Most organizations are already doing distance learning with varying results. While larger firms or those with proprietary needs are keeping programs in house, most resort to vendors who develop dedicated training interfaces, often in addition to content. Outsourcing firms, attuned to cutting-edge marketing trends, recognize market potential in taking initiatives to lock in their customers to their way of learning business skills. This Microsoft model may become superseded by the appeal of open standards.

The internet browser standard, requiring only html or Java scripting languages, barely survived efforts to create a Microsoft-oriented environment. Our interest as trainers will be to encourage generic training platforms to establish standards for delivery. Only then can our energy be devoted to the hardest task: devising training programs that deliver the right training to the right people at the right time. Easy to state, difficult to realize.

New developments in technology, adapted for training, will make the means for delivery easier, faster, and of professional quality.

A crucial distinction associated with both technology and training methodology are the terms "asynchronous" (loosely translated as "not at the same time") and synchronous ("at the same time").

Thus, tools for distance learning allow tremendous flexibility for training and development use because sender and receiver need not be synchronized – in sync – in space or time. When they are in sync the ensuing benefits are enough to require a retooling of the training program, both content and delivery. The McLuhanism "the medium is the message" remains true.

Like other areas of digital technology, the software and hardware needed for distance learning will only become cheaper and easier to use. For now, the flexibility that distance learning offers trainers, in most cases, more than offsets the expenses incurred.

Current strategy must account for myriad alternatives: cable modems, satellites, wireless cell transmission, and the internet increasingly offer customers various choices for video-conferencing. These wide-bandwidth conduits, information super-highways compared with the footpath represented by plain old telephone service, are sought by many growing impatient with waiting for fiber optics or ISDN installations.

The rush to get "fibered up" by everyone demonstrates the usefulness of two-way, real-time, video-conferencing– the most dramatic type of distance learning. The value of training with video conferencing lies in its capacity for show and tell. The image is absorbing and creates a virtual presence when everything works just so. But video conferencing is much more than talking heads: interactive data, audio, and image sharing are its real strengths.

You will soon be doing all of this as easily as turning on the lights. By the end of next year, expect audio/video with send/receive capability as standard features in laptops. Major vendors such as Acer, Mac, and Sony already feature 3-spindle options, meaning you can access the net on a ethernet hook-up (or use a 56K modem); work from a reference DVD (or CD) and output to your multi-gigabyte hard drive, etc.

Generally, laptops have tended to sacrifice spindles for lighter weight or cost. That will no longer be necessary. You will be using a slim laptop as the docking-base for your learning station or kiosk and opting, depending on your needs, for ergonomic aids: larger monitor, mouse, or keyboard.

Storage capacity will increase considerably. Learn the new set of size-prefixes. You know well enough mega-sized (millions of bytes of data) zip drives, etc. After familiarizing yourself with giga- sized (trillion) hard drives expect to see tera-sized (quadrillion) capacities and possibly peta-sized (the next order of magnitude after trillion) hard drives or RAID capacities. (Tom: a sidebar with the orders of magnitude kilo/mega/giga/tera/peta etc. could be interesting. See my attachment)

One company, C3D, is demonstrating applications of a new technology they term Fluorescent Multilayer, or FM. CDs and hard drives currently store and read data in a linear, two- dimensional circular track, analogous to the phonograph they supplant. In form like a CD-ROM, the prototype FMD-ROM disk stores 140 GB, nearly 30 times as much as a DVD and over 200 times a CD-ROM. A related product, ClearCard, in the shape of a credit card, can store 10 GB, or 2500 times as much as the standard smartcard.

The key to achieving these storage densities involves storing data in multiple layers. (The FMD-ROM uses 6 layers and the ClearCard 10) The company says they are working with 20-layer technology in the lab and see no practical upper limit. They will have FM storage devices and media on the market this year and it will create another major leap in training capabilities.

Picture yourself walking into an interactive training kiosk, putting in a credit card sized storage device, downloading a training module of your choice, plugging the card into an electronic viewing/interacting device, and then being carried away by all the rich sound and stunningly detailed visuals.
Soon, you will store petabytes of information on storage devices that will be half the cost, twice the speed, and one-tenth the size of the best currently available storage products on the market.

