Karl Kapp: I was at your presentation at a recent training conference and one of the things you had mentioned was the impetus for your book, which I thought was interesting. It was a series of questions asked to you at a conference by a vendor. Can you elaborate?

Jane Bozarth: I work for the government, and I'd been doing a short workshop on inexpensive e-learning for government agencies and local chapters of groups like ASTD (American Society of Training and Development), and ISPI (International Society of Performance Improvement) on how to develop inexpensive e-learning.

I also did it at a VNU Training conference a couple of years ago. At that conference there was a salesperson for a certain big-name product in the audience. Every time I showed an example of something you could create with, say, PowerPoint or MS Word, the vendor representative would interject comments about how you could use his product to do it just as well.
Finally someone in the audience asked the vendor how much his product cost and he said, "$12,000 dollars." Then the person asking looked at me and said, "But didn't you say we can do the same thing with just PowerPoint?" When I said she could, she turned back to the vendor and asked, "Then why would we want your product?"

So then someone asked me, "Is that what's going on with all these products? Do they just replicate tools we already have?" And I had to admit that in many cases, yes, that's exactly what's happening. The next thing I knew, I had a book contract.

The other day someone called me, very excited, who'd been contacted by a vendor who said for $1,200 dollars their product would let you add narration and a 'talking head' video clip to a PowerPoint presentation. People really don't know what they have, or they are so intimidated by the technology and by people who speak techno-babble, they become overwhelmed. PowerPoint already does the things the vendor was talking about. You can add narration and video clips to PowerPoint for free-you certainly don't need to buy a $1,200 product to do that. People are intimidated by technology and techno-talk, and are just dazzled by the promises that some vendors make.

But I need to be clear about something. I do not dislike vendors as a group. I have a very good relationship with the ones I use. We don't build everything in-house and we do purchase e-learning products. I think it is a matter of cultivating good relationships, working with vendors who are interested in your success, and having a win-win partnership with your vendors. I encourage people to have good relationships with their vendors but to also know what they already have before buying something they may not need.

Karl Kapp: Do you think that part of the reason people purchase software they don't need is because they don't know what PowerPoint and other tools on their desktop can do?

Jane Bozarth: Yes, I do.

Karl Kapp: Why do you think that is?

Jane Bozarth: I think that PowerPoint is widely viewed as just a presentation tool and, as such, it is terribly abused. Trainers know how to make text fly and create bulleted lists. But they don't know how to go the next level to make PowerPoint into e-learning, into an instructional tool.

So two things happen. One, people decide to take a bad PowerPoint presentation with 55 bulleted lists, upload it to the web, and call it e-learning. That's terrible. Second, you have people that really don't understand what they could do if they just sat down and learned how to use PowerPoint's hyper-linking capabilities and animations properly.

This morning, for instance, I was working on the state's AIDS Awareness program. I was using PowerPoint, and trying to convey the concept that AIDS is on the increase here in North Carolina. I was looking at a slide show someone else had created to a look at their way of approaching this. One slide had a chart illustrating the increase, but the chart was spinning and dissolving, with text flying in and back out. It was dizzying and completely missed the point of drawing the viewer's attention to the problem that AIDS is on the rise.

Text flying in, and the spinning and dissolving chart, did not do anything to convey the reality of an increase in cases. More meaningful animation--and what I created-- was an animated bar slowly climbing from the bottom of the graph up toward the top. It makes an impact, it makes the point, it's memorable-that's what good animation can do. People don't take the time to learn how to do those types of things or, more often, they don't think through what they are trying to accomplish. Instead they use auto-commands to make text fly around, and don't realize that they can make a great learning point if they do something with the right animations or hyper-linking.

Karl Kapp: Interesting, what are some of the critical points involved with creating e-learning on a shoestring?

Jane Bozarth: Well, first of all, if you are on a tight budget you need to be careful what you spend your money on. You don't want to buy something that you already have; you don't want to buy something that replicates what you can already do.

