When should you use PowerPoint or
Rapid E-Learning Tools?

May, 2003 Josh Bersin, Principal

Breeze is a fantastic new product.  But where does it fit?  The first question you should ask is:  What kind of e-learning application do you really need?

The Four Categories of E-Learning Applications

We have found through our research and work with many clients that learning applications fall into four major categories.  Take a look and see which category your problem falls into. 

As you can see from this table, depending on your business need, any given problem "the problem of a new price schedule" may be solved using one or more of these four models.  If you are just informing people, the first two models work fine.  If you really need to make sure everyone understands the new pricing (because it will impact sales revenue or profitability), you can cost justify the third or fourth category.

(Our research paper Blended Learning: What Works™ goes into this model in much detail.)

The Issues of Cost and Time

These four categories of e-learning differ in several ways.  They use different media, have different tracking, and achieve different results.  But the biggest difference between the four models is the time and expense needed to build content. 

Typical costs per instructional hour are as follows:

What this table tells you is that different problems justify different solutions.  It turns out that 50% or more of the learning problems in corporations fall into the category of Breeze.  

The main issue is time.  Many corporate training problems have content which is out of date within 3-6 months.  Hence, the time required to build a "course" just cannot keep up with the timeliness of the information.  If you can develop instructional content faster, you can meet the needs of more reapidly changing information.

The second problem is cost.  Traditional courseware costs $1000-35,000 per instructional hour to build - and required a highly trained instructional designer and web developer.  Most companies do not have those resources available -- and the budget to outsource a "fast course" is not available.   PowerPoint is the most widely used authoring tool in the world - and anyone who uses a computer can use PowerPoint.

Enter Breeze:  for all those "informational" applications (types 1, 2, and some 3 above) - Breeze is a breakthrough.

What are some of the examples of problems that are perfect for Breeze?

• Sales:  New product introductions - where features, pricing, and configuration information must be well understood.
• Channel Training:  Need to inform and train the channel in products and pricing, but not on basic selling skills.  Rapid turnaround is key, as is an easy way to distribut anytime/anywhere.
• Customer Service:  Changes in pricing, delivery, or other ways of doing business -- where representatives must know the changes, but do not require new skills.
• HR:  New processes and procedures - how to fill out a time card, how to submit expense reports, how to submit suggestions and why... but not necessarily how to be a better manager.
• Corporate Wide:  Company initiatives, CEO and management changes.  A new manager, a new leader, a new strategy -- the message, the importance, the voice  can be portrayed easily with Breeze -- and is scalable beyond a conference call.

The Era of "Rapid E-Learning":  Enabling New Applications

We believe that Breeze ushers in a whole new paradigm for e-learning - the "Rapid E-Learning" paradigm.  Now you can build trackable courseware in a few days -- which means that the "rapid turnaround" problems which you could not address before in e-learning are now possible.  Plus you have the ability to re-use and leverage the thousands if not millions of powerpoint slides already existing in your organization.  The examples above could never be deployed in a trackable form before -- now you can create informational courses and track deployment for informational applications (type 1, 2 above).

Think:  What is my learning application?  What business problem am I solving?

Whenever you start thinking about a new learning problem, take a look at the table at the top of this paper.  Is this a problem of imparting information?  Making sure people "get it?"  Then Breeze may be the perfect fit.  Is this a problem of developing new skills and competencies?  Then you may be justified in developing or purchasing courseware.

Is the information I am producing going to go out of date in 6-9 months?  Then Breeze may be the perfect fit.  Is this information which I will have for many years in my corporate library?  Then courseware may make sense.

Do I have access to instructional designers, web-developers, and an IT staff with an LMS?  If not, again you should look at Breeze. 

To learn more about how to architect a blended learning program call us.  We recently conducted a study of 30 major implementations of e-learning, and published the results in a new study entitled Blended Learning:  What Works™.  Learn more before you proceed, or call us.

More information about Breeze is available at www.macromedia.com.  Some additional resources include a product walkthrough at http://presentations.breezecentral.com/p69229210/, and the Breeze overview presentation at http://www.macromedia.com/software/breeze/overview.