This innovative technology allows for the storage of vast amounts of information at a low cost with important advantages over current technologies. C3D Fluorescent Multilayer Disks and Cards allow the recording, reading, and storing of information using fluorescent materials embedded in pits and grooves in each of the layers. Information is stored and retrieved using fluorescence of the media instead of reflection. Due to factors such as the ability to simultaneously read multiple data layers, access and retrieval of information will be unmatched as to speed, allowing the data retrieval rate to exceed one gigabyte per second. We’re talking serious throughput here. The applications for disks and memory cards used for trainers are enormous.

Sound quality at times can be scratchy, hollow, and mechanical because sampling rates vary and some people have a better ear than others. This is another good reason to test continually with groups and refine your technique. Occasional production glitches will always remind you that this medium is still in its formative stage. Maintaining the integrity of audio and video connections is crucial because the eye can be as unforgiving as the ear. Muddy visuals or scratchy sound distract and thus destroy immediacy and virtual presence. Virtual presence maintains the illusion that we are interacting with another human close at hand. The new technology grabbing your attention this coming year will make it easier than ever to create and maintain that illusion. What you do with these resources is key.

Besides providing face to face communication and instant document sharing, distance learning tools enable groups to use the video camera to show equipment, processes, and viewer reactions. Current video capture cards, more efficient storage and retrieval media and connections such as digital video disks (DVDs) and Firewire, more processing power in PCs and cable modems with faster bit transfer rates will demonstrably improve the quality and speed of video-based training and conferencing.

One videoconferencing demonstration I attended showed employees how to follow proper safety procedures at a construction site. Nothing more than point-and-shoot, show-and-tell, but workers arguably comprehended the points made more effectively than by simply reading a manual, a reading often subject to misinterpretation. With increased storage capacity, efficient training platforms will use internet connections to encourage interaction.

The digital storage of high quality video and other data, means that trainees will no longer need to sit twiddling thumbs while that next module loads up into RAM for viewing. Moreover, applications will be most effective in complementing a traditional instructor-led class. However, the interactive component helps assure the trainer, perhaps thousands of miles away, that the Aha ! one observes suggests that the worker got the training objective. Not rigorously scientific, but intuitively persuasive. The debate need not become reductive: Either CBT or human-led training. Best will be an intelligent use of both: the training cyborg.

Any organization venturing into distant learning must determine at what scale it can operate– and what is realistic for that organization. Simple forms of distance learning already prove useful. Distance learning permits a trainer to post, e.g., through Lotus Notes or e-mail, a lesson on the net (internet or intranet) at any time, and the trainee can chose to read it and to reply to the trainer at a different time. People can read both the lesson and others’ remarks at their convenience – asynchronous communication. You will deliver and receive training from an office, from home or, with the use of a notebook computer and modem, even while traveling on other business requiring face-to-face interaction.

While many major organizations already have conventional facilities rivaling the quality of commercial television broadcasting, the high cost of studios, cameras, staff and signal transmission, even on closed circuits, has kept the medium from proliferating. Thousands of miles of copper wire already in place are now valued more as pipelines for data to flow through than simple voice transmission. ADSL modems, permitting fast download speeds and far slower up load speeds will maintain the clear video and audio needed for virtual presence.

Budget restraints and increasingly inexpensive digital technology (e.g., computers, information storage devices, cameras) provide the quantitative and qualitative differences making distance learning the inevitable standard despite prevailing inadequacies such as glacial-moving customer service departments or call-in menu hells.

Your savings in time, board and travel are considerable and should be used in calculating the return on the investment for any distance learning initiative. For someone giving the same briefing to similar groups so often your monologue drones on in your exhausted dreams, this approach could make the difference between burn-out and refreshed enthusiasm,for both sender and receivers. Depending on whether the emphasis is on the means employed or the benefits to the user, "distance learning" "asynchronous communications," and "flex learning" refer to the same development.

However that same flexibility requires different controls and guidelines analogous to the changes made to work routines by flextime. The technology involved is similar in both categories, except for the added burden requiring that the "learner at a distance" has completed work in a satisfactory manner.

Learning and relearning those techniques and skills needed to take advantage of new technology is the skill-set needed for the remainder of our careers. Distance learning entails a major commitment in time and money for both organizations, trainers and administrators. Sooner or later though, the technology enabling distance learning will affect us all in ways we can not imagine fully. This preview of new tools for the coming year can only offer a glimpse into the possibilities for increased training effectiveness and efficiency.