In collaboration with AEShareNet, I am co-hosting a seminar in Sydney on Monday 6 March, Creative Practices for a Connected World, with guest presenter Euan Semple.

Euan is a UK digital innovation expert and ex-Director of Knowledge Management Solutions at the BBC.

For more information see: http://www.aesharenet.com.au/Semple_seminar.asp

If you want to improve your work practices, your organisation and your service delivery in a connected world, this is the event to attend in 2006. The seminar will cover key issues for managers, teachers and support staff in education and training including:

• Using collaborative tools for innovation, networking and knowledge management
• Developing advanced capabilities in social computing, using blogs and wikis, RSS and folksomonies (no previous experience required!)
• Performing new roles and forming new relationships with learners and partners in a digital environment.
  

Australia’s economy depends on fostering the creativity and innovation of its workforce, and education and training is a key to achieving this high-skilled workforce. The Euan Semple Seminar will provide you with concepts, practices, strategies and tools to help transform education and training.

Early bookings are strong and the forum will definitely go ahead, so be quick to book to ensure a seat.

Despite the various national reports I have published on the matter for ANTA, NCVER and NOIE, I find that most VET organisations resist developing comprehensive plans for operating as e-businesses. Curiously, these organisations sometimes spend millions of dollars on e-learning developments or they tinker with some aspects of e-business, such as freshening their website’s homepage, but they avoid developing a thorough strategic framework for e-business.

I am currently assisting a national VET organisation to develop a strategy and a project plan for becoming an e-business. My client has recognised the value of such strategic positioning, having determined that most of the organisation’s customers are online and they expect services to be available online. The benefits for my client are fundamental to its survival as a business, as e-business can assist the organisation to

• provide its products and services nationally, 24x7
• enhance its profile and brand name
• widen its market share
• increase its efficiencies
• reduce its costs
• improve its speed of customer response
• and link more effectively to its suppliers.

Why would VET managers ignore these organisational benefits of e-business? I recently completed a substantial body of research in which I found that managers’ resistance to embracing e-business can be explained in part by the fact that managers need skill development and new conceptual frameworks to develop e-business strategies and processes. My research details the range of skills and the types of knowledge required and describes the extensive professional development needed to address the issue.

But it is not just a matter of professional development. My research also identifies a number of organisational factors, industry factors and technological factors that are barriers to the development of e-education in Australian VET. E-business is alluring and important, but not easily obtained by educational organisations.

One of the major challenges facing VET is to shift as much training as possible from campus-based classrooms to the workplace, to increase the relevance, value and immediacy of learning. This shift requires collaboration between providers and industry, particularly where the industry is used to classroom-based delivery.

One industry that still relies heavily on traditional classroom-based training is the baking industry, with apprentices routinely dispatched several times a year to distant campuses for blocks of training. However, the baking industry is characterised by variable work hours and a high number of casual employees, so staff often have difficulties accessing institution-based training.

A group of researchers and VET practitioners set out this year to investigate flexible learning options that would suit the baking industry, enabling more learning in the workplace.

Ninety students studying the Baking trades course volunteered to participate in the project and the researchers split them into two groups. The first group was called the face-to-face group, for whom content was delivered in a teacher-centred traditional learning environment.

The second group was designated the hybrid group and involved the use of what the team called blended learning. These students were given tasks to complete before each lesson, in the workplace, with the tasks delivered via SMS, email, a blog and a web site. The lessons conducted on campus for the hybrid group were student-centred and self-paced, where the teacher functioned as a facilitator and mentor.

The researchers compared the knowledge and skill level of the two groups after a series of learning activities and found that the hybrid or blended learning model resulted in higher levels of learning than the traditional face-to-face model.

The above research is the focus of my column in Campus Review, to be published on 1 December 2004.

The Commonwealth Government’s recent initiatives indicate that industry will have a much higher profile in VET decision-making. While industry obviously needs and deserves a prominent role in VET, an ideal arrangement is that all the stakeholders have a voice, as VET is like an ecological system containing many interdependent components. Interdependence means that we need each other.

The interdependence of industry clients and training providers is one of the key issues which emerged from research I am currently completing. The research project was funded by the Applied Research Program of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework, and the report’s title is ‘Implementing flexible learning in workplaces’. This 2004 research study set out to identify the strategies used by a registered training organisation (RTO), the Central West Community College (CWCC), to implement flexible learning in the workplaces of two enterprises, a prominent food processing plant in Bathurst and a large abattoir in Wagga Wagga. The study also set out to identify the collaborative partnership model between the RTO and the enterprises and how that model assisted the implementation of flexible learning.

The report describes the multiple contexts in this VET study, including the regional context, the industry context, the enterprise context and the training provider context. The report demonstrates that the different bodies involved in these contexts – such as regional industries, local enterprises, local training providers and regional development organisations – are inter-dependent: that is, if learning is to contribute to a stronger regional economy, these different parties need to work together. A potential benefit of such collaboration is the design and support of learning activities that address industry skill needs and can be provided at times and in locations that suit local enterprises.

I develop this story further in the issue of the Campus Review to be published on 10 November. The full report will be available later this year at http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au

A good colleague in the VET community, Peter Smith from Deakin University, has consistently focused attention on the issue of learners needing to be self-directed if they are to succeed with e-learning. I am currently preparing a research report which reinforces this point.

Proponents of VET online products and services need to target self-directed and verbal learners, not non-verbal learners who prefer instructors and demonstrations. For instance, Smith (2000, 2001) showed that apprentices prefer learning in structured environments that provide opportunity for direct social interaction with their fellow learners and with their instructors. These learners also exhibited a low preference for learning that is presented through verbal means such as reading or listening. Verbal learners are those who prefer learning through the spoken or written word. The strong preference of the apprentices, as non-verbal learners, was for learning through hands-on experience, demonstrations and practice. 

