**[E-learning]{.underline}**

by

Jerry Ice, Executive Director

Graduate School, USDA

Keynote Address at Department of Energy's Training Conference

August 20, 2002

Albuquerque, NM

Thank you for that introduction. I consider it a real honor to be with
you today and to be asked to be your keynote speaker. It has been almost
one year since I became the Executive Director of the Graduate School,
USDA -- an institution of 81 years with a distinguished history of
service to the federal government. This year we will register more than
200,000 in courses and programs -- and our programs will be in over 100
cities in a number of delivery options. I'm providing you today with a
CD all about the Graduate School's capability to be your corporate
university for training and education.

Since October of last year, the Graduate School has provided to the
Department of Energy, over 10,000 training days -- in the states of New
York, Washington, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Maryland, South
Carolina, Ohio, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, Colorado, Oregon, Idaho,
Arizona, D.C., Nevada and here in Albuquerque -- so where you are is
where the Graduate School can be for you.

Recently, I heard a speaker tell a story that took place in a West Texas
town in the late 1800\'s. It seems a horse and cattle thief had been
caught and was due for a public hanging. Before the sheriff was ready to
place the rope around the thief's neck, he asked whether the thief had
any final words? The thief replied that he "had nothing to say."

Well, this didn't set well with one of the local councilmen who was
known for his long-winded speeches, and indicated that if the thief
wasn't going to use his time, that he would.

The sheriff asked if it was okay for the councilman to use his time. The
thief replied it was fine with him provided his hanging took place
before the councilman spoke!

I hope to save you having to think that you might have to give the same
answer as the thief.

Prior to coming to the Graduate School last September, I had the good
fortune of being the Provost at Thomas Edison State College of New
Jersey -- it clearly was a trail blazer with its creation in 1972 of
where education was headed. The College chose not to build a traditional
campus with traditional classrooms with traditional faculty, but chose
30 years ago to build a virtual campus. The college was built on what
learners needed. Typically, you build a college, have a faculty -- who
will decide what the curriculum will be based on what they can teach,
and finally decide who will be admitted to "the club" -- clearly a
cottage industry that in many cases has not changed in 200 years.

So, Thomas Edison built programs on what a working full-time adult would
need upon returning to the academy -- it created an open system of
assessing/evaluating the educational assets of what the adult brought in
and then created a number of distance education options for completing a
degree. The college is unique today with no traditional classrooms, no
full-time faculty, and no athletic teams -- it is an "R" rated
institution. Adults only.

This model serves us well in looking at the training and education
direction in government and non-government organizations. The rise of
the Internet and the convergence of computers, television, radio,
satellites, telephone and wireless are causing major shifts in
education. The traditional classroom-based teaching is being augmented
and/or replaced with interactive distance learning. The bricks and
mortar of today's education will evolve into clicks and mortar of
combined traditional and distance learning -- a blended learning.

I thought that this morning I would talk about the strength of the
technology before us as a powerful tool -- the dramatic changes before
us now and around the corner in our organizations -- and the
opportunities we have before us to create new organizations as a result
of this digital age.

Within our lifetime we have moved from the Industrial Age to the
Information Age to the Knowledge Age. Information is everywhere --
overwhelming -- and also difficult to find when we need to use it.
Knowledge about our customers and clients drives, the way we do things.
Knowledge and experience can give us huge advantages over our
competition.

The Internet, the rise of virtual schools and universities, and the
constant introduction of new communication technologies are generating
radical changes in the ways that information is transmitted.
Technically, it is now just as easy to deliver instruction on
environmental protection and sound health practices to Alaska and Hawaii
as it is to provide agricultural extension advice to local farmers in
Illinois and Nebraska. Many of our long-standing concepts and ideas
about disseminating information and education have become obsolete.
Access must be broadened and a wide variety of teaching and learning
opportunities made available, from traditional face-to-face instruction
to Internet and blended use of technology and the traditional
classrooms.

The information technologies - "the tools" can make it possible for
large a number of employees to learn by doing, learn in teams, learn
from mistakes, learn by discovery, learn by example, learn through
personal tutors, learn through interactive collaboration, and learn
through simulation-based exploration.

If we are to deal effectively with a dramatically changing world, we
need to use every tool at our disposal to organize, manage and share the
knowledge that inundates us every day.

If used properly, technology can help us accomplish this task. The cost
of computers is dropping 25% each year, and the under \$1,000 PC market
now represents half of all PCs sold. It is estimated that by 2019, a
\$1,000 PC in today's market, will be able to perform 20 million billion
calculations per second and will be equivalent in sophistication to the
human brain. (After that it just keeps getting smarter.)

-   computing power will double every 18 months

-   fiber connectivity will double every 9 months

-   conversion to disc will double every 12 months.

