eSpok - Company blog

Distance learning convinced me a long time ago now. Certainly the subject is not new. After all, if people are already using video conferencing in their company for online meetings, why not for training? Actually it has already been more than 10 years since offers appeared for learning languages by phone. And there are lots of reasons to like distance learning. Here are a few of them:

• You do it where you want
• You do it when you want
• You save the transportation time
• There are no commodities issues and costs

Of course people would say it is always better to have a trainer next to you. But why? I still haven’t found any reason. For the social aspect? Well by saving time on your training and making it more flexible you will actually gain time for other things like participating in social activities, seeing your friends etc.

And the truth is that, with the development of Internet technology, it just becomes better and easier. A good virtual classroom has exactly the tools that a tutor needs to teach online. Video and audio ensure communication, and the whiteboard works perfectly for collaboration.

Directly integrated in the whiteboard there is the possibility of displaying images, switching between different layers, even playing a video… all this on top of all the things you can naturally do with a normal blackboard: annotate, erase etc.

Moreover the session is easily recordable, and it needs no costly hardware. A simple computer with a headset and an internet connection is sufficient.

Despite all this, the use of the virtual classroom for training sessions is not yet totally popular. There are a few reasons for this, and we have noticed that just a few steps can help to remove the barriers.

People don’t like change

People definitely don’t like changes. Even if the virtual classroom brings them a lot of advantages, until they really notice it, it can be extremely difficult to convince them. Based on our experience, I would like to give two suggestions when the learners are not ready for this new step:

• Make the first one or two appointments offline. We have noticed that the fact of building a relationship between the tutor and the learner before starting the online sessions greatly helps people who are not yet experienced with learning online
• Use a tutor who is very familiar with online tools

Tutors are not used to these tools

A short experience has showed us that a big part of the problem comes from the tutor. Indeed who can imagine that a tutor who has never used a virtual classroom before can actually give a good lesson? Actually a virtual classroom does not take that long to learn. If the interface is intuitive, the tutor can easily start to know all the tools within one hour. Still the tutor needs to find his way around this new method.

Based on our experience, a tutor needs between 5 and 10 hours of online tutoring to start to be totally efficient with the tool. Therefore, a proper training method should be defined. The appropriate time budget should be allocated so that the tutor gets trained in a real session.

Technical problem

Technical problems are another barrier for distance training. If the user has to download software, install it, solve problems, he will not easily accept facing the change and the necessity of taking up this new habit.

Our tip: choose a web-based virtual classroom where there is absolutely no software to install. Relying on massive spread plugins like Java or Flash will definitely reduce the problem and maximize compatibility.

Finally if you face a technical problem because of infrastructure (poor internet connection) or because the people don’t really know how to use a computer, try using the phone for communication at the beginning, combined with the whiteboard.

What is sure is that after a few hours, tutors and learners will both enjoy this flexible new way of teaching / learning a lot. It is worth it!

When I talk to the boss of a training company, I always hesitate before saying the word: “e-learning”. Such a bad word which, most of the time, smacks of “old and bad experience”, “bad quality”, “not our philosophy”… It sounds bad… but also, in my opinion, this is a little bit unfair!

Even the best would have to give a simple and clear definition of this word… but,  as the article devoted to the subject on Wikipedia reminds us, there is not one definition, but many. And this is precisely the problem! So, instead of telling you what e-learning is, let me tell you what e-learning is NOT:

1. e-learning is not blended-learning, but a part of it. Blended-learning consists of diversifying the way and the support of teaching so that the student doesn’t feel bored after two weeks of training and remains stimulated and motivated and keeps concentrating. In a way, everybody already proposes a kind of blended-learning because it has been obvious for many years that the classic face-to-face classes are not enough; that’s why, we should be aware that training that mixes individual lessons, group lessons and phone lessons is blended-learning. However, the key point of blended-learning is, most of the time, the electronic support of e-learning which can be used to introduce a personal workspace for reviewing and practising and/or online classes. Indeed, as efficient as time with the tutor or the other students can be, we do believe that a successful learning process should allow (or impose) a time per week for personal work and to support this we do believe that e-learning - as (not) presented in this article - is the best support.

2. e-learning is not (always) multimedia-learning or interactive-learning, but it should be! E-learning - or more exactly “old e-learning”- can be as boring as a classic paper support (books and so on): indeed, what is the interest of giving a quiz with questions and answers on an e-learning platform if it looks like the one on paper? For sure, this online quiz will be accessible from anywhere thanks to the Internet and the correction will be available immediately without waiting for the tutor to do his job of correcting it. But that’s the way one may have defined and supported e-learning ten years ago! And it’s not enough because nowadays everyone knows that in the balance these two real advantages may weigh less than the obstacle that the electronic interface can represent for a lot of students. E-learning is more than accessibility and availability: it must also be interactivity. Add MP3, videos, pictures… to your exercises; communicate with the student from the correction of his exercises… let the students interact together by sharing interesting multimedia content they encounter in their daily lives… E-learning should be more than the two dimensions of a sheet of paper: it depends on you to create as many dimensions as you want! (NB: but keep it simple, that’s the basis!).

