We all know that the process from idea to finished digital product is continuous and recursive. But for our purposes momentarily assume the process consists of discrete tasks sequenced as follows:

• planning which yields a decision to engage in DL, to create a particular course or program, to market it to (or require it of) a specific audience, to use a specific technology or technologies, commit a specific amount of money, time, staff, and facilities, assume a specific set of educational and/or financial outcomes, and assess in a specific way against specific standards, in short, a formal or informal feasibility study

• design which yields details of content, sequences of information, specific media and interface decisions, scripting and storyboarding, and specific testing and course management techniques

• production which yields media and integration, loading to servers and/or creations of CD’s, videotapes and a broadcasting process.

• assessment which yields formative, iterative testing during the design and production process, summative tests at the end of the production process, and continuing formal or informal testing after implementation

• implementation which yields

• ongoing maintenance which involves resolving technical problems, accommodating technology upgrades, interface modifications, addition and clarification of content, and continuing revision of the on-line testing process.

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While planning should be the same for all DL projects, such projects actually divide into two categories with different resources and expectations, and these in turn affect primarily the planning process.

Corporate and government projects follow a traditional planning cycle. Both governments and corporations have broad strategic plans which incorporate their long-term and near-term goals, the technology they plan to acquire, and the way they are going to use it. They also have established training programs, normally run by internal training departments. In most cases, they know what it currently costs to operate a course or program, how many people it reaches, and how effective it is. They know what new courses they will need to develop and how much money they can afford to spend on them.

In general, DL course developers are most effective in this environment when they claim to reduce cost, increase learning, leverage a technology asset, or modify the learning culture in accordance with the strategic plan.

The advantage of working in a corporate or government environment lies in having funds available and in having clear baselines against which to measure effectiveness. The disadvantage is that everything is expensive, and there are many competitors for available funds.

Educational and not-for-profit organizations tend to be less structured in their planning. Their strategic plans can be brief, non-existent, or too general to be useful. Their technology base may be weak, and their technology plan may be vague, primarily because of funding uncertainty. They may have a limited sense of the cost of any specific internal training activity, primarily because such information is not very useful to them. yet they have some compensating advantages. They often have a relatively high technology skill level, an enthusiasm for new initiatives, and the ability to acquire equipment at least for short-term use.

The advantage of working in educational or not-for-profit environment lies in the comparative ease of getting projects approved and in gaining low-cost or free assistance in project development. The disadvantage lies in finding resources for large-scale implementation.

In general, DL course developers are most effective in this environment when they can find ways to leverage the skills and enthusiasm of peers within the organization.

Because of the differences in the two types of organizations, you can assume an emphasis on a formal, multi-stage planning process in a corporate or government environment and a more truncated process in educational and not-for profit environments, especially in the early stages of a project. In addition, the level of detail in any initial plan will depend on the size of the project and the culture of the sponsoring organization

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DL is exciting, is receiving a great amount of media attention, and is being promoted as both the solution for a large number of current educational and training problems and as the key component in the future of education and training.

But producing and delivering DL requires considerable skill in managing and producing digital media products, much attention to technology on both the delivery and student side, and an environment that is receptive to a substantial commitment to technology-based education.

1. Do you already have sufficient technology resources to serve all your students?

(Such resources might include: networked PC’s on the desktop, at home, or on the road; interactive television sites immediately available to students; combinations of TV/VCR’s and networked computers; satellite links for video transmission; or whatever it takes for students to receive information and provide response from a distance.)

If you do have such technology, DL provides an excellent way to leverage the investment you have already made, and thus a powerful argument for engaging in DL.

2. Are you relatively satisfied with your current education and training environment?

(Many schools, companies, and non-profits have already made a substantial commitment to their education and training environment. They have invested in a professional staff, dedicated facilities, a student and management feedback system that allows for continual upgrading and fine-tuning of courses. They benchmark against their peers and are satisfied with the result.)

Under these circumstances, it is hard to justify a substantial commitment to DL.