If we had similar progress in the automotive technology, today you could
buy a Lexus for about \$2. It would travel at the speed of sound, and go
about 600 miles on a thimble of gas.

The pace of change and the mountains of information before us will
continue to be mind boggling. To put this in perspective, we'll move
shortly from 1 gigabit on a disk to 1,000 gigabits. A disk with this
capacity can include everything you have ever learned -- every book,
movie, newspaper, etc. In essence, you can hold your entire world in the
palm of your hand.

For individuals keeping up with information and the rapid pace of change
can be mind boggling. For organizations, keeping up with the changes
while still carrying out their mission, can be akin to changing engines
in an airplane while the plane is in the air.

Clearly, technology is one tool that alters the way we work. If utilized
properly, it can help us to achieve both personal and organizational
success. I often read articles that make it seem as if technology is an
end unto itself. What seems to be missing from these articles is an
emphasis on people. Technology is a tool used by people to work more
effectively. Clearly, people are the engine of productivity. Knowledge
is the fuel that makes it run, and technology is the oil the lubricates
the system and allows for a smooth running machine.

At a recent Senior Executive Seminar, Gordon England, Secretary of the
Navy, indicated that technology, information, and people were the 3 keys
to success in the future of the Navy, but the most important one was
people. An 8 billion dollar carrier means little until the people that
form the team makes it happen.

So, people are still the key. No matter what your job, you will almost
inevitably be a knowledge worker charged with making decisions on a
daily basis. The challenge for both technology and organizations today
is how to capture information and organize it in way that helps us do
our job. As we are already aware, over the next 5 years more than 40% of
the federal workforce is eligible for retirement. In addition to the
loss of a valuable and experienced workforce, government is outsourcing
more and more of the hard and soft skills work to non-government
providers. However, few organizations are prepared to replace the skills
that have been lost as employees retire -- let alone, deal with the gap
created by the need for new and broader responsibilities in this ever
complex age.

More will be asked of the individuals that remain in the workforce. It
is these employees who are the key component to high performing
organizations in the federal sector. The individuals that remain in the
workforce must be flexible and responsive to the ever-changing
technology.

A recent publication from the Brookings Institution, "The New
Relationship, Human Capital in the American Corporation" stated that:

-   E-learning is an important resource for developing intellectual
    capital -- and human capital is the only form of capital that you
    cannot buy or sell.

-   Evidence from the stock market suggests that there may be a
    potential pay off to increased efforts to measure investments in
    human capital more carefully. The growing divergence between book
    value and market value in knowledge-intensive sections of the
    economy attests to the increasing role of intangible assets, of
    which human capital is clearly a major component.

The most telling statement from the book is that little systematic
information exists on impact and value of a firm's human capital
investment.

GAO also recognized the importance of human capital to organizational
performance in its report "Human Capital: A Self-Assessment Checklist
for Agency Leaders" (September 2000). As this report notes, "The federal
government employs a diverse and knowledge-based workforce composed of
individuals with a broad spectrum of technical and program skills and
institutional memory. They are the government's human capital, its
greatest asset. To attain the highest level of performance and
accountability, federal agencies depend on three enablers: people,
process, and technology. The most important of these is people, because
an agency's people define its character and its capacity to perform."

We see examples of this every day. One example I recently came across
was in an article about paint chipping on cars. For two months after the
retirement of one of its line supervisors, a major auto manufacturer was
getting new cars returned with flaking paint. Experts checked the paint
supply, the spraying equipment and a myriad of other factors, spending
nearly 2 million dollars in repainting work before someone figured out
that the guy who had left through retirement knew something about the
temperature at which paint had to be delivered to the assembly line from
the loading ramp. This vital little fact was not in the manual or
program -- only in an employee's head.

The previous example illustrates the fact that, to be successful in the
future, organizations will need to capture and manage knowledge. Given
what I previously said about how advanced our IT systems are for
capturing knowledge -- every organization should begin to create a
knowledge tree -- looking at what information is being used, and
avoiding the valuable brain power loss walking out the door every year.
As organizations strive to manage the knowledge of their workforce,
learning management systems emerge as a tool in e-learning that can
assist with skill-gap analysis and development plans for future
learning.

There are numerous other things that organizations need to do to capture
knowledge and promote learning. Federal organizations have already begun
to utilize technology to manage knowledge and to help develop their
workforce. One way it has done so is to make use of the on-line
community.

Developing an online learning center can be the organizational hub of
learning resources \-- the corporate values, business objectives,
defining the knowledge, skills, abilities all employees are expected to
attain \-- organizations that are geographically dispersed,
technology-friendly employee populations, a drive to maximize Return on
Investment, a desire to break down exclusive, independent operating
units into working across units, and a strong senior management
commitment to learning, training and retaining top talent.