I have seen people insist on having to buy high-end software they don't need. For example, you don't need a high-end graphics package if you want to edit one piece of clip art. MS Paint comes free with Windows and can be used for creating or editing art or photographs. Now, if you have a whole library of materials you want to work on, or if you have an extensive program that you are building that requires 1,000 images then, yes, buy a graphics package.
Some people feel that they need a LMS before they can do anything, or think they need to have an authoring tool before they can create any e-learning at all. For example, I know of a government agency, not my own-not even one in North Carolina-that only has one product running on their six-figure LMS. The program is a PowerPoint email etiquette program I created. They insisted on buying this LMS without understanding what they were going to do, or what they were going to run on it, then they started calling around asking people if they had any stuff they could put on it. I gave them my program so they would have something in this huge empty LMS. Last I heard that was still all they had.
I have seen a lot of waste. People who say they don't have a lot of money around and buy a tool that replicates something they already have, something that takes years to learn to use, or requires another tool in order to run it. I have seen people grossly overestimate use, buying 40,000 slots when real first year use was only 2,000. I have seen people get really excited by a gizmo someone's boss saw at a trade show and just had to have.

A trainer friend of mine tells the story about a former boss, a junior-high-school principal, who in the 1980s went to a conference expo floor and fell in love with the concept of video taped lessons. He then spent half the school's annual budget on beta video equipment. Of course it was never used again. Making the right purchasing decisions about learning technologies is critical. If you make a huge mistake and you really do have a need there is no money left. Or worse, the organization's decision-makers will say, "We tried e-learning and it didn't work." It's not 'e-learning''s fault that they bought something terrible, bought something that they couldn't use, or just overbought.

There are a number of good authoring tools, but let me give you an example of what can happen if a company buys a tool that is more complex than they need. Let's say that a company only needs to build a quick, simple new hire orientation program. So they go out and buy a high-end authoring tool. Well, it might take them two years to learn it, and the end result is not worth the effort they put into the product. Then the guy who knows how to use it goes to another job, leaving behind this legacy product that no one is interested in working with, because newer, shinier things have come along. I just see people wasting money, buying things that replicate what they have or products their budgets and plans can't justify. Many smaller organizations really do start with nothing online but new hire orientation or a couple of overviews of policies. They really don't need to start with 1,000 courses.

Karl Kapp: Why do you think that is, because the people are intimidated by the technology? Are they overwhelmed by the vendors? Are they chasing buzz words?

Jane Bozarth: All of the above. I think someone called it "Frankenstein's Wish List", just filling up your shopping cart with this and this. It's when you are not clear on what you want to accomplish that you run into problems. It is very easy to be tempted by these products. The more the salespeople talk the cheaper the product gets-"Well, if you get a whole catalog and this many slots then it's this price, but if you get half of a catalog and this many spots, I'll give you this price" --it can get very confusing. A thousand courses is not a deal if you are only going use four.

With government agencies, an issue we run into with commercially available e-learning catalogs is that as many as a third of the items focus on sales training-- and I never use that. So knowing how to negotiate with a vendor to get them to drop out what you're not going to use, and understanding what you are realistically going to do the first couple of years, is important. The deals are tempting but it's important to take your time and think through your goals. I talked to a LMS vendor the other day who wished a particular client hadn't bought their product. The client was not ready for it, but the training director insisted that they needed a LMS before they did anything else. There were employees who didn't even have reasonable Web access. It is a retail environment, with cash registers on the floor that don't have internet access, and the only computer with Internet access was in the manager's cubicle all the way in the back.

Karl Kapp: Wow.

Jane Bozarth: The vendor told me that the client practically made him sell them this thing, and two years from now nothing is going to be done and the client is going to blame the vendor. They're going to say, "We spent all this money on e-learning and it was because of X's LMS that the initiative failed." Here's the thing: when the vendor tells you not to buy their product, it's probably a clue that you shouldn't.

People can be intimidated by the technology and the techno-speak. I think if you read a lot of the websites and trade magazines you would be under the impression that you need to buy all these things. For a first effort, or a single topic to start with, there is nothing wrong with a good PowerPoint-based program and a printable completion form.

Karl Kapp: How do you get the message out to people that you don't have to buy a Ferrari when the Yugo will get you from point A to B?

Jane Bozarth: I've learned that you need to show them. Demonstrate what they can do with their existing tools. One of the biggest myths in the e-learning field, for instance, is that you need an expensive LMS to track test scores. There are other ways to track test scores. You can start with a printable completion form and printable test, you can start with an email test that they complete and send back to you. There are a lot of quiz engines, like survey monkey. I demonstrate these tools in my workshops, and show examples in the book.

