne Whyte, Morgan and Banks
Andrew Silvers, Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific
Maralyn Parker, Daily Telegraph
Kevin Sumption, Australian Museums On-line

Anne Whyte

Director Learning, Morgan and Banks

Who do you work for and what's your job?
I'm Director of Learning for Morgan and Banks, which is part of the TNT Worldwide group of companies. I came into the company to start their internal learning processes and to set up what were then called 'learning organisation strategies'. That work quickly developed into knowledge management systems and intellectual capital knowledge management.

How do you use e-Learning?
Through Worldwide Learning (which used to be TechWorks), we provide a complete online learning solution for major corporations. It's unusual because it incorporates Australian competency standards. It can be used both by educational providers and by organisations that need to keep records for formally accredited training. For example, one of our best known clients is Qantas College on-line. WWL provides all of their learning content, which goes out to thirty thousand staff globally, 24 hours a day. And our B2B online learning is complemented with a developing B2C business for more than 15 million eyeballs that look at Monster.com every month.

Where is the market for e-Learning?
The market is predicted to go gang-busters! John Chambers from Cisco Systems says that 'education over the internet is going to be so big it's going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error'. While he has much to gain by encouraging growth, and may be over-stating the situation, it certainly is a big and growing area. The growth has accelerated recently in Australia, and clients who have been talking with us for a number of years now want to commission major e-Learning projects.

I think there are two reasons for this. Firstly, organisations have developed bits and pieces of online learning and suddenly they're realising that they need to tie it together - and that it's looking a bit messy. Secondly, they've re-engineered, right-sized and improved IT, and they've got precious little left to do to raise performance. So they really are focussing on people and how to raise the performance of people. That coincides with the whole knowledge-worker revolution and a shortage of knowledge-workers globally. These trends running together are behind the growth in e-Learning.

What's driving the move to e-Learning?
Quite different things - like the need for learning and opportunities to make money. For corporations, there's a genuine need and desire to make sure all staff learn quickly and fast. For example, when new privacy legislation is passed by Parliament, many people will need to understand the implications for their practice and employers will need to be able to show that staff have been trained and understand proper practice. e-Learning is obviously the way to go for that kind of thing. The other driver is the IT industry itself, where e-Learning is opening up more and new markets.

What kinds of e-Learning careers are there?
There are not enough people for current jobs in e-Learning and the shortage will increase. We're short of instructional designers. We're short of programmers. We're short of the conceptual designers of curriculum, because putting old curriculum on-line is not smart. We need educational theorists who don't assume you simply apply existing education practice and theory to on-line form, but who rethink the concept of intellectual capital, knowledge management and on-line learning.

So there's a need for a whole new breed of educational thinkers who aren't hampered by previous ways and assumptions and theories about education and learning. We also need multimedia experts, web and game designers, technical architects, information and knowledge managers, e-Learning analysts, system developers, help desk operators, online mentors, tutors and mediators, technical writers, network developers and e-Learning sales and marketing people.

How do you prepare for a career in e-Learning?
People will inevitably need an undergraduate degree, and many will have come through a computer sciences specialty. Double degrees in IT and education would be ideal. It's an advantage to have strength in one, but you need a fluency in both. A lot of the poorer examples of on-line learning are those built by talented technologists who aren't educators, or built by educators who haven't much clue about the technology.

What's the future of e-Learning?
Big! In the future, there will be a lot of activity in e-Learning, however it evolves. It's here and it's going to grow. It's going to be a future full of changes. It doesn't stay still for a moment, so you need to be a person who loves change.

What advice would you give to prospective e-Learning students?
It's a discipline that lends itself to 'chunking', where you can collect different capabilities along the way. It certainly lends itself to experiential learning. Ideally students will be able to learn and practice simultaneously. And there's success in store for people who can understand both education and IT. People who have an awareness of why a learner might want to do something, but won't let the traditions of IT and education dictate the solutions they create.

Andrew Silvers

Business Manager, Online Learning
Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific

Who do you work for and what's your job?
I work with HP Education Services. Originally I worked only in Australia and New Zealand, heading up Education Services team. I changed roles and now I'm part of the Asia Pacific region e-Learning team. At first, I was the only person heading this up, but now we have a team of people.

