Time is money, especially when it comes to educating a group of people. Time is even more money when that group meets in person vs. online. Consider how e-learning can save your budget.

Image: David Castillo Dominici

It’s easy to overlook all of the hidden costs of in-person instructor-led training. There’s real time and cost involved in putting actual bums on actual seats. Just start to jot down the costs of getting people into a room together, and it’s easy to see how the prices quickly shoot up.

Training material costs

• Space rental and overhead
• Day rates
• Instructor travel (airfare, taxis, hotel, tips)
• Learner travel (airfare, taxis, hotel, tips)
• Printing
• Collating
• Binding
• Storage
• Food (breakfast, snacks, lunch, drinks)
• Presentation equipment

I can keep going, but you get the point, right? The instant you start gathering people into a room together, it costs a lot of money.

One of the strongest business cases for e-learning is for lowering training costs. That’s why so many companies turn to e-learning, especially when they have ongoing programs, a large number of people to train or have a geographically dispersed workforce. That was the rationale behind a government-led project Talance completed for a division of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. It’s cheaper to bring people from across the state together online.

Time involved in training

It’s easy to see how the kinds of things you can buy at your local Staples drain the coffers. One item that’s often neglected from “should we move to e-learning” calculations is the cost of time. Instructor-led training simply takes longer than e-learning.

“My company has found that on-ground courses that move to eLearning take about half the ‘seat time’ in their eLearning format,” Judy Unrein says in her article Overcoming Objections to eLearning in Learning Solutions magazine.

Unrein, who is an instructional designer for Nike and who has an M.Ed. in Instructional Design from the University of Massachusetts in Boston, goes on to say that one cause is because an online course is more streamlined. All of the “nice to know” filler information that instructors share in classrooms has been removed by the time it goes online.

Minimizing financial risk

Live trainings are also critically scheduled, and the margin of error is much narrower. For example, one of our clients, a department of a New York-based college, recently had an in-person event where the instructor didn’t show up. He simply forgot, and there was a room of people clearing their throats waiting for the star to show. They rescheduled for the following week, duplicating all the costs of the lost event.

Problems can happen online too, but when mistakes of this magnitude happen in person, the financial drain is much higher.

While every program is different, the savings of an e-learning program vs. instructor-led training can be significant. Every program considering moving training online should carefully research hidden costs of bringing a room of people together.

Some people think having accessible websites is like having a swimming pool. Nice to have, but too expensive and too much upkeep. Unlike a swimming pool, however, an accessible website means that anyone can view it whatever their limitation, ranging from a physical limitation like limited or no eyesight, to having a handheld device with small display.

John Rochford, Director of Technology at New England INDEX a project of UMass Medical School, is one of those people who takes accessibility seriously and makes websites better for everyone. Talance has been working with Rochford and his team on the online training component for an initiative called Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH). It’s a major undertaking that aims to streamline and coordinate how healthcare providers work with each other and patients.

Monique Cuvelier, Talance’s CEO, asked Rochford about his work in accessibility, his biggest headaches and his proudest moment.

Monique Cuvelier: I think a lot of people who care about accessibility have a compelling reason to do so. What’s the driving force behind your involvement in accessibility?

John Rochford: The driving force for me is the result of the combination and the evolution of two of my passions. One is for computer technology. The other is for helping people with intellectual disabilities. My professional career started in the mid-1980s with a succession of jobs serving people with intellectual disabilities. During that time, people shunned computer geeks like me. Yet the people I served embraced me. That they are such an open, friendly, and accepting people has always been heartwarming to me.

In the early 1990s, I sought a graduate degree at The Shriver Center for research, training and service related to intellectual disabilities. It has a project, New England INDEX, which provides free information about programs and services for people with disabilities residing in Massachusetts. All of the software INDEX designed at the time for that purpose was as accessible to people with disabilities as we could make it.

I started to extend our software to the web in the mid-1990s. Since then, I have designing websites as accessible as technology and funding have allowed, and as best as my developing expertise could make them.

MC: What does a typical accessibility test or process look like for you?

JR: We start by building accessible web applications. This makes it much less costly to fix accessibility issues, and much easier to test for related deficiencies. We use automated testing software to check for problems across a website. We have also used assistive technology products in our testing. A good example is that we make sure all our web sites are compatible with screen reader software for people who are blind. Most importantly, we have people with disabilities test our web sites.