Think about it: a survey is a kind of test, it's a series of questions, and you can turn it into a quiz. Or with a little more money, under a hundred dollars a year, you can use a quiz engine. So for a little bit of money you can get very nice feedback You know--who took the test, who missed question three, what percentage missed question three, who didn't miss question three. The trouble is, the free tools, or those who have inexpensive products, don't do big-blitz advertising and aren't positioned prominently in the e-learning ads and literature. So people are under the impression that you can only do tracking if you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. But there are a lot of ways to get that kind of feedback. I think the misunderstanding of LMS is that people think it is tracking training, when a really robust LMS can do so much more, like customize information on particular employees, their needs and goals. For example, the LMS can map career paths and match competencies to job goals. It's a fabulously useful tool when you're ready for it.

Here is what I find funny: for years we've been able to give paper tests and keep up with the fact that Karl got a 93, but now that the training is online we believe we have to spend two hundred thousand dollars to gather that same information? I think that people just don't know there are inexpensive options, or don't think through what they are trying to do. I have been in the training field for 17 years through three different government agencies, and we've done paper registration, or used Access or Excel, and have managed to track learners pretty well.

Karl Kapp: So you do think PowerPoint is the next authoring tool? Should we get rid of all our other authoring tools?

Jane Bozarth: First, I think the thing about authoring tools is that we need to go back to the title of the book E-learning Solutions on a Shoestring. Some people have no budget, but they have PowerPoint. Some organizations don't have anyone on staff to learn a new authoring tool. People don't always have the time or resources.

However, I think it's a false distinction between the two-you can build good e-learning with PowerPoint and you can build good e-learning with authoring tools as well, but you can also build bad e-learning with these tools. The tool is not what makes the program good-the designer does.

I don't know if the authoring tools are going away, though companies certainly do shift and merge all the time. Some are good products, some of them have capabilities that PowerPoint does not have. PowerPoint does not have an embedded means of tracking, and there are limitations to the interactions that you can build for learners. For example you can't do a drag and drop activity in a PowerPoint show, although you can link to one. The other tools do some things that Power Point cannot. But I do think it is a false distinction-you can build a very good product with PowerPoint and you can build very bad products with other authoring tools. Here's the thing: lots of people buy expensive tools and still end up just creating screen after screen of words. That's not even a good presentation, much less "learning". Why not just create a Word doc and email it to learners, if all you're going to do is produce a huge quantity of text?

Karl Kapp: You mentioned a number of free resources in your book but that people don't always use them, why do you think people don't take advantage of more free and low cost resources?

Jane Bozarth: I think people are very suspicious of free. My husband has season basketball tickets, and there are a lot of games so he can't go to every one.. If he tries to give the tickets away for free, he can't. People think that the seats are bad, or it's going to be a bad game, or that it is a women's game and he didn't tell them. (laughs)

When he asks just $5 for the tickets, people beat down the door for them.
The same is true with e-learning. People are suspicious of free. I have recently been trying to facilitate a conversation between a county training department and its IT Director. The trainers want to join the 5,000-member Tr-Dev Yahoo group-the one that used to be the Tr-Dev listserv, if you remember those days. Lots of information, discussion, files, links, and free membership, but the IT department blocks Yahoo groups. The IT Director's last email to me said, and I quote, "If it's free, how can it be any good?" Good grief! Also, some of the vendor's positioning in the marketplace helps create the feeling that you need to pay a lot of money for good products. When you go to the big trade shows, you walk around and get the impression that even the simple things have to cost of $10,000 or $20,000 thousand dollars.

Free stuff doesn't have the positioning in the magazines, or in the catalogues or the trade shows. You hear of the products from big companies like Adobe/Macromedia because of the advertising -and, make no mistake, they have great stuff-- but Joe Blow's Quiz Engine doesn't get the same type of visibility even though the quality might be just as good. Of course, it's kind of a cycle-the vendors pay lots for the advertising, so they get visibility, but then that runs the cost of the product up.

So some of it is that people just don't know that free items are there. But, really, another issue is that people don't know how to do a good web search. They don't know to search for free quiz engines, for example.

There is free open source academic courseware. You know, the kind that colleges use for hosting courses, registering students, etc. The best-known are products called Sakai and Moodle and they really are, really, free. We have a big academic group in North Carolina looking at Sakai because of the enormous cost of the product that they have been using. Lots of smaller colleges are using it, we have great word of mouth and endorsements, but everyone sits around thinking there must be something wrong, this just can't be free.

Karl Kapp: Yeah, people have the old philosophy you get what you pay for.

