An Interview with Cisco's Tom Kelly and Nader Nanjiani
    - by Karl Kapp, PhD for E-LearningGuru.com

KK: My first question is why this book, The Business Case for E-Learning, and why now?

Tom Kelly. We have been in the e-Learning space as an industry for a decade or two. Sure in the past we may have called it different things but within the last six or seven years the industry has more or less coalesced around the "e-learning" industry. But for the most part it has been about the courses and the disappointing results of course completions. What Cisco, specifically our group, Internet Learning Solutions, tried to do over the past seven years, is to take a more holistic approach to e-Learning. We tried to eliminate some of the arguments about information, communication, and education versus training, and just talk about content and making people successful in their jobs. And because we have been successful doing that, we wanted to share the elements we have developed for success. We also wanted to share the results of some proof points with people that are not as far along the experimental curve as Cisco.

Nader Nanjiani: Essentially we are trying to convince people of the value of e-Learning, and we now have the numbers to do that. We have the ROI. If we had the numbers sooner, perhaps the book would have been in the bookstores sooner. But the timing of the book is coinciding with the numbers becoming available. The numbers and the book clearly demonstrate to any CFO (Chief Financial Officer) in the world, that e-learning is a worthwhile business proposition. Everyone knew it intuitively in the last few years, but now there is no denying it.

KK: How would you respond to the argument, that while e-Learning may be more efficient as terms of time and scalability, it's not more effective in terms of learner performance?

Tom: Most of us know that classroom training is not consistently effective. It completely depends on the passion, enthusiasm, and expertise of the instructor and the willingness of the learner.

No one really believes that we get 40 hours of solid learning out of any 40 hour instructor-led class. So the metrics that we have been using and developing over the years show us that in fact e-Learning is more efficient because it is available at that teachable moment when we, the learner, are most interested, curious or fearful and hence most ready to learn.

It's the availability of the e-learning, not the instruction or quality of the content. The student is more motivated at the moment they access it. I think that's part of the answer.

The other one is that at the end of the day how effective is classroom learning? Most of us have seen studies indicating that, at best, its 25 to 50 percent effective and those figures are for the first week or two after the learner has attended the class. What happens if that class happens a month or two before the product or skill is needed? We all know the answer to that, it drops off dramatically. So availability is the difference, not quality instruction, availability is what makes it effective.

Nader: Assessment is the key here. We believe in certification exams, or any exams you need to pass. We did an experiment in which we put a group of people through an e-Learning class and another group of people through the traditional face-to-face class and the results were negligible, in fact they were better for the e-Learning folks. So the issue is, people are able to perform well on those assessments despite the fact that they took either e-Learning or traditional face-to-face. If the assessment shows good performance, good retention and good comprehension then the argument about e-Learning vs. classroom instruction becomes moot.

Tom: Yeah, the other experiment we did was in manufacturing. We found a 40 percent improvement in time-to-competence. This means that if it took 5 days to learn a new skill like how to set up a new machine, or how to actuate a new process [in traditional classroom training], then by using e-Learning instead it only took 3 days. I don't know if that's a repeatable outcome or if it's a one time deal that's just incredible, so we use it internally, we quote it externally, but we don't guarantee it.

KK: There seems to be a segment of the industry that argues against return on investment (ROI), they say no one ever calculated the ROI on fax machines or email or anything like that. They seem to think the learning industry should focus more on benefits like improved quality or responsiveness and less on some of the harder business methods. How would you respond to that argument?

Tom: I would agree completely. In fact that's what we did here for the first three or four years, we said the same thing. We said no one did ROI on email or voicemail because it is better to be connected than not connected. We asked, so why are you having this problem with learning? Isn't the only reason to communicate to either teach or learn? And mostly the answer is "yes" even if you're yelling. So then email, voicemail are two tools for e-Learning. And if that's true then we should say that all this stuff, even if its video based, is content that drives both the formal and the informal parts of learning. And yes, in some cases, it is expensive, but ignorance costs a whole lot more.

I would personally agree that we shouldn't have to do ROI on things that make people smarter and better at their job, and more connected to their companies, their goals, and their missions but I don't write the rules.

Nader: I think Tom makes an excellent point, he has advocated that for a number of years, and we believe that. There are many individuals like us who feel the same way, but in their organizations there are groups who tend to feel differently, and if they need different types of evidence points, and if it helps their cause to have those different evidence points available then it doesn't hurt to provide them. Its one of those things, we say yes we don't think it should be needed but if you insist, then here it is for you.