Mitchell, Latchem, Bates and Smith (2001) point out that teachers are normally able to identify those students who are self-directed and those who are not. Self-directed students ask challenging questions, not just about program structure and what is expected of them, but about the content, what it means, and how it can be applied. They tend to go beyond what is delivered in instruction; and show greater willingness to work independently, and to access resources beyond those the instructor provides. Providers need to be able to identify self-directed learners and to market e-learning to them. 

Fortunately self-directed learning can be nurtured. Smith (2001) has suggested a wide range of strategies for the development of self-directedness in VET learners, focusing largely on assisting them to:

• use their experience and prior knowledge to develop new knowledge
• set their own learning goals and monitor achievement
• adopt a problem solving approach to new learning and its applications
• broaden the range of learning resources they make use of
• use other people to assist them where necessary to understand new learning.

I am currently writing up a research report on the implementation by a training provider of flexible learning approaches in enterprise workplaces in regional NSW.

The research identifies the range of contexts and the complex set of factors that impinge on an implementation of flexible learning. This contrasts with the simplistic use of throughaway terms by the media recently, like ‘ increasing skills training', as if that is a matter of pulling a lever or two. In terms of different contexts, I map out the regional contexts (two regions are involved); the industry context (two); the enterprise context (two); and the training provider's context.

One of my key findings is that the stakeholders representing these different contexts are interdependent. The range of different stakeholders, from government advocates of regional development to industry spokespeople to enterprise leaders and training providers, need and want to work together to support regional development and skill development. The RTO involved is determined to leverage off the interdependent relationship it has with the other stakeholders, to develop improved strategies and models for supporting flexible learning within local workplaces.

Implementing flexible learning in regional enterprises requires sophisticated management.

Currently I am writing up the results of research I have conducted over the last four months.

The focus of the research is to identify new and transferable strategies of VET-related training and assessment practice in the workplace for the meat and food processing Industries, involving the use of a range of flexible learning methods.

The potential implications of this research for the industries and enterprises include:

• revised policies about flexible learning for industry and government bodies
• enhanced flexible learning opportunities for the meat and food industries through the development of a model for accessing flexible learning in collaboration with external providers
• new, practical and achievable solutions for industry to address problems in training and assessment
• increased participation of industry in the Australian flexible learning community
• improved training and hence improved productivity for rural and regional industries
• improved partnerships between industry, RTO and industry advisory bodies
• innovative models of industry-based flexible learning transferable to other enterprises and other industries in regional Australia.

The final report will be available from www.flexiblelearning.net.au in about six weeks.

I am currently drafting a story to appear in the Campus Review later in October 2004 around the fear of many training providers: the fear that they will be wiped out if private e-learning companies gain a foothold in the local market. This fear is mostly directed at international companies. Training providers commonly respond to this fear by refusing to collaborate with e-learning companies.

My research shows that this fear is unfounded for a number of reasons:

• First, students normally trust local training providers, so are much more likely to use packaged e-learning programs when they are offered via the local provider than over the Internet, direct from the manufacturer.
• Second, students like to associate with the local provider: they like the human connections; they like some face to face contact.  Most students are disinclined to develop an association with a purely online e-learning provider.
• Third, e-learning companies understand that local training providers have something which they may never have: a loyal, accessible customer base. So e-learning companies need partnerships with local training providers.

The story I am composing uses the above points as a backdrop to the theme that training providers need to develop skills in brokering with e-learning companies, to extract the best possible arrangements for their students. The brokering needs to include attention to educational, business and technology issues. I have developed a decision-making tool that incorporates all of these issues and enables the training provider to quickly move into brokering.

As is evident from some of my earlier postings to this blog, I am convinced about the value of permission-based e-marketing in education.  

I want to share some insights about email marketing from a recent workshop I chaired. I facilitate a group of Principals and senior managers from the NSW Adult and Community Education (ACE) sector – the ACE Entrepreneurs’ Group. A guest speaker at the September 2004 meeting, a specialist in e-marketing, noted that email marketing has the fastest response time and is the lowest cost per unit. Some interesting statistics she tabled included the following: 10.8m of Australia’s 20.8m population are online; 99% of those use email; and 80% have two or more email addresses.

The speaker introduced the following concepts, which might be new to many educators:

• ‘Customer Acquisition’, which is possible through the College’s website, or from feedback forms, or from enrolment forms
• ‘Customer Re-marketing’, where Colleges send out email alerts about the course catalogue is available
• ‘Customer Service Marketing’, where Colleges market through emails the availability of new products or services, such as online payment. 

The speaker also suggested that ACE providers consider the merits of renting email databases (where individuals have given permission), that are available for different postcode areas, e.g. for specific regional areas. Databases can be rented from brokers for set periods of time.

At the same September meeting, two members provided detailed reports on their email marketing activities. Both were already renting email databases and were pleased with the success of their recent email marketing strategies. Here are some excerpts from their stories:

• The first member, from a regional college, provided a detailed report on the development of seven different email campaigns, one for each of seven locations serviced by the college. This college is building a database of different market segments. The use of email marketing has enabled the regional college to reduce its printed brochures from $120,000 pa to $60,000 pa.
• The second college, in metropolitan Sydney, through using its website and email marketing and SMS marketing, has reduced its annual expenditure on printed brochures from $175,000 to around $105,000/$110,000pa.

Email marketing, in concert with website marketing, SMS marketing, printed brochures and other forms of marketing, is now a legitimate and strong contributor to educational marketing.

IP and copyright issues are becoming increasingly important, with so many learning materials being developed in digital format - say as e-learning programs. When developing or modifying digital resources, it is also easy to forget about the ownership of intellectual property.

I recently drafted a column for Campus Review on the issues around copyright and intellectual property (IP), based on the experiences of AEShareNet. The story will probably appear in the issue published on 13 October 2004.