Jane Bozarth: Now I need to be careful how this comes across, but I think a lot of people are not natural resource searchers. They need an authoring tool, they go online and type in authoring tool, and they get the big ones that paid for the commercial placement on these search engines. So they are under the impression that there are only four and they cost a lot of money. They don't scroll down and see that you can build free stuff with PowerPoint or MS Word. They are under the impression that they need to spend a large sum of money, and I don't know that they don't need to do that someday, I'm not saying don't ever go out and buy a product. I'm just saying people need to look harder. They are intimidated by the technology and jargon, and very often vendors call you first and convince you that you have to whatever it is they're selling

Dr. Kapp: How important do you think good design skills are to developing e-learning on a shoestring budget?

Jane Bozarth: Design matters more than anything else. But I don't mean design in the sense of graphic arts; I mean design as in a well thought-out instructional strategy and a solid understanding of how adults learn. A lot -maybe most-- of e-learning is nothing but screen after screen of text. That's not e-learning-it's e-reading. And no attention is paid to instructional design-it's just pretty pages with nothing there. A good deal of e-learning is missing the concept of helping the learner to develop skills. Great e-learning, like great training, is grounded in a constructivist framework. Learners don't need to just be fed content, they need to be able to interact with it, explore it, and make sense of it in ways it will help transfer back to the job. I'm worried that the reliance on e-'content' is what blended learning is becoming. We just slap information online if it's reading and say learners can do that as "pre-work." That is not really what I want blended learning to look like.

Karl Kapp: Can you give me some examples of instructional strategies that people could add to a presentation software program like PowerPoint to make it more than just information on a slide?

Jane Bozarth: Oh yeah, and a good example is that e-learning can do wonders for testing. For instance, with a paper test you sit down and answer multiple choice questions and you get your scores back and you either got questions right or wrong. With good online testing you can create questions that help the learner learn, rather than just examine recall. For instance, I like quizzes with scaffolded feedback. The first time I get a question wrong the program can say "Try again, Jane," and the second time I get it wrong the program can give me a hint and say, "Think about this Jane, we covered this in Module 2," The third time I get it wrong it says, "Maybe you need to look at the material again." You can't do that with a paper test.

Now that might be difficult to script in PowerPoint, but you could script something like that is Java Script or in Dream Weaver or in Course Builder. You could insert a hyperlink to that test from PowerPoint. This gives much better feedback than you would get from paper and pencil-the test can actually help someone learn rather than just tell them they were right or wrong. . There are also a number of inexpensive products (less than $100 per year for unlimited users) that will let you create Flash templates for game-show type games. You can use PowerPoint's hyperlinking capability to break out of the usual linear slide-after-slide approach. The learner can be taken to better-quality feedback slides, links to additional information, things like that. And PowerPoint is great for building decisionmaking simulations. . Instruction is very powerful when a learner can see the consequences of her own decisions.

Karl Kapp: Some branching maybe?

Jane Bozarth: Yes, you can create branching decision making. You can build a fine simulation decision making lesson in PowerPoint. It's not especially difficult. You just need to lay out a clear storyboard and use what you remember from high-school logic. If the learner chooses item A she's taken to slide 12, if she chooses B she'll go to slide 13, if she chooses C then she go back to slide 1 for a review of the content.

You can do good simulation with many inexpensive products, especially PowerPoint. But it doesn't have to be just content and words. It does more than you can do in a classroom. My favorite site at the moment is www.hungerbanquet.org. It's a little text heavy, but it puts you in the role of a person in a developing country, and gives you branching decisions. Decisions such as "You have a sick child. Are you going to take him to the village healer, or a doctor, or ignore it?" The other day I chose to take the child to the doctor, but to pay the doctor I had to sell a chicken. It was the only chicken I had left and when I get the child to the doctor, he tells me the child needs protein. It was a great way to put me, the learner, into the day-to-day reality of the struggling mother. The program is an excellent example of both case study and simulation. More importantly, it presents a great deal of information about world hunger while touchin the affective domain by putting the learner in the shoes of the struggling person. It's nothing but text, but it is broken into chunks. And it's not a bunch of cold, hard facts about people starving ….it is about a real situation with a real woman. It's very powerful.

The program is built entirely in HTML, it has great graphics, there is nothing complicated, and it is one of the most effective online programs I have seen. I'd hold it up against much more expensive online case studies. And it's free. I teach a course to help classroom trainers learn about e-learning, and I used this as an example last time. I also showed the students really glitzy, expensive online programs, and none of them got the response like Hunger Banquet did.
But it is as perfect as you can get with doing shoestring e-learning. I'm not sure you could do better with a huge budget. It is an excellent product, mostly because someone took the time to think it through.