Tom: Because at the end of the day, to implement an email system doesn't cost $8 million a year. And putting an infrastructure in place to do e-Learning in a company of 50,000 employees, bigger than Cisco, might cost you $8 million dollars upfront or $2 millions dollars a year for four or five years or some other number that really dwarfs the cost of email, voicemail or other casual communication tools, so I do understand why the CFO wants to rationalize these larger expenditures.

We try to point out the logic that learning equals communication, so don't put us on the same investment scale of return requirements as you would for a new product. Sure you might say that for a new product to be worth the investment, you have to get a return of ten times what was originally invested. However, in the learning space, lower your expectations by half, expect four to six times return in the first 18 to 25 months. Learning events can meet that hurdle.

KK: As you both know, John Chambers, CEO, was famously quoted saying e-Learning would be the killer app of the Internet. Some people have said that at the time he made that statement, e-learning had just peaked. What were you thinking when you heard him make that statement, what was going through your mind?

Tom: Well I don't think that was the peak. I think it was the first salvo in coalescing an industry. Before that statement there were very few companies in the e-learning space, there was little or no product in learning management, content management, or very many authoring tools that had any scalability. So I don't think it was anywhere near the peak of e-Learning in its first wave even, and there's been at least two waves since then, what he did though was give us all a vision where we stopped saying distance learning and Web-based training, and about 40 other euphemisms, and the industry centered on "e-Learning," right or wrong, and it came to mean a lot of things to many people. For example, what's the difference between e-Learning and knowledge management? Great question. I'm not going to answer it. Chambers started us all as an industry down a path.

What was I thinking, he made that statement about 3 months after he and I had a discussion about learning versus training. My immediate response was wow that was a better meeting than I thought. And then I thought holy crap I just got a bigger job than I thought. So there was a little joy mixed in with the terror. And I think also I wasn't thinking about the consequences of what he said and how broad a response that was going to elicit. If you look at business plans of companies bringing online learning products to market from 1999 until 2002 virtually everyone quoted John Chambers in their business plan. We saw dozens of business plans if not many dozens, as part of people coming to Cisco for equity investments. So we know that it had a far reaching impact in the training/learning space.

KK: What do you think of the quote now?

Tom: Yeah I think he was right, I don't think we have achieved it yet. We have gone through three waves of varying degrees of success, and we still aren't there. But if e-Learning is about communications and education and training, then that's all the Web does except for spam. And you can argue for some people that that's education. But you can say that the Web is the greatest library in the world without a Dewey decimal system. So is it clumsy, is it inefficient? Yes, but it houses more information that allows more learning, including getting a map from Yahoo or Mapquest. It's huge, it's the killer app of the Web, and it's what the Web exists to do.

KK: Nader were you at Cisco at the time?

Nader: If I wasn't at Cisco at that time, that's probably one of the reasons I joined Cisco because we had a CEO that thought that way. When you have a CEO that is committed to e-Learning, then certainly the projects are more aggressive, the demands are more aggressive and that ties back into good results for e-Learning and the organization.

KK: What advice would you give to a Chief Learning Officer (CLO) or training manager who is about to go into a similar conversation with his or her CEO?

Tom: One is, do not get locked down into the training vernacular. If you go to France, you're better off speaking French. If you go to a CEO you are better off speaking "business" than "training". Talk about learning, talk about the impacts of informal as well as formal learning, talk about the importance of learning in communications and the direct link between the two that, again, the only reason you communicate is to teach or learn. You can write the best book in the world, but if it doesn't get published or distributed, nobody wins. In the Web world, it gets distributed and it gets to everybody when they need it, not when it's convenient for the instructor to fly to that city, or for the student to fly to another city. So mainly it's about timing and scalability, but mostly it's about giving people the tools to be successful when they most need them.

KK: Is Cisco doing anything right now in the area of writing courses specifically for delivery over Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or hand-held computers?

Tom: We did a little bit of experimenting with hand-helds, but the demand right now in our environment is pretty low.

Nader: We do offer MP3 downloads now for those people that wish to listen to product lectures or updates and want to download it to their MP3 devices. So that's going on, but it is an option not a strategy or anything, and if that kind of approach takes off then enabling those types of features should not be very difficult within the infrastructure we have currently, but we are just waiting for that demand to show up.