**The on-line community can help generate new knowledge and learning.
Best practices can be shared so that knowledge of things, such as the
correct temperature for paint delivery, won't be lost when an employee
retires.** Putting such systems into place, and providing employees with
access to these systems will help ensure that employees have up-to-date
information that enhances the agency's value to its clients and ensures
that it is equipped to achieve its mission.

This year, the Graduate School, USDA contacted a cross-section of
federal program managers representing over 50 departments and agencies
to determine e-learning initiatives in the federal government. Managers
reported 5 undeniable benefits of e-learning to agencies and
departments:

1.  Reducing costs associated with conventional learning

2.  Communicating a consistent message to employees everywhere, anytime

3.  Increasing learning effectiveness, and information retention

4.  Decreasing the time to introduce new procedures, policies, new
    products

5.  Allowing employees to access the information they need, when they
    need it

It's no wonder that distance education is expected to grow at a compound
annual rate

of 33%.

Within the federal government, we found in our survey that currently
CD-ROMS, the World Wide Web, Intranets, and the Internet were the most
widely used technologies for training.

Within the Graduate School, we have assisted agencies and departments
with a number of e-learning initiatives -- among them

-   For the U.S. Department of Agriculture, we designed and delivered
    mandatory civil rights training to over 42,000 USDA employees in
    several versions -- Web-based, paper-based and in both English and
    Spanish

-   Pre-retirement training for IRS employees delivered through
    satellite transmissions

-   For Health and Human Services, six courses delivered on CD-ROM and
    Web to child support case workers at the state and local levels in
    such areas as child support enforcement, orientation, processing
    interstate child support cases

-   And, recently on-line Web services for information, application
    forms, help desk, and reporting for the centers for Medicare and
    Medicaid Services to service their clients better.

In a major speech at last year's fall Comdex Show, John Chambers, CEO of
Cisco Systems, said that he believes e-leaning usage will continue to
grow at a record pace -- Cisco spends tens of millions of dollars on its
"Are You Ready?" advertising campaign and one of the current themes is
e-learning "One day, training for every job on earth will be available
over the Internet," a young girl predicts in one of the commercials.

Cisco Systems can be a good example of what organizations need to do.
Not only do companies need faster, cheaper development of online
training, but employees want the information in small chunks of training
materials online when they need them. Cisco's internal learning
challenges are much like those faced by the federal government. Training
is needed for thousands of employees at various grade levels including
managers, directors, with a critical need to have knowledge about
programs, practices, budgets, and end user needs. In addition, new
federal government employees arriving, and retirees leaving in
increasing numbers, need to develop quickly a culture with a common
vision, common goals, and team building skills to develop internal and
external partners.

To keep the business running fast, organizations are moving 100% of
their training on line. Companies put together a program that stores
small chunks of information that can be pulled out on demand. In
beginning, with this type of e-learning system, an organization creates
a single repository of information that can be used in training,
documentation, knowledge management, and other capacities.

At the Graduate School, our staff are making sure that our e-learning
enhancement to our traditional face-to-face courses are meeting SCORM
standards. SCORM stands for "Shareable Content Object Reference Model"
-- wow -- what that really means is that learning content is readily
available, without adaptation, to virtually all members of the learning
community. That means that the content should run on multiple platforms
and be launchable from any number of learning management systems.

These e-learning sites also offer assessment, management reports, and
links to dozens of other learning portals. Our "about to retire"
employee could create an e-learning module in one afternoon on how long
the paint needs to be on the shelf before it's moved to the assembly
line.

Good organizations develop common sense solutions to common sense
practices. Best practice organizations are moving from a perception of
learning as a cost, to one of maximizing value. This leads to increasing
demand for skills and knowledge delivered in a much shorter cycle of
time -- a greater demand for access and speed. The technology at hand
enables us to move from mailings to our staff, information/exploration
meetings, CD-ROMs packaged with course information and training classes
to online portals of information in useable formats/and learning
templates. As GAO noted, "enhancing the value of employees is a win-win
for employers and employees alike." E-learning is one way to do so.

Coming from a "continuing higher education background, I've found a
number of successes that seem to work in the e-learning training and
education world. Among them are:

-   spend your time and money on implementation rather than "course
    development" -- if the content off the shelf, content that can be
    provided by a training provider -- then go with it. The cost of
    waiting months to develop can be overcome with the focus on using
    what is available.

-   go with training providers that have a lot of experience in putting
    on training programs. Experience produces better results.

-   focus on impacting your organization with high-quality programs
    addressing basic issues that impact a high number of people rather
    than a high number of courses spread among the same number of
    employees.

-   look for programs that can be tailored to your organization without
    a great deal of changing the basic content.

-   generally, buy programs is much more productive than building it.