According to Dennis Macnamara, Business Development Manager of AEShareNet, if VET practitioners are to really leverage their IP both within their organisation and to share and trade IP across institutions, they must come to grips with IP management.

However, Macnamara finds that IP “gets less attention and respect than the management of the furniture”.  For successful VET organisations of the future, good IP management will be a key success indicator.

AEShareNet’s first annual conference will be dedicated to the topic of Unlocking IP. The conference will be conducted over two days in Sydney in November this year and is being organised in collaboration with the Baker McKenzie Cyber Law and Policy Centre of UNSW.

For more information about the forthcoming conference on Unlocking IP, see http://www.bakercyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip/

I have just finished my latest column for Campus Review, to appear in the issue due out on 6 October 2004. The column discusses how e-learning is progressively being tied to the electronic support and measurement of business improvement from learning at work. This growing integration of learning and work using web-based technologies is called e-performance.

Theorist Mariano Bernardez defines e-performance as “the capacity of an organisation, teams and individuals to generate measurable performance improvement through the integrated use of online practices and technologies”.

The column focuses on the views and work of  Clint Smith from TAFE frontiers in Victoria. Smith’s 2004 project as a Flexible Learning Leader for the Australian Flexible Learning Framework is to explore the issue of e-performance.

According to Smith, two of the tools driving e-performance are integrated learning management systems and e-portfolios. Over the horizon, Smith sees e-performance organisations using a wide range of electronic tools to assist staff learning, while improving corporate performance.

The column begins to address the question as to whether VET organisations will also become e-performance organisations. 
 
Contact Clint Smith at csmith@tafefrontiers.com.au

This morning, Thursday 9 September 2004, I attended a breakfast conducted by one of the world's major e-learning companies, SkillSoft, at the Marriott Hotel near Circular Quay. I usually avoid such events, as they are usually an excuse for the vendor to thrust endless products at a captured and bored audience inching its way through microwaved-warmed bacons and egg.

The main reason I attended this event was because of the pre-publicity that SkillSoft had mapped a range of its existing e-learning products against the competencies for one of the most popular qualifications in the Australian Qualifications Framework – the Certificate IV in Business. The promise turned out to be true: a Queensland RTO had undertaken the mapping and identified a number of supplementary activities that needed to be undertaken to ensure competencies are developed.

Similar mapping has been undertaken by Electric Paper to match its e-learning courseware with the Certificate 1 in IT, but the Certificate IV in Business is a much bigger market in Australia. (By the way, I think the Electric Paper e-learning content could be mapped against higher level competencies).

Interestingly, SkillSoft has also mapped its e-learning courses against modules required for the Certificate IV in Frontline Management. Smart move, as Frontline Management is another popular qualification.

This acceptance of reality by SkillSoft – that  Australian VET competencies are not going to be changed to suit existing e-learning courses – is a breakthrough. I predict that this will be a winning move by SkillSoft and will encourage it and other e-learning vendors to do more of this mapping. Nothing like meeting the market!

Now we need e-learning vendors to map existing e-learning programs against other highly popular VET qualifications, such as the soon to be endorsed TAA package. This will also cause consternation for local developers of similar e-learning products, who might have hoped the big e-learning players would stay clear of the VET market.

Last Thursday, 2 September 2004, I heard a stimulating presentation on e-marketing delivered by digital strategist for a group I facilitate, the ACE NSW Entrepreneurs’ Group. The speaker is an Australian leader as well as a university lecturer, award judge and writer in this field of email marketing. The ACE NSW Entrepreneurs’ Group consists of Principals and senior managers of ACE NSW Community Colleges and the Group has the charter to drive e-business and e-learning through the ACE NSW sector.

This is the third speaker this year I have invited to address the Entrepreneurs' Group about email marketing, because I have a view that this is one of the breakthrough strategies for educational bodies wanting to better market their services. Provided the individuals receiving the email have given their permission, email marketing is entirely ethical and the emails can be personalised to suit the individual receiving them, optimising their impact.

In her presentation, the speaker summarised the main uses of email marketing:

• eNewsletters
• Promotional emails
• Product updates emails
• Survey invitation emails
• Customer service emails
• Announcement emails
• Staff news emails
• Shareholder news emails.

Some of the opening points made in the presentation were as follows:

• Email marketing has improved from the early days of the Internet, such that now it can lead to measurable revenue increases
• Research shows that email marketing provide better returns on investment that any other direct marketing method
• The benefits of email marketing include the ability to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time
• It is possible to measure the following aspects of email marketing: who opened it; what they clicked on; whether they forwarded it; and whether it produced a transaction.

The speaker also shared some findings about Australian consumers of email marketing:

• We are very sophisticated in the way we use email.
• We have developed a range of strategies for managing our inboxes.
• We are quick to pick up on email content that interests us or to drop it if it fails
• We regard unsolicited emails as untrustworthy and an irrelevant menace.

The presentation then explored in depth the three key issues of customer acquisition,  customer re-marketing and customer service, before focusing on expected results from the email marketing – all new terms for most educators.

Email marketing will come to education like a huge wave. The question is, who will surf it: conventional or forward-thinking educational managers?

I predict that progressive educational managers of the future will be most interested in how to write a concise and arresting 300 word email message to prospective students. Or how to compose an engaging few words to appear in the 'Subject' line of an email to existing students, in pursuit of repeat business.

Today I made a presentation to the Strategic Planning Workshop of the NSW Board of Adult and Community Education on the topic of 'Key Strategic Issues in e-business and e-learning within the contemporary ACE context'.

In addressing this topic, I posed six questions, one of which was: 'Can e-business and e-learning enable ACE to create and sustain competitive advantage?'

I explained that sustainable competitive advantages are normally derived from the organisation’s exceptional skills or assets or resources, for example its brand name or customer base. ACE organisations can develop sustainable competitive advantages through flexible learning by doing it well (that is, developing and using skills in flexible learning) and developing a strong reputation with a particular customer group (an asset).