How do you use e-Learning?
e-Learning is a tool that gives organisations an opportunity to look at, understand and make the most of the skills of the people so important to their existence. If organisations don't realise that, they're not going to retain their people. People have to get skills and it's not going to happen by attending five days of classroom training a year. So it's really going to be important for organisations to take learning seriously. In the past, learning has only been seen from a cost perspective. Organisations need to measure the advantages learning brings to the revenue side of the operation as well. e-Learning is a component of that. So I can see great opportunities for it both for organisations and for individual people.

Where is the market for e-Learning?
Well, we're still at a very early adoptive stage, I think. In Australia, nearly every large organisation that I speak to is contemplating it, and over time the smaller organisations will get involved too. They'll be dragged into e-Learning because they have customers who are large organisations, and those large organisations will not only provide learning to employees inside their organisations, they will also provide it to their customers and suppliers. When this happens, for a country like Australia where so many of the organisations are smaller, it's going to be quite incredible.

What's driving the move to e-Learning?
Well, I think there's a few things. Organisations are spending a lot of money on training now, and it's not very effective, so they think they can save some money by using e-Learning. But when they're setting up, it's unlikely they will save if they want it to be effective. It's unfortunate that this is one of the main drivers for e-Learning.

The other driver is that some organisations now understand that they need to develop their people, and that they can attract the best people to their organisations if they value their ongoing skills development. Employees will travel from organisation to organisation looking for an employer who will give them the skills development they need. Once you have an organisation that's continuing to learn, then its very hard for the competition to keep up.

The other driver is the technology hype associated with the internet and all sorts of devices that'll be coming out in the marketplace. Organisations are coming up with all sorts of ideas to offer training on the internet. Eventually we'll access it using wireless devices — it's really not far away! So there's quite a lot of money being spent marketing to organisations and consumers, which is raising its profile.

There are two areas for careers in managing e-Learning. One is how you bring together a curriculum - the magic in the mix. There's great opportunity for people who know how to put things together from a curriculum point of view. I think that in Australia we're pretty good at that. We've had classrooms in the bush delivering training over the radio and things like that. So I think that if you can capture some of that, which the educational institutions understand very well, then there's great opportunity. Then there's managing systems - learning management systems, the delivery system. People with some IT skills are going to specialise in those sorts of areas.

As learning is now so important in organisations, the role of the training manager is becoming more important. The knowledge director role will evolve for those with the right strategic skills and vision.

How do you prepare for a career in e-Learning?
That depends on your background. If you understand training and learning, then really you'll need to understand the different technologies available. You don't need to understand the intricacies of how they work at all - just the different tools and what they can do. And you need to look at case studies across the world.

What's the future of e-Learning?
There's going to be a huge skills shortage. If you look at the numbers (and they vary all the time), people talk about a ten-fold growth in the e-Learning market over the next five years. So I think there are huge opportunities for people who understand what it's all about in terms of learning within an organisation and who can use e-Learning tools well.

Because of Australia's diversity in languages and cultures, there's a huge opportunity for us to take e-Learning overseas. We're really in a good position in that way. None of the countries across Asia Pacific have anywhere near the diversity we do. In Australia, we could put together courses for Korea, courses for China, courses for people in Hong Kong and many other languages and cultures. I think we could leverage that better than anybody, and if we can capture that market then the opportunities will be absolutely enormous. I really hope we can. I'd like to see more government assistance to help some of these things along. Unfortunately at the moment I don't see the government taking learning particularly seriously.

e-Learning could also give individual employees a more flexible way of living. Their skills will be in such demand that they can move to an organisation that really is sensitive to their needs. I’m an example of that. I'm sitting here working from home ninety percent of the time. I can go and pick up my children from school or go roller-blading in the park, etcetera. So, if you've got the skills, I wouldn't say you could name your price, but you could name the conditions you want.

What advice would you give to prospective e-Learning students?
I suppose the main advice is not to put it off. There is plenty of opportunity now to make huge leaps and bounds using this technology. Technology's a tool and, yes, it's advancing very quickly and it's going to be great, but you need to get into it now. Don't put it off, because there's great opportunity out there now. Sure, over the next five years there'll be opportunities as well… But you can't walk before you can crawl - so you need to start picking up the skills now.