3. Are your potential students comfortable with the demands of a DL environment?

DL courses make three kinds of demands: personal, cognitive, and technological.

(Unlike a traditional course or program which provides a structured time, physical environment, and lack of distraction, DL courses require that the student take the personal initiative to create on a daily or weekly basis such an environment for himself or herself.)

Some students will find advantages in this situation, creating time just before or just after the work day, during lunch, or late in the evening, when they will be free from distractions and able to pay full attention to course material. But will other will find that in the absence of a required traditional class time the demands of work, family life, and personal life constantly claim higher priority than coursework. Especially among students just beginning programs, this is the most significant cause of failure.

(Research is just beginning on the ways in which courses offered through electronic media make different cognitive demands on students than do traditional courses.)

The loss of immediacy, the students’ inability to communicate through non-verbal behaviors, the sometimes awkward response of inexperienced instructors to a mediated environment, can all increase student discomfort and reduce teaching success. But at the same time, the ability of students to replay material until they understand it, to access multiple examples or multiple media, and to contact the instructor when questions arise during study, all offer the possibility of an environment cognitively superior to the classroom.

(Almost all DL courses require some competence in the use of technology. Even videotaped courses generally assume students will contact the instructor through e-mail.)

If such technology is not available, it has to be purchased and users have to be trained. This is expensive in a corporate environment and sometimes an insurmountable obstacle for new students in an educational environment. However, the traditional college age population is among the most wired and most computer literate, and an increasing number of schools are requiring computers for their students, their purchase often substantially reduced through mass purchases, bundled into tuition, or supported by loans and grants.

4. Do you have specific needs that would be hard to meet in a DL environment?

(Some college courses that require laboratory use, hands-on learning, or collaborative learning have proved difficult to DL. So have corporate and professional courses which assume that professional networking, sharing experiences with new products, and problem and/or solution sharing will be among the most significant outcomes.)

Means have been found to address almost al of these problems in a DL environment, but such means generally require significant technology and/or an unusual degree of student commitment.

5. Is your organization feeling competitive pressure to engage in DL? This pressure generally takes one of three forms, each requiring a different response.

1. To retain key staff, you must offer continuing professional education.

(More and more of this education is now available through DL, provided by colleges, professional societies, and for-profit organizations. Buying the use of such courses for your own staff generally involves a very limited commitment to DL.)

2. Your actual or potential student body is not available for traditional, face to face training or education.

(In industry, the competitive demands of business may mean that staff can no longer be released for day-long or multi-day training sessions. Or situations may demand such frequent training that the organization can no longer support lost time and travel costs associated with training. Or staff may spend so much time on the road that group training is no longer feasible. Or urgent needs may demand that everyone be trained almost at once.)

In such cases, training may be modularized into short units and delivered to desktop, either to be competed in a specific time or as "just in time" training, required immediately prior to beginning a new activity. Or it can be specifically designed as on-the- road training, created for portable computers and slow networks. Or it can be designed for use on the road, the desktop, and training centers to provide immediate access to all staff and to record each user’s satisfactory completion.

(In education, there is an increasing awareness of the need to reach many kinds of non-traditional students who may be completing degrees, seeking personal enrichment, or upgrading their skills. Some of these students want to want to test their competence or interest before returning to school. Others want to complete degrees and programs more quickly by taking courses during summers, intersessions, or co-op terms. Others want to sample areas outside their major, either for enrichment or in anticipation of a change of major. Others will seldom or never be available during a school’s day or evening classes, because of transportation problems, disabilities, or obligations at home or at work.)

In such cases, schools may respond to one or more of these needs. They may create distance learning versions of initial college courses that many students find difficult or intimidating such as freshman composition, introductory college mathematics, or introductory physical sciences. They may create courses that satisfy the "core curriculum" requirements at most institutions. They may create complete on-line degree programs in popular or much-needed majors. They may create graduate programs.)

3. You are facing pressure to cut the cost of education or training.

(DL is being promoted in some quarters as a way of reducing instructional cost. However, such claims should be treated with caution.)