Aaker (1995) argues that an effective sustainable competitive advantage will be created when a strategy has at least the following characteristics:

• It should be supported by assets and skills
• It should be employed in a competitive arena containing segments that will value the strategy
• It should be employed against competitors who cannot easily match or neutralize the sustainable competitive advantage
• It should be substantial enough to make a difference
• It must be sustainable in the face of environmental changes and competitor actions
• It should be linked with the positioning of the overall business.

I then discussed how some of the different types of sustainable competitive advantages possible through the use of flexible learning include:

• Reputation for client responsiveness in flexible learning
• Clear focus on a segment of the market in flexible learning
• Retention of skilled staff in flexible learning
• Reputation for innovation in flexible learning
• High profile and name recognition in flexible learning
• Pioneer in the field of flexible learning
• Breadth of products in flexible learning
• Long-standing base of customers in flexible learning
• Reputation for quality in flexible learning
• Technical superiority in flexible learning
• Differentiating characteristics of flexible learning products
• Knowledge of the business of flexible learning
• Effective partnership arrangements in flexible learning  (Mitchell, Latchem, Bates and Smith, 2001, Critical issues in flexible learning for VET managers, TAFE frontiers, Melbourne).

The topic of e-business still generates a lot of hype. I find that the most common response to the topic from some journalists is to recycle their tired old articles on the dotbombs. So it was a pleasure to read a sensible article from Graeme Philipson in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, 10 August 2004, called ‘E-business at middle age’.

Philipson focuses on the impact of the large vendors such as PeopleSoft and Oracle on the concepts and language within e-business. He also identifies the influence of the market research company Gartner. Philipson shows how concepts such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) were heavily promoted by Gartner, Oracle and others in the late 1990s and then in the current decade these same companies took to placing ‘e-‘ in front of terms like ERP and CRM (Customer Relationship Management). While these companies ‘grew fat on the fruits of the ERP boom’, these same companies may not have done enough to assist all types of organisations to clearly think through the complex issues raised by e-business.

While Philipson rightly criticizes these companies for manipulating the language of e-business, he has no difficulty acknowledging the substantial impact of e-business. For example, he says:

E-commerce – the use of the Internet to conduct transactions – is now a fact of life, and industries as diverse as travel, banking and music have been transformed. In the process, enterprise applications have entered yet another phase, where applications are even more tightly integrated, but which has no commonly agreed name.

Looking beyond the efforts of Oracle and others to corner the market, integrating applications continues to be an important issue for contemporary businesses. Applications that can be integrated include finance (e.g. accounts receivable; accounts payable), supply chain and customer relationship software applications. Philipson continues:

Enterprise applications, by whatever name, remain at the core of most organisations’ information processing. Integration continues to be important but the focus is shifting to integrating applications across organizations, not just within them. The journey has scarcely begun.

My own research into e-business in education supports Philipson’s view that the journey has scarcely begun. In fact, many educational organisations lag behind the corporate sector, in integrating applications. Where educational organisations are most sluggish is in is electronically linking teaching delivery with back office support. On the other hand, I am aware of some outstanding educational organisations that are electronically linking the front office, back office and supply chain.

IT expert Graeme Philipson has accepted an invitation to address, in early September, the NSW ACE Entrepreneurs’ Group that I facilitate, so I am very much looking forward to hearing more about these trends in the corporate sector. The e-business/e-education journey continues.

I am currently undertaking a research project funded by the Flexible Learning Advisory Group (FLAG) as part of its ‘Policy and Research Program - Engaging Industry in Flexible Learning - Applied Research Projects’. I began the study in June 2004 and will complete it in November 2004.

My project’s title is ‘The identification of transferable flexible learning strategies and models for the Meat and Food Processing Industries – in regional Australia’.

Part of the context for the project is that Australia needs vibrant regional and rural communities and economies that are attractive to new migrants and to other Australians. To be attractive, regional and rural communities need world-competitive industries providing sustainable jobs and security for their populations. Cost-effective, flexible training in regional industries is one of the keys to realising this vision for regional Australia.

This research study will identify transferable strategies and models of VET-related training and assessment in the workplace, arising from the evaluation of a range of flexible learning initiatives to be undertaken by Central West Community College (CWCC) in 2004.

CWCC has the full support of the enterprises involved, Simplot (food processing) at Bathurst and Cargill (meat processing) in Wagga Wagga, as well as the relevant industry advisory boards.

The focus of the research is

• to identify new and transferable strategies of VET-related training and assessment practice in the workplace for the meat and food processing Industries, involving the use of a range of flexible learning methods
• to identify models of how RTOs can engage with industries and enterprises in the meat and food processing industries in regional Australia, to apply flexible learning solutions to business problems
• to identify barriers, especially policy barriers, to the take-up of flexible learning in the meat and food processing industries in regional Australia and how can they be overcome.

In focusing on the above three issues, the research will monitor a range of flexible learning methods to be implemented in 2004 at Simplot and Cargill by Central West Community College. Data on innovative approaches will also be obtained from Burrangong Meat Processes in Young.

This week I am visiting Bathurst twice, interviewing staff of the CWCC and of Simplot and viewing operations at Simplot.