Karl Kapp: Do you think one of the reasons people buy these expensive solutions is because they don't want to take the time to do the design, or that they aren't skilled enough to do design and think that is a short cut?

Jane Bozarth: Yes, and people grossly underestimate what it's going to take to use these products. I don't know where they got the idea that if they buy some product they don't have to do design. Many "authoring tools" are a glorified PowerPoint-- they are just architecture. You still have to understand how to build quality content and learning interactions. It is still just dumping content into a template. I have a friend who says uploaded crap is still crap. And I think people believe that purchasing one of these tools will magically change a hundred Word documents into something meaningful, and it won't. Someone still has to do the real work.

Karl Kapp: Much of e-learning in the corporate world seems to be self-paced but your book has an entire chapter on low cost, online collaboration. Do you think that government agencies are more likely to use collaboration rather than for-profit organizations?

Jane Bozarth: I think it depends, most the time when you're talking about online collaboration, you're looking at an organization with employees scattered geographically. In North Carolina we do some synchronous training. It really helps since we have staff working across 550 miles, in 100 counties, on all kinds of work schedules, and due to gas prices and other financial issues often have travel restrictions.

.So I think it is driven by circumstances rather than government versus non-profit. If you have people all working in the same building and same shift there really isn't a point to spending a lot of money on synchronous technologies. I also have a private consulting practice, and a lot of my clients are just one-stop shops. They don't really need that much in the way of online collaboration because everyone is in the same location, they just need stuff people can access on a just-in-time basis, or at breaks or whatever.

Dr. Kapp: What are shoestring ways to do collaboration?

Jane Bozarth: Blogs, wikis. Most windows programs now load with Net Meeting software. It doesn't have all the capabilities of a virtual classroom like Centra or WebX, but you could have an online meeting with a few slides, or whiteboard to write on. SKYPE is almost free . An exciting, emerging development is the use of blogs and wikis. These are really cheap, sometimes free, and I'm interested in seeing where they go. I think they are especially well-suited to course or topic home pages, knowledge management tasks and support for communities of practice. I attended a Webinar just the other day where the instructor was showing how to use of a wiki for a collaborative writing project. It was great, as the contributors were in different locations, even countries, and working on very different deadlines and schedules.

For all it gets misused, very few people consider better uses for email, which is free. You can use e-mail for doing role plays, relay games, or online case studies. You can use a Yahoo!, MSN, or Google group to set up a site for your course; these come with discussion boards. But on the issue of "collaboration", I am careful about when and how much I rely on extensive online 'team' training assignments. My learners, and myself, when I've been one of them, often say, "I get enough of that in my job. I don't need any more team assignments." The assignment needs to be meaningful, worth the learner's while, and supporting instructional outcomes. I see trainers building in collaborative activities, group work, and team assignments with the idea that adults need this to stay engaged. My experience tells me if the program is interesting, provided in manageable pieces, and relevant to the learner's world, adults will complete it. Match the strategy to the need: If you have some real reason for people to get together and get to know each other, or if the task will truly benefit from putting heads together, then collaboration is great. Just using group work for the sake of it, I don't know if I'm a big promoter of that. And that goes for classroom training, too!

Karl Kapp: Your point of independent learning is interesting, for this series I interviewed Mark Burke, the director of the Keystone High School online, and he said that they tried to do a synchronous virtual classroom approach but they found the students liked the independent approach, so the virtual classroom actually didn't work, and the independent approach was more effective.

Jane Bozarth: Yes, and I need to be careful because others will make the argument that learning is social, and you need a social environment to learn, and in some ways that is true. I'd rather argue that some learning is social. I have seen trainers get caught up in thinking we need to have x amount of group work for x amount of time because the students have been sitting. I don't know that adult learners really need it like we think they do. I do an online course using Blackboard every fall. The intent is to help classroom trainers see how all the approaches work, and to be put in the role of the learner, so I do include a team assignment. All my students say that the team projects just take up time and they don't really get a lot out of them, they say they get plenty of team work at work. They do like the discussion boards and other interactions, but the team assignments, in which you have to get together and turn in an assignment by Friday, well, it's just like work. There's always a person who isn't pulling their weight, and you end up just frustrating everybody, and they don't need that because they already get that at work.