While I've spent most of my time today focusing on using the technology
to advance our human capital, I do want to touch a little bit on
blending the best of online and the classroom. E-learning is not about
using the latest technology to replace the classroom. Nor is it about
posting content on the Web. E-learning provides a new set of tools that
can add value to all of the traditional learning modes. As learning
moves closer to the job, blended instruction provides the critical piece
of just-in-time/as needed learning. **Elliot Masie, an e-learning "guru"
(reported in a column on HR and e-learning in the June 2001 *IT
Training*), found through an informal poll of HR professionals that the
most common solution seemed to be in the blended approach to learning.**
We know that face-to-face training plays an important role for certain
types of high level learning -- and it is the way most people prefer to
learn and how many trainers teach. Internet training is clearly on the
move from 500 million dollars in 1999 to an estimated 7 billion dollars
in 2002.

The growth of online courses, programs within higher educations is
staggering. At University College, of the University of Maryland system,
enrollment in courses offered over the Net soared to 63,000 in the past
academic year -- up 50% from the year before. The University of Phoenix
Online, saw revenues jump some 76% in the fiscal year ending August 31
to 181 million dollars with profits of 32 million.

In January 2001, Thomas Edison State College of New Jersey -- where I
was the Provost, became a lead institution for the U.S. Army rollout of
an e-learning program. Currently nearly 11,000 soldiers are taking
courses and earning degrees online from 24 participating colleges.
Students at E Army U, as it is known, receive a free laptop, printer,
and 100% of their tuition. No wonder the Army expects enrollment to hit
80,000 by 2005 as it takes the program Army-wide.

Even colleges NOT pursuing online courses are integrating the Internet
into everyday campus life. Professors are using everything from digital
reference works to Web-based tutors to augment textbooks. At Princeton
University, every course has an online portal access with papers,
assignments, related reading, notes from lectures, and links to other
references. Students are getting a rich array of learning assets in
addition to the face-to-face lectures.

Last year, organizations in the United States spent over 60 billion
dollars on formal training to gain an edge over their competition.
Today, organizations are seeking, developing, and outsourcing training
through the use of technology. This move toward distance learning has
occurred because organizations are trying to save training costs, and
because they are making an effort to deliver the training "just-in-time"
in order to reach larger numbers of their workforce. One company
recently estimated that over a three year period, training in a
face-to-face format cost 3.3 million dollars compared with 1.7 million
dollars for the same course delivered in a technology delivered format.

Some have asked - Does the future of education, learning, and training
belong to a new machine-based digital environment, or will the best
learning remain a deeply human endeavor conducted person-to-person in a
traditional classroom setting? I believe the answer is "yes" -- to both.

We are at the proverbial fork in the road where we should, and will,
take both paths. We will continue to be influenced greatly by the use of
digital media, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and devices and systems
yet to be developed. Learning communities through amazing new electronic
technologies will help us learn. But great teachers in face-to-face
classrooms will remain an essential element. For traditional-age
students, machines cannot replace the magic that occurs when bright,
creative young people live and work together with highly dedicated
faculty.

So what does all this mean? Learning Management Systems, the on-line
learning community, on-line training initiatives, and blended learning
are all tools we can make use of to meet the unique challenges of the
Information Age. Job success in the information age will present unique
challenges for us. We cannot stop change! So what do we need to do to be
successful in today's and tomorrow's environment? I remember seeing a
publication titled "The Employee Handbook of New Work Habits For a
Radically Changing World." The publication cited 13 ground rules for job
success in the Information Age to the Knowledge Age. They were:

1)  Become a quick-change artist. Take personal responsibility for
    adapting to change.

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2)  Commit fully to your job -- it's therapeutic; and antidote for
    stress -- and a cure for the pain of change.

> 3\) Speed-up
>
> 4\) Accept ambiguity and uncertainty
>
> 5\) Behave like you're in business for yourself
>
> 6\) Stay in school
>
> 7\) Hold yourself accountable for outcomes
>
> 8\) Add value
>
> 9\) See yourself as a service counter
>
> 10\) Manage your own morale
>
> 11\) Practice expecting a higher level of performance
>
> 12\) Be a fixer -- not a finger-pointer

13\) Alter your expectation -- the era of entitlement is ending.

Through the development of our human capital, we can strive for an
effective organization as akin to looking at a healthy tree with far
reaching branches and beautiful leaf structure supported by a strong
trunk -- but beneath the ground is the real strength of what the tree
will become through its root system. If the root system is too close to
the surface the tree will have a shorter life, but if it is a root
system is deep the tree will be long-lasting. Each part of the root
system is supported by the strength of the system. In a similar way, our
development of human capital to support our agencies, departments will
need to develop an interlocking root system. Knowledge management and
e-learning application will be important nutrients for the health and
vitality of the organization.

It's been my pleasure to be with you today. I wish you much success in
"changing the engine."

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