In some cases, for example when the cost of instruction includes a high travel component because students must come a long distance to attend a course, it may be possible to achieve cost reduction. In cases where the course consists of information delivery and objective tests there is also the possibility of reducing cost. But when significant instructor interaction is required and/or technology must be purchased by or for students, overall costs may stay the same.

6. Is there a defined market for the course or program you plan to produce?

Are there a sufficient number of people who currently need the information or skills you are offering, must or would prefer to obtain it through DL, have the necessary technology to access the course, have the have the information, skills, or discipline necessary to succeed in the course? Do others offer a competitive course to the same market? Do students or a sponsoring organization have the funds to pay for the course?

7. Is the course critical in some way to broader program success?

(In a college environment, such a course might serve a very large student population, be a course students often have difficulty with, or serves as a gateway into a particular major or concentration.)

This first course will be expensive in dollars and/or time as the producers learn to become comfortable in the delivery environment, collect materials and deal with copyright issues, address technology concerns, and market and manage the course. This effort is most effectively leveraged if the course has programmatic value in addition to its value as an individual course.

(In a corporate or government environment, the course might offer just in time training as part of the rollout of a major new product or product line, address a key issue in changing a corporate culture, or address a major skills upgrade for a significant number of staff.)

8. How do you plan to measure success?

Success can be measured by revenue from the course, by the number of students completing the course (either in absolute terms or in comparison with the number in a traditional version of the same course), by test results that show: increased retention, increased ability to apply the material, by student high satisfaction levels on students’ course assessment forms and by increased enrollment in follow-on courses in the same format, by time saved by students, or by the results of an external evaluation.

9. Would you produce a course in house, by hiring an outsider, or by some combination of these two? To begin to answer this question, ask yourself the following questions:

Do you have a training staff committed to DL?

Do you have production funding?

Do you have staff with experience in managing and producing digital media projects and can that staff be freed from current commitments?

Are courses that meet your needs already available?

Are you comfortable working with digital media contractors?

Does your company already have a relationship with an organization (i.e., your ad agency) that can produce DL courses?

10. Is the proposed course or program a best fit with the sponsoring organization

- Strategically within the competitive environment:

• Can the training package win support from accrediting and licensing organizations and insurers?

• Does it address current legal or regulatory concerns?

• Does the training build on what we can assume that new hires have already learned?

• Does the training make us more attractive as an employer, increasing retention of current staff and quality of new applicants?

• Does the training accommodate coming changes in our external environment?

- Within the enterprise:

• Is the enterprise technology (networks, sufficiency of user platforms, technical support) sufficient to exploit the potential of the course? Does the proposed course build on our strength in a particular technology?

• Will the technology environment be stable during the deployment and use of the package?

• Is the enterprise prepared to develop sufficient follow-on packages in this area?

• Does the look and feel of this package reflect the look and feel of other current and planned packages?

- Within the workgroups that will deploy the course or use the course

• Will this project require any changes in the way the unit does its work?

• Will the project require any maintenance or updating from within the unit?

• Will the project require additional technology or user training?

• Does unit management agree that this project is the best use of resources?

• Have all key players in the unit bought into the need for the project?

11. Does project meet/exceed current best practice

Compare with similar DL courses now in use or forecasted in your field or industry. Does your proposed course incorporate their features? Does it build on them in any way?

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A business plan argues for the financial practicality of the project. It asserts a total cost for the activity and compares it to the total funds that will be saved or new funds that will accrue. Business plans are more formal in the corporate and government world, generally less formal in education and not-for-profits. But regardless of the level of formality, it will always have the following components:

1. a list of activities that will need to be accomplished, from original plan to final delivery and ongoing maintenance

2. a list of persons responsible for performing each of these tasks

3. a schedule for completion each sub-task and the entire project

4. a list of costs for the proposed project, including:

• a technology cost , including acquiring, upgrading, and maintaining the delivery technology

• a marketing cost, for either internal or external publicity

• a production cost, for production technology and production staff, including designers, domain specialists, instructional designers, testing specialists, media producers

• an overhead cost for use of facilities and equipment and for use of staff services including management coordination and accounting and legal support

• an installation cost for loading to servers or delivering CD’s and/or videotapes

• a maintenance cost for content upgrades, delivery enhancements,

• a course management cost to cover registering students, giving tests and recording grades and/or CEU credit, and delivering transcripts

5. a quantification of the value of the project in money saved or earned.