I want to defend the synchronous classroom, though. It's as good as the instructor. I have worked very hard to develop skills for the synchronous classroom. The programs are very well attended and very well received. Many of these are free and available to the public through Jennifer Hofmann's InSync training site (www.insynctraining.com). Jennifer pretty much invented good synchronous training. I used to do a lot of open-enrollment classroom topics at work, like Stress Management or Managing Multiple Priorities, and the synchronous versions have been so well received that I don't even offer them "live" anymore. I get quadruple the attendance online that I got in the classroom, and participation isn't limited to Raleigh, or North Carolina, or North America. I routinely have learners from Europe joining in. It extends my reach, maximizes the use of my time, and exposes my learners to people and perspectives they'd otherwise never come into contact with. Unfortunately, many virtual sessions I've attended --the word "webinar" is usually a red flag for me-are nothing more than a speaker droning on over 50 slides. Learners shouldn't tolerate that.

Karl Kapp: That makes sense; let's return to something you wrote in your book. You mention that off-the-shelf solutions can sometimes be more effective than building something yourself, can you explain that?

Jane Bozarth: Yes, well, you can build stuff from scratch in-house but if you spend 300 hours building a 10 minute program that 8 employees are going to look at, it's probably not a good use of your organization's resources. The problem is that the individual trainers in these shops are salaried. The organization is already paying them to be there, so can just let them sit there and build something from scratch. For a trainer who has to choose an authoring tool, learn how to use it, and install it, a year can go by, and they may only be developing something for 25 people. You really need to look at the size of the organization and size of the product. Are 500 people even going to look at this thing? Is it proprietary? Everybody gets caught up in this ides that the program has to be specific just for us.

If you are building programs like, say, proper lifting of heavy objects, using the fire extinguisher, safety evacuation procedures, stress management, or basic supervision skills, that material already exists -lots of vendors will have it, and you might even find it online for free--and it is probably going to be cheaper than what you'd have to invest to build it. Sometimes people get so caught up in the seduction of designing things that they really aren't looking at how ridiculously expensive it can be in terms of design, testing, and programming time.
Plus, I would argue that the vendors have gotten to be much more reasonable and flexible with their prices. They have gotten much better about selling you the topics or bundles that you do need.

So-- sometimes you really need to look at the real, and hidden, costs. It's fine to say that you don't have the money, but if the organization is are paying the trainer monthsh of salary, then somebody "found" money, or in other words allocated resources. I know of an organization that paid an in-house Web designer probably 4 or 5 month's salary to build an online sexual harassment program. So I'm guessing the organization spent $40,000. And it's terrible, it's lots of tiny text on a screen, and takes hours to complete? Do you have any idea how many really high-end sexual harassment programs she could have purchased for what they paid her? And here's the worst thing: since the program is so poorly designed it only has a 5 percent completion rate.

Karl Kapp: That is expensive. Earlier you mentioned blogs and wikis, do you use blogs for your training in the North Carolina office personnel?

Jane Bozarth: I use a blog for my trainers networking group. Most of the e-learning programs we have for general employee use are intended to fulfill mandates, like AIDS awareness or sexual harassment. There really is not an ongoing discussion or need to collaborate on subjects like that. I would like us to have an online discussion board for supervisors, but I'm not willing be the one to moderate it. Because it has the potential of becoming a big gripe session about how someone got treated poorly in 1992, and I'm not willing to arm wrestle that at this point. I do use blogs and discussion boards for my facilitated asynchronous courses. And as I said before, I see great potential for the use of wikis in project sharing and knowledge management.

Karl Kapp: Can you explain that group a little bit, the trainers networking group?

Jane Bozarth: Sure, North Carolina has 90,000 employees. We are not a single employer, which means, for example, that the Department of Commerce, the Department of Revenue, the Department of Insurance, all have their own management and own training shops. And some of our offices do not report to the Governor. Plus the bigger agencies may have shops in several areas of the state. People don't realize how big North Carolina is-we have a 550-mile spread from the Outer Banks to the mountains. So trying to share resources gets to be a real challenge. We've worked hard to develop a pretty extensive networking group, we don't have officers or dues, but it keeps everyone in contact and lets everyone know what everyone is working on. We share information and sometimes resources like classrooms, or open seats in workshops, or equipment.
The main problem because of the single employer issue is that we often have people reinventing the wheel. I had two people in the same day proudly announce to me that they had developed new programs from scratch on exactly the same topic. Because no one talked about this we had this ridiculously expensive duplication of effort. So we now have a blog. It gives people a place they can talk and share. It also gets us out of the email loop, because a lot of people who get the emails don't care, and email gets lost.

Karl Kapp: What are some hints then if I said "Ok I am going to get this book and start to design things on a shoestring, I don't have a lot of money." What are some developmental hints you would want to give me, or how would you suggest from day one that I got started so I could do this properly?