3. e-learning is not self-learning, or it shouldn’t be (ever)! Either as the core or as an extra of the training (the two extreme cases), e-learning is - unfortunately - often presented as a purely electronic way to learn: the student faces a computer, alone with himself, his bravery and his motivation. Considered as a simple tool, e-learning will always lead to at best decreasing motivation, at worst a failure; we encourage you to consider e-learning as a process that includes:
- upstream, consideration of the whole training process (see point 1)
- choice of an interactive platform and creation of multimedia content (see point 2)
- transmission of the content as a task to do and monitoring the achievement of this task
- downstream, request for feedback and feelings

At every step, you - as educative manager or tutor - have an important role to play to let the student feel that he’s closely accompanied. Be sure that this commitment is not so costly in terms of time (a quick answer to students’ questions, short comments on their exercises…) and that at the end it definitely improves the efficiency of your e-learning. That’s the only way to reach the main goal usually assigned to e-learning: reduce the costs, while maintaining a high level of quality.

4. e-learning is not distance-learning, but it can be. If you have read and understood the above points, this may be obvious: first of all, because we encourage you to introduce e-learning most of the time as part of a blended-learning process (with classic classes, etc… see point 1) but also because we advise you to always be close to your student, even - I should rather say “especially”- if he attends a pure e-learning training. E-learning must always be close-learning, that’s the key to success. However, to successfully respond to the needs of your students in a modern way of life (and work), it’s a good thing to propose a pure distance-learning service: your e-learning becomes the main (or the only) interface of this training, thanks to the workspace but also and especially thanks to a video conference system to support the classes. For these cases, you have to keep in mind two key points:
- for a long distance training, it’s especially recommended to respect a blended-learning process (by mixing online classes with phone classes for instance…)
- the video conference system must be available from your e-learning platform and with a share-screen (possibility for both tutor and student to interact on the same document) to keep the process as simple and interactive as possible.

I hope that after reading this article you will agree with the fact that e-learning is not a revolution, and neither is it a useless extra, but a real “plus”. In my opinion, that’s the paradox of e-learning: it was introduced as the modern miracle to change everything in the teaching world but we never gave it the chance to reach these too great and unrealistic expectations. And - what a surprise!- it failed in this revolution, so much so that it can sometimes be considered as the bad word I was speaking about at the beginning of this article.

So yes, human relationships are the key point of any learning process (or prove me wrong!).

And yes, if we keep this in mind, a smart electronic system can successfully support and even improve this learning process.

As a person passionate about education I am very interested in the question “How will education look in 5 years?”

Since I co-founded eSpok together with my friend and partner Francois Xavier around 2 years ago I have been wondering how strong Internet based learning can improve the existing educational model. Advantages like more “flexible” and more “convenient” are obvious but is it really as efficient as, or even more efficient than face to face training? What about the aspect of social learning: are a lot of people not going to schools to socialize?

Recently I spent a lot of time in China and got motivated to learn Mandarin. As my time is extremely limited I decided to take 30min of live training every day in our virtual classroom with a Chinese teacher and an additional 3 hours face to face training over the weekend. So far I am impressed with the positive result of the online learning part. The key to learning Mandarin is correct pronunciation of the different tons which is the greatest challenge for a good distance training solution.  Using her webcam, my teacher allows me to follow her mouth at any moment, which I wouldn’t be able to do with her sitting next to me. Having a good headset and connection allows me to totally focus on her pronunciation, being alone in front of my computer to freely talk without repression. Receiving the vocabulary learned and the documents used after every lesson makes it extremely convenient for me to take 15min in the evening to review what I learned in the morning.

In the last month we twice skipped the face to face training and decided on online training even over the weekend. The fact that nobody has to move, that classes can be taken spontaneously in the evening in pyjamas and that all the materials including vocabulary are already online is very  appealing.

After two months of both online and offline Mandarin training I consider both ways to be equally efficient. Because of online training being so flexible in a lot of aspects, I consider it to be a better solution for busy people.

After Facebook and co have shown us that online socializing is possible and practiced worldwide, I do believe that social learning has a great future as well. The idea of getting to know people online by studying with them and exchanging experiences and information with them sounds very useful, promising and exciting to me.

In the upcoming month I am planning to invite some passionate Mandarin learners in Shanghai and Berlin to join me on eSpok to test and experience social learning.

..as written in “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Pracises in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies” from the US department of education.

As part of the findings, we can read:
“Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.”

This combined with “cost efficiency” of online learning justifies largely the use of distant learning.