Set out below is a range of benefits, for organisations and their stakeholders, arising from the application of e-business principles and processes to online learning:

• Improved levels of student services. The introduction of back-office e-business applications such as online finance systems and electronic student information systems can result in improved services to students, e.g. for online payment and students accessing their records online, enabling the organisation to better meet its customer service objectives.
• New student markets. E-marketing facilitates the pursuit of and access to new student markets, which can be offered online learning among a suite of digital services.
• New brands. E-marketing enables educational organisations to develop new brands, to cater for target markets of online learners.
• New profit sources. E-business gives educational organisations new ways to provide services and to make a profit.
• New harnessing of intellectual assets. E-business facilitates the knowledge management of digital data and gives providers the ability to harness and deliver to the student more of the digitised, intellectual assets of the organisation, not just to inform online learning but to enrich all electronic services.
• New relationships with customers. The development of new relationships with customers, based on more frequent contact and better understanding of students’ needs can be facilitated by e-business software systems such as Customer Relationship Management.
• Relationships for life. Through ongoing electronic communication, e-business facilitates the development by the educational organisation of a relationship for life with the student, not just during the students’ initial enrolment.
• Repeat business. Electronic communication also facilitates repeat business, a key to profitable business.
• New customer-centric models. E-business encourages a more customer-centric, demand-driven approach to service delivery.
• Customisation of services. E-business allows for customisation of digital data, to differentiate products and for the delivery to different target markets
• New business alliances. E-business facilitates the development of new relationships and alliances between providers, using shared technological platforms.
• Small business growth. E-business enables small organisations that are nimble to compete in the marketplace.
• Positive cost benefits. The introduction of labour saving practices can lead to the achievement of positive cost benefits, e.g. not having to mail out payslips, not having to publish a handbook.

The above list shows that e-business can position online learning as one of many online customer services and assists VET organisations to be more customer-focused. 

I discuss these ideas further in my 2003 NCVER report E-business and Online Learning: Connections and Opportunities for VET available at

http://www.ncver.edu.au/research/proj/nr2f03vol1.pdf

There are benefits to be gained if online learning is incorporated within an e-business framework.

The benefits of applying e-business principles and processes to online learning are different for customers and for the provider organisation. Benefits for customers include user choice and access to personalised services delivered electronically. Benefits for organisations include increased market reach and enhanced relationships with customers.

A range of benefits for customers arising from the application of e-business principles and processes to online learning includes the following:

• 24x7x352 service availability. Students potentially can access online learning and many other electronic services twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year, from home or work or when travelling.
• Fast response to enquiries. Students can receive, electronically, relevant and detailed responses to requests in seconds, rather than in days or weeks via the telephone or post.
• Customer-customer interaction. Students can interact with other customers in virtual communities to exchange ideas as well as to compare experiences.
• Customers can compare services. Potential students can compare prices, response times and value added services from educational organisations offering e-business services, providing students with a choice of both providers and products.
• New suite of electronic services. Within an e-business framework, students and all potential customers benefit from online learning being positioned as just one of a range of online services made available electronically. Other electronic services include online enrolment, payment, library access and course information, timetables, results, careers resources and employment information, as well as counselling and support services.
• Personalisation of services. E-business facilitates the personalisation of products and services, including the provision of individual web pages for each student.

I discuss these ideas further in my 2003 NCVER report E-business and Online Learning: Connections and Opportunities for VET available at

http://www.ncver.edu.au/research/proj/nr2f03vol1.pdf

In the last few weeks policy papers in the UK and Australian education sectors have headlined e-learning. I am uneasy about a growing trend of policy makers to foreground e-learning and to push into the background the concept of flexible learning. This unease stems from the fact that there is now a rich vein of thinking around flexible learning that links it to contemporary business practice, while e-learning on its own provides fewer links to core business strategies. I have found that e-learning is better protected by nesting it within a flexible learning framework.

Let’s consider the rationale for flexible learning in contemporary education. My own research in recent years shows that there is widespread agreement with the idea that flexible learning is a philosophy and not simply a methodology; but it is a philosophy describing how the VET organisation can be positioned as a service business as well as how learning can occur. Interviewees and survey respondents in my various studies generally confirm that flexible learning is fundamental to the survival of their organisations. Flexible learning in VET emerges from my research as an aid to achieving corporate goals such as improved customer services and enhanced competitive advantage. It is representative of the way business is ideally conducted in VET organisations today.

Further, my research shows that flexible learning is ultimately contributing to a customer-centred approach to the provision of VET. In the current decade, ‘flexibility’ in flexible learning is increasingly about providing extra or added value to students and other customers. While the definition of and approach to flexible learning in VET in the early 1990s emphasised two themes – access and equity on the one hand, and learner-centredness on the other – the definition of flexible learning emerging from my research takes those two imperatives for granted. The emerging definition places a new emphasis on the value of flexible learning for the individual customer and for the enterprise that requires training.

As a result of these findings, it is possible to identify the following additional examples of flexibility that are derived from a customer-centric approach to the provision of VET:

• some educational organisations offer customers self-service while others provide a mix of self-service and hands-on instruction
• some customise educational opportunities for individuals or groups while others modify generic offerings
• and some pitch to markets of only one person and others seek mass markets.

This customer-centred approach is the language of contemporary business, used by authors such as Cortada (2001) who notes that in the contemporary world customers

• are more in control because they have increased access to information
• can negotiate better terms and conditions for goods and services
• can return goods faster
• can change suppliers quicker, more frequently and easier than in the past (pp.18-27).

Latchem and Hanna (2001) note that customers have increased expectations of educational organisations:

Many of today’s students are fee-paying. They are more knowledgeable, more discerning, more assertive and more market-oriented. They expect quick outcomes, quality, currency and applicability in their learning, not hype…They expect good ‘customer relationship management’ and some require ‘customer intimacy’, for example, through Web-based customisation (p.17).

Latchem and Hanna (2001) conclude that it is imperative that all educational and training providers see their central mission and purpose as ‘satisfying the customer’s needs’ (p.17).

Flexible learning provides direct links to contemporary business thinking about customer-centred business structure and practices. Proponents of e-learning may wish to  better protect the interests of e-learning by aligning e-learning with flexible learning. Putting it another way, if policy makers want to see a surge in the use of e-learning, then e-learning needs to be tied closer to customer demand - both conceptually and in practice.