Jane Bozarth: I would be very clear of what I wanted to accomplish, some organizations already know that they want-a catalog with 10,000 courses in it. Some organizations know that they want to get up a basic orientation program or want to give their learners basic updates from time to time. If I really thought I wanted a huge program with 10,000 courses, I would start talking to the vendors. The biggest problem I see with starting up is that people call saying they want to "do" e-learning but really have no idea what that means to them. Where are your biggest needs? What critical training is not getting delivered due to lack of personnel, classroom space or other resources? What skill gaps are you seeing? What classroom training courses are difficult for employees to attend?
My first e-learning program was at the Department of Justice. I was the Training Director, and we were having problems with staff using email for a public argument forum. So my first online course was a quick "Email Etiquette" program that was PowerPoint converted to Flash. It included a quick hyperlinked quiz and a printable completion form that also emailed to me. I had a 100 percent completion rate on it, which was very encouraging, and it gave us a good idea of where we wanted to go. It was plenty sophisticated back then, to have a Flash movie coming through your email.

So, to get back to your question: The first thing I recommend in the book is to look at what you have. Do you have a DVD burner, a video camcorder? Did you know that your computer has a sound recorder and a graphics tool, MS Paint? They come free with Windows, and hardly anyone knows it. So the first thing is to get a good handle on what you are trying to accomplish, and a good view of what you have, before you start spending all this money. I think that's the first mistake, people spend money they don't have, and then when they finally realize what they want to focus on there is no money, because they spent it on something they didn't need or weren't ready for.

Karl Kapp: Is there ever any reason to spend money on "expensive learning"?

Jane Bozarth: You know that is a nebulous word, because "expensive" is different to different people. I will give you an example. I wouldn't call this expensive, but the state of North Carolina has a mandate for unlawful harassment, like many states do now. If you go online to just look for unlawful harassment you will find page after page of text documents, and they are about harassment laws and cases, and most are dreadfully boring. For harassment training to be effective-online or otherwise--you really need something to touch the affective domain-the emotions of people. The program should include good, realistic scenarios showing appropriate and bad behavior. Video clips to show bad situations or inappropriate actions; maybe simulations and decision making. You need more than a text only program.

We found a company in California that had exactly what we wanted, it's a great product, and it has embedded videos and tracking, nice interactivity, really gets the message across and keeps learners engaged. It meets California's guidelines, and if you meet California guidelines, you pretty much meet any state's. It's the only store bought product we have. I could not have built it; it has professional directors and actors, high-end programming. I would say it is well worth the investment, there is a 100 percent completion rate, and the technology never fails. We have a big need for it, we had a big audience. So, yes, in this case we were very justified in going with a "store-bought" product. Similarly, I've seen remarkably sophisticated surgery tutorials for med school students, simulators for airline pilots, things like that. They are certainly worth the money. But, really, the people who call me aren't trying to build things like that.

Karl Kapp: What do you think is the future of e-learning?

Jane Bozarth: I would like to say it is going to get better, quality wise. I don't know, though. There is plenty of bad training out there, and I don't know why we think putting it online it's somehow going to get better. My office shares a wall with a training room, and some days I feel like I'm hearing a bagpipe playing through the wall all day because this voice has just been been droning on for hours.

I hope, in the future, that e-learning is more about the instruction and less about the technology. I hope that by telling people that they can develop e-learning with simple tools like PowerPoint that more people will do that and trainers will make good decisions. The downside is that I worry people will make bad e-learning with PowerPoint. I think there is a lot of bad stuff online. There is a lot of text online, and it's discouraging. I don't know if I've seen that get a lot better, the technology is getting better but I don't see e-learning getting better.

Karl. Kapp: I teach graduate students in Instructional Technology that are about to go out into the e-learning field. What advice would you have for those students that might go out and work in that government sector?

Jane Bozarth: They want to be instructional designers?

Karl. Kapp: Yes.

Jane Bozarth: I would get familiar with everything that is out there-I mean e-learning samples and approaches, not authoring or tech tools-- so if someone approaches me about e-learning I can show them an example of good and bad, educate them a little. I would try to develop something for a portfolio. One of the things I have seen with my friends is that they build a program that was great in 2000, but now it looks outdated. The field evolves quickly; I would look at something current. If they are in school, I'm sure you share my frustration that they need to pick projects that they can use in the real world. I am in graduate school, almost done with my Doctorate, and I see people choosing things that they will never have an application for. Why waste your time? Build something that is commercial that you can put in a portfolio.