KK: Are you working on SCORM?

Tom: Most of our content created in the last 18 months has been SCORM compliant, I don't think 100 percent. With that said, we all know SCORM is a specification not a standard, so even things that are SCORM compliant don't necessarily talk to each other easily, but we are pursuing greater alignment with SCORM today.

KK: In your book you describe a Cisco vision for e-Learning; it starts content-centric information then portal-centric, then module-centric progresses through to performance-centric and ending with learner-centric e-Learning. Do you feel that is a maturity model, do companies have to go through that process (from content-centric to learner-centric) or could they start right at learner-centric?

Tom: I think it's a case of, if you haven't laid cable, then you can jump straight to wireless. So yes, you can jump in somewhere, I think we started where we were, as content-centric, because that is what we had in those days (about seven years ago). We started with 12 million Web pages on our Web site. We were very content rich, but it was very difficult to find what you needed, so people started aggregating that content based on some common interests. Soon we had a sales portal, then we had six sales portals, then we had an engineering portal, then we had a customer portal, then multiple customer portals. So the portals turned 12 million Web pages into hundreds of portals, so I suppose that, in some respects, it was better, but not really.

It got us thinking about getting a single logical repository regardless of how many physical devices. And it got people thinking about the analogy that the common repository was a house. You may look in the kitchen window and see one thing, look in the living room window and see something else, but it's all in one repository and I can go through the front door and search the whole house for everything I need. That's the model that we needed, not everybody in separate silos.

That moved us toward learner-centric e-Learning but anybody getting into this a couple years after us could have started with a module-centric, with the idea of learning objects, and then moving up the path. Performance-centric is just tying all of this in with your HR database, your development plans, your training history, the idea of career pathing, that's what performance-centric is. Then learner-centric is putting it in your control, instead of HR's or the company's control so that you set a profile. Only the stuff that you are interested in, what you and your manager have agreed is your development path, either career or personal development, comes to you. You don't have to search it out.

KK: In the future, do you see e-Learning housed more in Learning Management systems (LMS) or less in Learning Management Systems, and perhaps more in applications?

Tom: I think Learning Management Systems for the most part were sold as the answer when people weren't sure what the question was. I think as a tracking tool and gathering tool and a place to hang content, it has some value. But if you do a good job of meta-tagging, and a good job with the search engine, and a good job with creating a single logical repository, then the search engine and the personalization (the profiles, the learner-centric), will make the Learning Management Systems probably less front-office and more back-office important, it will be important to the data but not the people if that makes sense.

Nader: I agree with Tom on the search engine part. LMS is a good thing, but its not the end all to be all, I think people start with searches, that's how they learn. People like to go to the key word and get things quickly and being able to pull it up through search engines, that's where we all start, even on Google when you want to explore something.

KK: So some advice you would give to a training department and an e-Learning department is to learn about meta-tagging? Is one of the things they need to understand is meta-tagging and search engines?

Tom: And object strategy. Then you worry about content management more than learning management. One of my biases is, I don't know how any system manages learning. I don't know if I can manage it for myself. It's kind of like knowledge management or knowledge transfer, that's my favorite. But those are idiosyncratic word problems that I have. I think a better thing to know about is; objects, content management, meta-tagging, search engines, and assessment elements, instead of hanging all your hopes on Learning Management Systems.

KK: Tom can you explain a little bit more what you mean about objects? Are you talking about chunks of content, or object in sense of SCORM?

Tom: No, objects as chunks of content, regardless of big those chunks are. Our objects tend to be roughly a module size; they could be a test question or series of test questions, or they could be graphic elements that are also learning objects and that are elements of the object database. That's what we mean by objects as learning objects. We call them reusable learning objects. Some people call them reusable content objects. There are a variety of names for them, but its object strategy for the learning content that we create and deploy.

KK: So when you put together a lesson or module, do you have an ideal length that you are shooting for or is it all learner-determined?

Tom: One of the earlier strategies was that we wanted learning to be woven into the fabric of a person's day, much like email and voicemail. The reason we can get through email and voicemail is because it is short chunks. So we set an upper limit of 20 minutes on our learning chunks, and we have found because…whether we are smart or because it is a self fulfilling prophecy… almost anybody will stay for 10-12 minutes of content regardless of how mediocre it is, and if its bad we start to see drop off at 10-12 minutes, and if its really good we still see a significant drop off at 20 minutes.