If, on the other hand, policy makers want e-learning to subsume the conceptual framework and practices of contemporary flexible learning, then more sophisticated definitions of e-learning are required.  

One of my strong interests in e-education is assisting educational organisations to effectively market online.

I work with some groups in the adult and community education (ACE) sector who are actively exploring this topic. For instance, members of the groups have experimented with co-branding, as in the case of one member who has his College's courses listed on Lastminute.com and part of the deal is that Lastminute.com has its logo on his Community College’s website.

Look at this home page http://www.mwcc.nsw.edu.au/docs/index.php and you will see not only the logo of Lastminute.com but the logos of 13 other suppliers and partners of Manly Warringah Community College, with space for more. Personally, I find this home page very attractive and all the more interesting for its links to other parties. This is using cleverly the valuable real estate on one’s home page.

There is still more we can learn about web advertising. I was interested when I read in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald a story about the cost effectiveness of web-based advertising and am now thinking about its implications for my education clients. The article by Paul McIntyre was called ‘Net threat to other ad media can only get bigger’ (p.25, SMH, 22 July 2004) and discussed an event in the US two months ago when the Ford motor company demonstrated that there are mass audiences available on the net for a fraction of the cost of TV advertising.

Instead of buying up TV time for massive advertising on a single day, Ford bought advertising space on major US web portals such as Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. The result was exceptional: in one day Ford reached 40% of all American men between the ages of 25 and 40 – its target market. And it was ten times cheaper than TV advertising.

Marketing experts are now predicting that web-based advertisements will increase, bringing about a reduction in the amount of television advertising.

Now what are the implications of the Ford story for my education clients? Of course, trends in the US by massive corporations such as Ford may have little connection to small to medium sized educational organisations in Australia. However, the Ford story raises some broad issues which I would like to share with you. 

I believe that educational organisations would be wise to actively monitor the domain of web-based advertising and to consider the following points:

• Are educational organisations using their own web pages effectively as marketing platforms? My answer is a resounding no, at the moment. Most of our web sites are dull, flat and frozen. They meet a standard set about three years ago, and are off the pace now. Look at www.smh.com.au if you want to know where the high jump bar is for home pages.
• Are educational organisations actively exploiting co-branding opportunities to host advertisements on their web home pages from their partners, in lieu of their partners hosting the educational organisations' logos? The opportunities are immense: think about who are the partners or suppliers of Australian educational organisations and you might start listing some of the mega-US companies that are bigger than Ford.
• Are educational organisations thinking about the pivotal role of commercial web portals like Google and Yahoo and how these commercial portals (not government portals) provide access to mass markets? And if educational organisations cannot afford to have prominent advertisements on such web portals, what are the second and third and fourth cost options?

We are surrounded by and love the web but have we worked out how to use it effectively for educational advertising?

Yesterday I received some fascinating emails from Garry Traynor, Principal of Sydney Community College. He has a facility on his College web site which lets him know which other web sites are referring people to his site. He innocently clicked on a number of these URLs and found they were blog sites for what he called Generation Y – twentysomethings or thereabouts - born between 1979-1994. The blog sites included active discussion among groups of friends about the language courses at his College and which ones the bloggers thought interesting and worth taking.

Garry sent me a note about it and when I looked at these same blog sites, I felt like Mark Latham might have felt the other day, looking through the windows into the 'Big Brother' household: curious, voyeuristic and a bit invasive. The young adults’ blogging discussions about language courses were mixed in with other idle chatter and flirting.

What to do with such information is the question the Garry Traynor asked himself. As he said to me in an email (which he is happy for me to share with you):

The Gen Y thing has been happening for some time. A lot of our marketing effort is focused at that target. Seems like blogs could open a new method to promote... But on the other hand... like SMS, a blog is very private and in there is its strength. If we lever in... I feel we will be snubbed and probably punished.

Interesting new issues are emerging for e-marketing about blogs, SMS and the Y Generation.

Garry and I and many others in the world of adult and community education (ACE) are very interested in the thinking, lifestyles and learning-style preferences of the Generation Y, as they represent the next wave of ACE students - provided ACE understands them and can cater for their evolving needs.

It seems timely for educational marketers in the ACE and VET sectors to start  understanding more about Generation Y and blogs...without being invasive.

I have asked Garry to share his thinking about these areas at the next meeting of the ACE NSW Business Development Group, of which Garry is a member and I am the facilitator/consultant.

Professor James Dalziel from Macquarie University is presently in the UK launching a tool he developed in Sydney called the Learning Activity Management System (LAMS). 

LAMS is a software program that allows teachers to design, manage and deliver online collaborative learning activities. Teachers using LAMS can sequence individual tasks, small group work and whole class activities, and incorporate 'learning objects' into sequences where appropriate.

The launch announcement and details are provided today by Stephen Downes in his OLDaily newsletter. Subscribe at  <http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/website/subscribe.cgi> and look for his article for 15 July ‘UK Department for Education and Skills Hosts Launch of LAMS Roadmap’.

Last month I invited James to address a group I facilitate for the Board of Adult and Community Education in NSW, the Entrepreneurs' Group. The charter for this group is to drive e-business and e-learning through the ACE sector.

A live demonstration of the tool by James convinced the Group that LAMS has great merit. Of some interest is that LAMS is based on open source software and free trials (with perhaps some cost for technical support) may be arranged with the James’s Macquarie E-Learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE). See www.melcoe.mq.edu.au

LAMS is an easy-to-use but powerful tool for a teacher to create an online learning course. The teacher can pull down from a menu a range of twelve different templates. For instance, one template provides the framework for an online test and another template provides a framework for online discussion.

Some other features of the tool that caught the interest of the Entrepreneurs’ Group included the following:

• the tool enables the teacher to arrange online activities in an order to suit the group of learners and the learning tasks required
• there is no desktop software to install as the tool runs through your Internet browser and connects the teacher automatically with his or her class for real-time communication
• the tool integrates with existing learning management systems.