MC: What kind of digital media are ignored the most with accessibility?

JR: All digital media (e.g., videos, music, etc.) are natively inaccessible. Only a tiny percentage of websites are helpful to people with disabilities by incorporating accessible media players and/or by providing alternative, accessible content. An accessible media player, for example, provides controls (e.g., play, pause) that work with screen readers so people who are blind can use them. Such controls are also good for people with physical disabilities who may not be able to use a mouse.

The National Center for Accessible Media is a good resource about accessible digital media. For many years, we have used on our websites its ccPlayer, an accessible media player, and its captioning services for our video content.

MC: What’s the single biggest rule people should follow to make pages accessible?

JR: Make sure people with disabilities test a website and every version of it.

MC: What’s your biggest accessibility headache?

JR: My most significant challenge is convincing people to make their websites accessible. I find it appalling that I have to work to convince the staff of organizations, which serve people with disabilities, to make their sites accessible. What people do not realize is that an accessible website is easier to use for everyone, which is always good for business.

MC: What was your proudest moment in accessibility?

JR: It occurred early in my career after I installed speech recognition software for a young woman. I was showing her how to use it instead of a keyboard and a mouse, which she could not use. She cried as she told me it was the first time she would be able to write a letter to her mother. I consider that achievement of hers to be the special one.

Overhauling the way Massachusetts’ medical practices deal with patients is no simple task. Not when you’re considering coordinating all of a patient’s health needs, including managing chronic conditions, handling visits to specialists, dealing with hospital admissions and reminding patients when they need check-ups and tests. Add to it archaic systems that involve stacks of paper medical records and rows of filing cabinets in doctors’ offices.

Many doctors deal with patients’ various medical issues by writing a referral and then maybe hearing about what happened at yearly check-up time.

The Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Health and Human Services hopes to fundamentally change the way medical practices work with the Patient-Centered Medical Home Initiative. The 3-year demonstration project is part online and part in-person. Participants, which include 46 primary care medical practices, receive live coaching from facilitators, help establishing and maintaining patient registries and extensive training through a learning collaborative, managed by e-learning technical provider Talance, Inc. (http://talance.com/elearning).

The program involves all types of doctors in every corner of the state, including large, urban community health centers and small, rural group practices. Even in a state as small as Massachusetts, where it’s possible to drive from one end to the other – the long way – in a few hours, it’s still a challenge to train a broad range of practices at the same time. That’s why it’s vital for the project to incorporate online learning as a way to help manage the project.

In many cases, e-learning is the only way to effectively push health care management shifts. It’s an industry that naturally drifts toward in-person connection, where doctors talk to people face-to-face in examination rooms. When it comes to reforming office administration on such a large scale, that model won’t work. It’s the reason that 37 percent of training hours involved electronic technology in 2009, according to Alexandria, Va.-based American Society for Training and Development.

E-learning may be key in conforming to the Obama administration’s Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), which passed in 2009. Providers will have to adopt health information technology (HIT) starting in 2011, a requirement that includes more than $36 billion in incentive payments to reward providers whose electronic medical records (EMRS) meet the government’s test of “meaningful use”.

The end result is overall cost savings.

“At the heart of our effort to ensure access to care is a commitment to strengthening primary care and reforming how we pay for that care,” said Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. JudyAnn Bigby. “This new initiative is one of the key building blocks in our strategic work to make all primary care practices in Massachusetts transformed into advanced patient-centered medical homes by 2015.”

The Patient-Centered Medical Home Initiative (PCMHI) was designed by the Executive Office of Health and Human Services in consultation with a multi-payer, multi-stakeholder council of consumer, physician, nurse practitioner, hospital, insurer, state agency and other interested stakeholder representatives. The Council is co-chaired by Secretary Bigby and Dr. John Fallon, Senior Vice President and Chief Physician Executive at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts.

A free preview is available at: Talance’s Massachusetts Non-profit Social Media Report A few little gems:

• 80% consider social media important for peer-to-peer networking. By contrast 31% find social media unimportant to their business and marketing strategy.
• The great majority (85%) are not using social media for online giving.
• More respondents plan to use online video than those who plan to use blogging.

Plus, some great background for those new to technology.