Maralyn Parker

Education Journalist, The Daily Telegraph

Interactive News for Kids (INK) is probably the most interesting, as far as e-Learning is concerned. It's a virtual newsroom for kids that IML at UTS developed for me. Teachers bring in a team of kids and put together a newspaper on-line. We've used the idea that kids learn by doing - so they're learning how to be a reporter, how to be a sub-editor, what photographers and cartoonists do, and so forth, as they're putting together a newspaper. At the same time, the teacher is learning what an editor does. So the technology is the tool for them to learn what happens in a newsroom - who does what, what they need to know and how they do it. At the end, they also have an edition that's published on-line.

How do you use e-Learning?
In my other life I was a teacher - and now I'm a journalist - so I guess e-Learning has let me blend the two things together. I've always been interested in how to teach kids or show kids or get them to understand what happens in a newsroom. We've done various hard copy press kits, and reams and reams of work sheets, but nothing that actually teaches the kids as they're putting something together. Work sheets and so forth are fine - kids come up with stories - but it's nothing like Interactive News for Kids. The kids are actually getting on-line; they're using the technology, using the Internet to learn about what happens in a newsroom. I guess that's why I got interested in it. It was a new and better way to teach the kids, where they're actually using the technology while they're learning about something.

Where is the market for e-Learning?
Everywhere! News Limited has been talking about putting courses on-line - so journalists can log on and study topics from their terminal in the newsroom. That's happening in companies everywhere. It's not just universities that are into e-Learning, it's corporations and schools and every situation where someone is trying to learn something. It's the cutting edge. People want to do it on-line.

What's driving the move to e-Learning?
There are financial and commercial reasons for it, of course. It's just so easy. To be able to log on and work with someone else - that's one of the magic things about on-line learning. You can get such a wide range of quality in e-Learning - from just having notes and reams of texts on-line (which is basically putting a textbook on line, which I think is useless), through to a situation where you're actually working with someone on-line. You're working in a team or a partnership, and it's interactive. You're actually using the on-line technology to facilitate your own learning. But I think the bottom line is that it's going to be cheaper and easier for companies to put training on-line, or partially on-line. Companies will have to be involved in e-Learning, just to manage all the knowledge they need.

What kinds of e-Learning careers are there?
They're so varied. Companies need people who can manage their training and development on-line. They also want people who can develop and manage the knowledge the company needs on-line. So there's a wide range of career possibilities - for people who want to be teachers, through to people who want to be entrepreneurial, but don't want to be accountants - right through to people who want to work on web sites. Whatever careers you can imagine...

How do you prepare for a career in e-Learning?
It's a good idea to do an undergraduate degree first, and then specialise in e-Learning. If you come from an education background, you still have to learn about what works on-line. If you come from a technical background, you can learn the basics as far as education is concerned, if the course you do is set up properly. It's new ground. I think that a lot of people who come into it from other backgrounds might actually contribute more... I don't really think you need to know a lot if you step into the right e-Learning course. Mostly I think you just need to be keen and enthusiastic and interested.

What's the future of e-Learning?
Well, you just have to look at the e-Learning courses that are springing up in every university, and how they stretch across faculties. It makes me think that in the future there will be a blurring of faculties because of the technology. We're used to these strict little divisions - not only in universities, but also in schools. But they'll start to break down. And everyone will have to be involved. If you want a future in business or education, you'll have to know how people are dealing with knowledge on-line. More and more, we'll be seeing e-Learning as a necessary part of any course.

What advice would you give to prospective e-Learning students?
Well, I think you have to shop around and make sure you find a good course. There's a big difference between the courses. Be discerning and find out exactly what the course providers mean by 'information technology' and 'learning'. You should look for courses where you learn something while working on-line with a team or in a partnership, and where you're actually using the technology as a tool, not just for a result. Shy away from courses where 'technology' just means the lecturer's giving a PowerPoint presentation or that you can access your readings on-line. That's not good enough. Ask questions about the courses. Read the promotional spiels they put out carefully. And I think it's good to find a course where you get a big picture overview. That big picture is so important - it shows you where information technology's going, how and why it's a force in the modern world, and its implications. If you don't know a thing, you need to find a course that will give you the big picture.