I had an interview the other day for a magazine that is doing a piece on instructional design and they were shocked that most the people in the field don't have training in training and instructional design. I work in a facility devoted entirely to training and am the only one here, well my boss has a masters in adult education, but I am the only one that has had training in instructional design or e-learning. We have a lot of Universities nearby with graduate programs in training and development, one literally in sight of this office, I know only three people in all of state government who have ever sat their "virtual" feet in those programs.
The reporter was shocked when she heard how few people in the training field have a background in training. So people going out into the job market assume that's what employers are looking for, and employers have never heard of such a thing. So people seeking employment need to show that they can do something practical, that they have created a solution to an actual problem. It is still very discouraging that there are no barriers to entering the field of training. It could be that once there is a standard of practice out there that people will start looking at that. But you know as well as I do that people get put into training because they could talk, they were technical experts, or they were getting punished.

Karl Kapp: Yeah, one time I was in charge of training and the person in charge of consulting came to me and said "I need to be in charge of training Karl because I need to be in charge of everything." I think good trainers make it look easy, so anyone thinks they can do it.

Jane Bozarth: Right, they don't understand that it's not just talking.

Karl Kapp: Yes.

Jane Bozarth: They don't understand there is a difference between content and instruction. And I think it's the same with online learning.
You go with a boss to a trade show and he or she sees this PowerPoint slide that has fish swimming around and they say, "Isn't this cool? We need that." If you create a live class and spend 40 hours developing it and it's a dud, then you didn't lose much. But if someone creates an hour long online class and others spend hours taking the class, if it's a dud then you have a big loss. And I think that e-learning gets blamed when it really is bad training that should be getting the blame.

Karl Kapp: Yeah, bad instructional design. And I think that you can get that bad design out to more people more quickly than good design.

Jane Bozarth: Yes, we have a leadership program here that we teach. And the instructor is supportive of online teaching. So she asked if I could come and talk to her class, and I went in there and showed them some of our programs, and I had this dialogue with one of the learners.

"Well I experienced e-learning and it was really boring" a man said as I was leaving the class.

"Have you ever been to a live class that was boring?" I asked

"Well, yeah."

"Then what's your point?"

I didn't want to fight with him, but why does everyone think that because a bad trainer slapped something online that it is going to be good? Why do we excuse bad live training while we're so unforgiving about bad e-learning?

Karl Kapp: There seems to be an expectation that since it is online that it is more exciting or better.

Jane Bozarth: Yeah that Internet, that scary Internet. (laughs)

Karl Kapp: Right. Well we are just about out of time, I have one more question. If somebody starts designing e-learning on a shoestring and does a good job, what do you say if that person says worries that their budget will be reduced because they can now do it for so much less?

Jane Bozarth: That it will eliminate my job. That Dr. Kapp is my dissertation. (Laughs)

Karl Kapp: (laughs)

Jane Bozarth: My dissertation is Second Order Barriers to Implementation of E-Learning on the Part of Workplace Training Practitioners.

Karl Kapp: Sounds like a dissertation.

Jane Bozarth: I wrote about this for Training magazine a couple of years ago, I think trainers that have done a good job of creating quality instruction will be successful in this. I think some trainers need to get out of the field. I need to be careful how I state that, but if they have just developed 65 bulleted PowerPoint presentations, then I don't know if there isn't justification for reducing them. They need to learn about e-learning, though, and keep up with advancements. Buying a tool in 2006 doesn't mean they won't need another in 2009. And here's the other thing: working on a shoestring frees up money for things you might really need. My employer gives me pretty much whatever I ask for because they know I need it, and I have researched it, and I wouldn't be asking if it weren't important.

Karl Kapp: We did a project for a large retail organization, and we replaced a big consulting firm, that had created a deck of 400 PowerPoint slides to teach people how to use the new software, but the learners never got to touch the software.

Jane Bozarth: Yeah, so I would say that people that have a fear-and it might be justified. Trainers need to get on this train or technology will take it. They need to be part of the development team and learn about the technology. I think there is room for stand up trainers at the table, but if I can put something online, and avoid pulling people out of work to make them listen to bagpipes, why wouldn't I replace that and put it online? If the outcomes are the same, what difference does it make?

Please make sure to include this: Trainers won't be replaced by technology. They will be replaced by trainers who understand the technology.

Karl Kapp: Right, well I think we are out of time, thanks for a great interview, this has been great.

Jane Bozarth: Thank you.