I don't know if that's a conditioned response that we caused or if it's something to do with television and commercials, or general attention deficit disorders. Our guidelines are 20 minutes and there are very few things that exceed the 20 minute chunks except for some reading like a white paper, which may take longer to read. Whether it's video or audio, it's "chunkable" into 20 minutes, even text.

KK: One of the things that you mentioned in the book is that you attach videos to email. So email is as much of an e-Learning tool as anything else?

Tom: Yes it is a distribution mechanism. We don't actually send a video because it is too big. We send the URL and people jump to it. The other side of email is something we call news clips. The sales force will get an email based on an individual's profile and the elements of interest the individual has indicated. The person will get an email once a day or once a week that summarizes 6, 8, 10 different things that are in their profile. The email includes a three sentence descriptor, plus a headline of the content, and a URL to jump out to that article, white paper, or video. So email is a distribution mechanism as much as an interpersonal communication mechanism. It is an integral part of our e-Learning strategy.

KK: If you gentlemen were forced to leave Cisco and start an e-learning company, what kind of company would it be and why?

Tom: A very well funded one (laughs). Go ahead Nader, you can take that one.

Nader: I was talking to someone last week when I was at the ASTD conference about this topic. Here is what I would do if I was forced to leave and start a company. I would start a company that offered continuing education degrees from traditional universities in an e-Learning format to employees enrolled in corporate universities.

KK: Why is that?

Nader: Continuing education groups within higher education are seeking a target audience which resides in corporations. And corporate universities have access to those individuals because they are already offering training to them. Companies also offer tuition reimbursements to employees so there is an opportunity for an employee to take advantage of benefits already available to them. It would also be an opportunity for higher education to find a good pool of students and corporate universities could become a vehicle for, not just training, but also a source of continuing education.

Tom: And I won't duck the question entirely. I would probably go the other end of the spectrum. I would work in a non-profit that addresses literacy, reading, and math skills; literacy in general, reading and math skills in elementary school. I think the public school system needs to change, just like trainers need to change the way we think about training, a lot of the public education sector need to change the way they think about teaching.

KK: What in your opinion would be your gravest concern about e-Learning in the future?

Nader: There are two things that our colleagues in training/learning organizations need to do. One is to recognize that they are in the productivity business. They are not in the business of "only learning" but in the business of learning for productivity's sake.

And two, once they have recognized that, to be aggressive in making a case to their executives that they can deliver the value they are promising. If they assume the responsibility for improving the productivity of their work forces, and make a case for doing that, then they will have no problems thriving within their organizations. They will be viewed by the senior executives as agents of change and agents of altering the work processes within the organization. The risk is that they might choose not to do that because they want to hold on to certain ways of doing things that really belong in the past.

Tom: The training industry has always viewed itself as a service industry, and not held itself very accountable to measuring accurate impact. Training metrics in the past have commonly been things like, "How many classrooms do you have and what's your occupancy rate?"; "How many instructors, what's your utilization rate?"; "How many dollars did it cost to create this course, and how many dollars did you charge back inside the company or outside the company to cover that expense?" and "How many teach-days or how many teach-hours did you do in the last 12 months?" None of those metrics mean anything to anybody outside the training space. They do not demonstrate any impact on the business, except as an expense.

They don't show any positive impact on the business that they are serving. If we don't understand that we produce product, and that product isn't the course, the product is the changed learner and the business impact of the changed learner, then we're doing ourselves and our industry a disservice. We are just as likely to fall victim to the next expense cutting in individual companies or next economic down turn, because we have not demonstrated the value. We have always talked about the value to the individual, and the real value has to be of that individual to the company and the impact on the company, otherwise get them a personal coach and shut up.

KK: I teach graduate students in Instructional Technology and they are about to go into corporate America and take jobs in organizations developing e-learning or designing or managing e-learning projects. What advice would you give to them as they begin that journey?

Tom: Well now I know you are going to get answers from both of us, and actually probably a couple. First, most of the things that have made us successful in our careers have not been in formal instruction. They were informal learning and the best value we can provide to the trainers is to link informal learning events or informal learning content without worrying about whether we designed that content to be instructionally sound. Link it in logical ways; give people opportunities to access content and events in a way that contributes to the learning, rather than designing the learning. Pay attention to the 50 or 70 percent that is informal learning.