Kevin Sumption

Curator of Information Technology, The Powerhouse Museum
National Project Manager, Australian Museums On-Line

AMOL is a Commonwealth Government portal for all information on Australian museums and galleries. So, if you go to AMOL, you'll find diverse kinds of information for all sorts of audiences, from students through to culturally active adults, through to museum staff. Each one of these groups can find information that's relevant to their professional, recreational or educational practice. Things like opening times, cost of admission and exhibition details of over 1017 museums, through to all sorts of documents that help small museums conserve and interpret their artefacts. We freely distribute all of this information to the general public and professionals working in museums and galleries. My third hat is as a lecturer of Design, History and Theory at UTS in the School of Visual Communications.

I suppose it's this professional commitment to education coupled with my interest in computing that on-line educational brings together so nicely. We want to take the experience we provide people with in the museum, and re-work it in an appropriate manner to make it more widely available to people outside the museum - people who can't get to the physical building. At the same time, we want to retain this ethos of educational content. It's not just about putting beautiful pictures and beautiful material up on the Web, so people can simply sit back and look at it in awe. It's about trying to provide content and experiences that help them make better sense of contemporary Australian society, science and industry.

Where is the market for e-Learning?
Well, I suppose in some senses it's everywhere - or everywhere there's an appropriate infrastructure. This is both its great promise and its major shortcoming. On the one hand, e-Learning can stretch out across national boundaries and extend opportunities to many more people than could access traditional learning. On the other hand, this opportunity seems to be almost exclusively the preserve of the well to do - no matter what their nationality. One of the major challenges facing the e-Learning sector is to find ways of building and maintaining new educational and IT infrastructure, both within Australia and around the world that can support access to the same rich learning experience, regardless of wealth or status.

What's driving the move to e-Learning?
A couple of things. Like having a much wider choice of courses and institutions to participate in. In other words, although we have many fine universities here in Australia, if I'm willing to do an e-Learning course, my choice can be considerably expanded. There are lots of emerging niche areas, some of which are picked up by our own universities and others that are not. So being able to partake of an expanding market in educational products is very attractive. There is also ease of participation - but this does come at a cost. Most e-Learning experiences don't yet offer the kinds of casual social interaction that make life on campus so unique. However, if you're a professional like myself with limited time and you really want to focus in on doing the coursework, e-Learning allows you to make best use of your time.

What kinds of e-Learning careers are there?
It's a very challenging profession because it's constantly changing, and in some senses we can't chart where it will be in two to three years. That in itself is enormously exciting - it's something that's unfolding before our very eyes. The challenge is keeping on top of a constantly emerging and changing area that offers enormous potential, not only in terms of careers, but also personal growth. Like many information technology professions, it's hard to see what careers will emerge in the future. I could never have seen myself doing this particular work some years ago when this role didn't exist.

What's the future of e-Learning?
I think there's certainly going to be considerable expansion. In particular I'd like to see more time and resources put into developing on-line Australian educational content. Most museums and galleries have their own education visitor service departments that prepare education content. Those who are orientated towards providing experiences within museums will need to embrace the Web medium more, to produce content specifically for schools and lifelong learners (teachers and students) via the Web. So I'm hoping museums will be a leading player in this emerging area.

How do you prepare for a career in e-Learning?
If I look at my own preparation, it's actually a mix of experiences. Ultimately, I think it is one of those professions where ideally you need a mix of skills and experiences. In my case, I started off as a designer and copywriter in advertising, and later did further studies in education theory and computer-based product development. A mix of skills allows you to appreciate the complex nature of the medium. First, it's a textual and visual medium, so having some appreciation of design and writing is really advantageous. Second, you need a firm grasp of educational theory and practice to build resources that learners can easily and successfully use. The third aspect is content. What I do in museums is build content - build educational content. Experience in publication or broadcasting or design, where you're creating rich content, is also advantageous.

What advice would you give to prospective e-Learning students?
You need to appreciate that it's an emerging field and that you are embarking on a career that will constantly evolve. So I think you have to be flexible. You have to be willing to stay informed about new service and delivery technologies, new developments in educational best practice, and most importantly the rapidly changing education marketplace.

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