Best of all, the LAMS product makes it easy for the teacher to quickly use sound instructional design principles, hence freeing the teacher to actively interact, guide and mentor students. Research and experience shows us that content will regularly need updating, but human communication – sometimes via technology – remains a vital key to effective e-learning.

A member of the ACE Entrepreneurs’ Group, who is well-known to many VET practitioners around Australia, Sandra Gray from Central West Community College, is presently liaising with MELCOE to trial LAMS within industry in regional NSW, on behalf of the Entrepreneurs’ Group. 

If the trial timing suits, I will be including this trial as one part of a research project I am currently undertaking for the Flexible Learning Advisory Group program 'Engaging Industry Applied Research Projects 2004' .

See http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/projects/research2004.htm

A fascinating article appeared in the national press today, Thursday 15 July 2004, about Australians’ habits in using web news sites such as News Limited’s www.news.ninemsn.com.au and Fairfax’s www.smh.com.au

The article called ‘The way the web was won’ by Sheena McLean featured in The Australian’s Media and Marketing section, pp. 17-18.

McLean notes that the web is unique in that news editors can measure what stories are being read and how long people spend reading them. The results 'can challenge conventional judgments about news values’. My mind is focused on how the insights from sources such as these can be of relevance to educators.

Research released last week by Fairfax’s f2 shows that online news has come into its own as a significant source of information for a growing number of Australians during the working day. There are 5.3m unique visitors a month to the f2 sites and 4.8m to the News Limited sites. This includes all sites, not just online news. In the light of the survey, f2 sites are being updated at least 100 times a day and are incorporating more breaking news.

One industry representative commented on users’ habits:

The big thing about the web is choice…I think it is a more serious medium. Five years ago there were a lot more quirky stories at the top… to me it’s done a total reverse. The regular audience that keeps coming back to us every day is coming back for news.

But users want news of all different types: news about politics, sport, entertainment and science. Readers want both hard news and lighter entertainment.

Some other findings from the research are:

• news online is mostly used by people in their office, with lunchtime a peak period;
• the belief that online readers prefer shorter stories is confounded by the new evidence;
• preferences of online news readers vary markedly from Brisbane to Adelaide to other capital cities;
• Australian stories that get picked up by Google news in the US get massive hits.

One interesting finding about our values is that an article about a woman’s struggle with depression is news.com.au’s top story nationally so far this month.

How can educators use this intriguing information about people’s habits in viewing online news? I am not sure. But at the very least it is an encouragement for educators to revisit their market research about how students like to use the web and whether their tastes and habits are different from a year ago. There might be significant implications for the design of online learning.

I completed several years ago for the Flexible Learning Advisory Group some extensive market research around preferences of online learners which now could be revisited and extended, given this new evidence that online users’ habits are changing. 

See http://flexiblelearning.net.au/national/np_news.htm

E-education is much more than the provision of e-learning. E-education involves the use of e-business – that is, conducting business electronically – in the front office, back office and supply chain of educational organisations.

My research for the Commonwealth Government indicates that e-business can, potentially, provide a range of benefits for educational organisations: improved efficiencies, additional value for clients, increased speed of transactions, enhanced business partnerships and, sometimes, reduced costs.

See http://www2.dcita.gov.au/ie/publications/2002/06/eb_education for my report E-business in Education.

Ten days ago, the benefits of e-education were articulated clearly in a presentation from Garry Traynor, a member of a Business Development Group I facilitate for the Board of Adult and Community Education. Garry Traynor is Principal of Sydney Community College and an Australian pioneer in the use of e-business in education, commencing in 2000 with a comprehensive plan to integrate the College’s online enrolments with the website and back office processes. See http://www.sydneycommunitycollege.com.au

A major achievement of the College’s e-business initiative was to build a website which is simple, secure, fast, reliable, cost effective, attractive and easy to update. The website provides students with up-to-date information about courses and whether classes are full and enables the student to enrol and pay online.

The benefits of e-business for Sydney Community College are substantial. Improving efficiencies by reducing double handling of enrolments was a key goal achieved by the College’s e-business system. Other benefits include reduced staffing costs for processing enrolments and the provision of additional value for clients.

What is most impressive about the College is that it continually seeks to improve its e-business strategies and systems. For example, the College’s next project is to enable each tutor to electronically update course information on the website.

Sydney Community College confirms some of the findings from my study for the Commonwealth, including that:

• e-business is constantly changing, as new technologies enable the development of new business processes;
• e-business is primarily a business issue, not a technological issue, driven by business goals;
• e-business raises the bar in terms of customer service, in terms of speed, convenience and the breadth of possible services.

While e-education is exciting, it is also continually changing, requiring educational managers, like Garry Traynor, to develop new business knowledge and skills. The role of managers is a key.

It is interesting to see the way the corporate sector is quickly discovering the value of an email database, while the education sector remains hesitant.

I recently arranged for a speaker from an online marketing company to address a group of senior educational managers. The speaker explained how his company helped a large hotel chain acquire an email database of 110,000 Australians in a number of weeks, mostly by offering people the chance to win free accommodation for a weekend. A raffle. People submitting their email addresses were asked twice whether they would be happy to receive future emails, promoting special offers from the hotel chain. Transparent process. Voluntary participation. The customer can choose to be removed from the database at any time. No tricks.  

One of the senior educational managers I work with followed the advice of the marketing expert and placed a similar promo on his college's website, offering visitors to the website the chance to win a voucher to an educational course. He collected 525 email addresses in the first nine days. He is now using these email addresses to market new courses to his database of customers.