Nader: I think one of the things that graduate students need to be aware of is that opportunities for them in the work force lie not in what they know today but in what they don't know. I came to Cisco with a graduate degree plus five, six, or eight years of experience, but the things that made me successful are the things I didn't even know about when I first joined Cisco. That has to be the same for the graduate students, so let's not try and dig for opportunities for success within our own databases only. There are plenty of opportunities out there if you keep your mind open to it.

There are opportunities in collaborating with business functions, so let us not be close minded to them. There are opportunities in instructional paradigms like learning games and [learning] communities. Let's not be closed to that. Just because we haven't studied a topic in graduate school, doesn't mean that it doesn't present an opportunity for us to excel. These are the things that they need to keep an mind open toward, the things that they don't know could present them with opportunities.

KK: Yes, I agree. In terms of letting students and others understand that their greatest asset is going to be in things that they don't even know right now, and trying things that they can't try in the academic environment and need to try…like partnering with other lines of business.

Nader: Yes, and keeping their mind open to that.

Tom: So the short way to say that… in the future the learners will rule the world and the learned will be mired in the past and in failure. The other advice is that whatever success you find in the short term, your processes must continue to change. If your processes do not continue to change, then you will probably not do anything meaningful more than once or twice. We are in a very rapidly changing environment, both in the content and in the various ways we are deploying content.

In our experience, things change a little bit every 12 to 18 months and change dramatically every 24 to 36 months. If you're not ready to accept that change and embrace it and be excited by it in a very positive way, you are going to start running into walls.

KK: What do you see as the future of the e-learning industry? If it was coalesced by John Chambers, where do you think it is going in the next 5 to 10 years?

Tom: I think we are going to see more and more around games and simulations. At Cisco we see remote and virtual lab, like pilots do. We see virtual experiments where learners perfect skills before going out and performing the actual task.

We are going to find more and more simulations, both social and skill-based, more games. What would happen if the SIMS was converted to an office game where you could, in 30 days, run through the decisions and activities you would have to make in 12 months on the job? Let's say you would have to make decisions, react to voicemail and email, content changes, policy changes, product changes. After 30 days of doing this for maybe 15 or 20 minutes a day, you would have a look at what your first year would look like if you made those decisions and you'd have corrections or suggestions on how to get better information or make better decisions.

For example, what if you found out you made your quota and made the best commissions in your life and in the history of the company, but you were divorced because you didn't spend any time at home? That's the simplistic answer, but can we get people to look at the first year of work over a 30 day period? Can we give them a look at what it takes not to just fly a plane but manage a network of 10,000 nodes in 20 or 10 days or even 5 hours? Games and simulations are going to drive a lot of the future, and more and more assessment, not only can you answer these questions or perform this skill, but how long does it take you, are you proficient not just knowledgeable, are you skillful not just capable. I think we are going to see more and more of that.

Nader: Absolutely, that's the way to go, and hopefully we will see some successes not only in corporations but also with higher education.

KK: Is IM (Instant Messenger) a big tool within Cisco?

Tom: IM is a huge part of Cisco's communication mechanism, which means a lot of content is transmitted that way, even though it is not a formal part of our learning strategy, it is a huge part of our communication strategy. There is a lot of people for whom email is becoming less relevant, because the amount of spam. For a lot of people at Cisco, IM is transplanting email for immediacy and ease of communication.

KK: Any final words?

Tom: If there was anything that I would want people to get from our book is that there is a business reason to do e-learning, you do not do this for the good of the learning space, even though that's true and it happens, or personal gratification, but there is sound science behind the breath of value with using e-Learning, not to replace all classroom training, but to supplement classroom training as a spectrum of solutions.

The entertainment industry went through some transitions. First it started with the spoken word, then written word, then radio, then movies, and then television. Everyone thought the newest one was going to transplant and replace the others. Today they all exist. They are all good at delivering the same content just in different ways. I remember getting enough out of classic comic books to pass some of my English Literature classes. It is the same way in learning. There are a variety of tools to deliver the same content in different ways. The delivery of the learning should be based on how the learner wants to get it not how the designer wants to create it. I think that is the difference in how training has worked in the past and how training in the corporate and private sector has to work in the future.