Web Educated
Cisco initiative aims for promising e-learning market
By Karen Brown
from the June 18, 2001 issue of Broadband Week
With pressure to cut costs and fairly ample access to broadband, cyberclass now is in session for a growing number of companies and educational organizations. Corporations are starting to create rich-media laced Internet employee training programs to cut travel time and expense. Meanwhile, educational institutions are starting to tap the same tools to boost their curricula.
Industry-wide, analysts are predicting the online training market will double annually, from $4.05 billion this year to $11.41 billion in 2003, according to analyst firm IDC.
So it is not surprising that network gearmaker Cisco Systems Inc. is looking to tap the promise of knowledge and improve its bottom line with a recently announced e-learning initiative. Knitting together its own enterprise content delivery network products with a herd of applications and service partners, Cisco hopes to offer customers a simpler way to learn online.
The initiative offers corporations and educators a menu of products and services, ranging from do-it-yourself tools to a full-service bureau offering. Cisco is bringing in its network products, including routers, servers and security systems. Partners are supplying interoperable applications and services, including learning management systems provider Saba, authoring tools supplier Gforce, and content delivery providers Digital Island, Qwest Communications International and DigitalPipe.
Customers "can build as simple of a content delivery network for learning as they want, or as sophisticated of a network as they want," says Julie O'Brien, product marketing manager for Cisco's Enterprise CDN product. "You have the opportunity to either deploy this yourself or tap into it as a service from one of our Cisco partners."
Not only is distance learning gaining attention as a way to whittle down corporate travel budgets, the addition of video, animation and higher-quality delivery are making e-learning a more effective offering, O'Brien says.
"The idea is to give them all of the knowledge, all of the training, all of the education that they need any time that they want it, and to do so with the kind of quality that will make them want to come back and learn more," O'Brien says. "It's a strategic piece for not only Cisco's business but many of the enterprises we are talking to, because it really helps them move information throughout the company very quickly."
Cisco has been its own guinea pig. Banking on its Internet Protocol television video streaming system, the company recently used the network to expand online training from a core 300 employees to 2,000 sales representatives.
If Cisco had sent the original 300 sales reps to a hotel for training it would have cost about $600,000 for a four-day training session. In contrast, using the e-learning CDN the company not only extended the training to reach 2,000 employees, but also cut the cost to between $60,000 to $70,000, O'Brien says.
The attraction is not confined to businesses. In western Kansas, Fort Hays State University is using Cisco's e-learning content distribution network to boost curricula on campus and for far-flung distance learning students.
Up and running for a little less than a year, the Cisco-powered network was pegged originally to replace the campus's closed-caption cable system. But with greater multimedia capability, the system has become a classroom resource center, allowing professors to create their own Web pages with daily lecture materials--including video and audio clips. Using a laptop, they then can present the material as part of their lectures.
"It started off with one department, but of course when one department sees it another one wants to get involved and another one," says Dennis King, director of the university's Center for Teaching Excellence and Learning Technology. "We went from where we were going to be streaming approximately 18 hours of video a week up to where we were doing the potential of the 50- to 52-hour range."
Students also can access the materials via the network. A server in the library delivers the same presentations to computer terminals, giving students access to presentations from classes they have missed. One history professor even has loaded up supplemental video material for students to view outside of class rather than making them check out a videotape, King says.
This summer, the plan is to expand that system to Fort Hays State dormitories via a shared network. "If they are in their dorms, they sit in their dorm rooms and do it. They don't have to come to the library," King says.
The content delivery system is also making inroads into Fort Hays' virtual college distance learning program, which offers some 1,300 far-flung students the chance to take classes. Distance learning is an important part of the program at Fort Hays, the only four-year institution for the western two-thirds of the state.
The program has relied on mailed CD-ROMs, videocassettes and audiotapes of class material, but now the content delivery network is adding streaming media via the Internet to the materials lineup. So far, about 200 students in the virtual college program are tapping the content delivery network for material, and King expects that to increase with time.
"It's going to be a major piece in the program," King says. "The way we look at it is, as the Internet becomes stronger, more reliable and the bandwidth is there to stream higher-quality video, we'll be reducing the amount of video tapes we'll be sending out."
Similarly, the e-learning system at Fort Hays likely will find broader application for information delivery on and off campus.
"We continually find opportunities, or we come up with problems and it just turns out to be our solution," King says. "It solves some problems that we didn't know we had, it's offered us an opportunity to improve on services we've offered in the past."
Meaning, the learning offered in the cyberclass isn't confined just to the students.
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