This same educational manager, Gerard Newcombe, Executive Director, Manly Warringah Community College, had 40 people on an email database three years ago and now has 5,000. Gerard has reduced his college's annual expenditure on coloured brochures by around 33% and, for almost no cost, emails sections of his brochure to people on his database. He only sends them the sections which they have previously expressed an interest in. Personalised service. Everyone wins.

See the website of Manly Warringah Community College at the following URL: http://www.mwcc.nsw.edu.au/docs/index.php

A challenge I am working on is to persuade other educational managers that compiling and using a database of customers can be undertaken in an entirely ethical manner, while delivering the customer with services he or she wants, and helping the educational organisation achieve more efficiencies and enrolments. But as I find with much of my work, education organisations are often more conservative than their customers.

It was interesting to see an article in this morning's The Australian (5 July 2004; p.10) called 'Old School Ties Bind Again' by Jane Fraser. The article describes the extremely successful SchoolFriends.com online service for linking you and I to our old school mates, or army mates, or university friends, or work mates. For instance, you might be able to find out what your old work mates are up to, if they are at one of the more than over 200,000 workplaces listed on the site.

As Jane Fraser notes, the concept “arises from the simplest (of) concepts - curiosity, the urge for networking, getting back in touch with old school friends and seeing 'what people are up to'.“

The site has more than one million registered members in Australia, out of a population of 20m. Not bad for an operation which started in a programmer's bedroom. A dotcom success story. The founders recently sold the business to a UK company for $3m.

Late last year I invited one of the founders of SchoolFriends.com, Rob Barron, to speak to a group I facilitate for the Board of Adult and Community Education (ACE) in NSW, the Entrepreneurs' Group. I invited Rob to speak, as I believe that ACE is sitting on a gold mine: the desire for its current and previous customers to connect with the local ACE community college for more than just learning. I still believe it.

SchoolFriends.com has shown ACE and TAFE and other educational providers that we human beings have a yearning to belong, to associate with the institutions we have inhabited and to connect with the other people who were there too. 

This need to belong is a fundamental human characteristic that educational systems sometimes overlook, preferring to relate to students through compliance-related frameworks, such as attendance records, assessments, competencies and qualifications. Sometimes we also think that students might be so enraptured with the wizardry of technology, they might be happy to forgo a human connection.

This need to belong is one of the reasons why many online learning programs struggle to keep their students interested if the programs do not provide some human interaction between teacher and student and between student and student. From my many years working in VET, I also know that many ex-students who look to sign up again are looking to re-connect with the person at the front desk or in the library.

This need to belong suggests that educational systems might do better to relate to ex-students as human beings who primarily want to keep in contact with their ex-class mates and ex-students, rather than relate to ex-students as prospective online learning students. Maslow revisited. The message is: think about meeting your students/ex-students' basic needs before selling them a product. Think about all that e-education can provide, not just e-learning.

I investigated the range of different services that educational organisations could provide electronically, beyond just online learning, in the report I prepared for NCVER in 2003: E-business and online learning: connections and opportunities for VET. Like SchoolFriends.com, the report finds that students want much more from their educational organisations than just e-learning.

The challenge is for educational organisations to work out what services their ex-students want and how the ex-students want to access those services. Organisations could start by relating to the ex-students as humans with needs, not as prospective repeat business. If basic needs are satisfied, the repeat business could come later.

Two of the ideas I advocate strongly within the VET sector are, firstly, that we are only just beginning to come to grips with e-business in education and, secondly, we need to give much greater attention to continuous strategy-making, not just to the two-three year strategic plan.

See my report on E-business and online learning: connections and opportunities for VET, at http://www.ncver.edu.au/teaching/publications/954.html  and my report on Strategy-making in Turbulent Times at http://reframingthefuture.net - click on ‘Publications’ and then on ‘Sub-program 2’.

Both of these ideas - about e-education and strategy-making - are reinforced by a useful article that appeared in the media last week.  VET can learn from industry about the need for strategy-making skills, particularly from those industries that are caught up in the maelstrom of digitisation and converging technologies.

The need for companies to continually craft new business strategies was the focus of a well-written article which appeared in The Weekend Financial Review 19-20 June 2004. Written by Stephen Baker from New York, and sourced from BusinessWeek, the article is called ‘Digital revolution sets tech industries on collision course’.

The article identifies a heightened push towards convergence, due to ‘faster chips, broader bandwidth and a common Internet standard’. For instance, the market for personal digital assistants, so strong in recent years, is vanishing ‘as customers get the same functions in a mobile phone’. Similarly, new televisions have enough computing power to grab streaming video off the net. An executive from Phillips comments: ‘Digitisation is creating products that can’t be categorized as tech or consumer electronics. The walls are coming down.’

Three forces are driving the change: increased broadband access to the Internet; wireless home computer networks; and the expanded functionality of the mobile phone. These forces will result in new networked ‘machines’, incorporating televisions, computers and mobile phones.

As a result of the convergence, three industries are about to collide: computer and software business; consumer electronics; and the communications industry. Baker notes that none of these industries, much less a single company, can put all the pieces together. ‘They all need help. For this they venture into adjoining territories, where they forge new partnerships and take on new rivals’.

Businesses involved in the convergence will grapple with new questions, such as ‘Will people buy their programming and machines? Or will they rent and subscribe?’ Baker notes that innovative companies will sort out these questions, leading the way in building new business models: ‘Those who figure out how to reach through the networks will be the architects and kings of the converged economy’.

Baker concludes that the clock is ticking, pushing companies into bruising markets far from their roots and their expertise: ‘As the giants struggle to adjust, they’ll face swarms of upstarts that enjoy powerful advantages’. Baker notes that history is on the side of the upstarts: ‘Few companies have made the leap from one generation of technology to the next’.

Baker's article identifies the need for enterprises to undertake continuous strategy-making and to develop fresh business models. If VET organizations are to provide up-to-date training for such enterprises, they may need to up-date their own organizations, strategies and business models.