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(i.e., "to help fulfill your college's state-mandated mission to teach non-traditional students by offering a key course in program _____ to students who cannot come to the campus" or "to support economic development by teaching adult literacy to students who work on a schedule that will not allow attendance at normal hours" or "to provide 'just in time' training to technical support personnel."

(i.e., "to students already taking other business related courses from this institution using distance learning" or "to students currently learning these skills from weekly classroom sessions that will be eliminated" or to students identified in a marketing study by _____" or to employees who currently travel to our training center for updates on new products.

in terms of instructional quality?

(i.e., "with grades at least equal to the grade in traditional sections of the same course as measured on the same final exam" or "with a passing at least equal to that in traditional sections of the same course as measured by the proficiency test administered by _____"

in terms of student satisfaction?

(i.e., "with a 'superior' level of student satisfaction as indicated by results of the standard course assessment form administered to all students completing the course" or with a dropout rate lower than that of traditional sections of the same course")

(i.e., "at a cost per student no greater than in traditional sections of the same course")

CIO: The Magazine for Information Executives , IDG: International Data Group, focuses primarily on enterprise-wide technology issues with a heavy emphasis on newmedia. Subscription information at www.cio.com

A subscription to CIO includes a companion monthly journal: CIO: Web Business (formerly Webmaster).

Both journals have a searchable Web archive of past articles at

www.cio.com/ciomag/archive/cio_index.html

John V. Pavlik’s New Media Technology: Cultural and Commercial Perspectives, Allyn and Bacon, 1996, is an excellent overview of a range of issues of interest to corporate users.

Bart O'Brien, Demands and Decisions: Briefing on Issues in Information Technology Strategy, Prentice Hall, 1992, is a collection of short essays on such topics as metrics, information modeling, technology and information infrastructure analysis, benefit and tradeoff analysis. The essays are sufficiently conceptually-based to be still current despite the 1992 publication date.

Don Tapscott, The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence, McGraw-Hill,1966, focuses on ways that networked environments are changing the world of work. It has a heavy emphasis on newmedia. Quite apart from the value of its contents, its a useful book in defining current corporate perceptions. The book was a best seller and was well reviewed in the business press.

Anita Rosen's Looking into Intranets and the Internet: Advice for Managers, AMACOM, 1997, is a non-technical, business-oriented study, heavy on cases, the business planning process, and practical advice. It was well reviewed in the business press.

Steven E. Miller’s Civilizing Cyberspace: Power, Policy, and the Information Superhighway (ACM Press, 1996) is a useful reference to American policy issues in hypermedia.

Ben G. Bentley, et al, National Computer Policies, IEEE Computer Society, 1987. The focus of this book is primarily international, describing the general policies and political philosophies that drive them in some twenty nations. Here, as above, the conceptual focus of the book makes it effective despite its age.

Datapro Reports. Datapro Research Corporation, Delran, NJ, is the best, most up to date, and most detailed resource for current technology configurations in industry. It is updated monthly and divided by industry and region.

Potential risks in Web-based distance learning (sex, security, and hate)

Anyone planning a corporate newmedia application gives some thought to the much publicized risks in its use. Both legal and public relations problems have arisen when employees have accessed, downloaded and displayed within the corporation text and images from sexually explicit or hate sites. In addition, there is a growing and well founded fear of data security risks in allowing access outside the corporate firewall. Some worthwhile books that explore and clarify these risk areas are:

Nancy Tamositis, net.sex , Ziff-Davis, 1995 which both reviews the problem and provides information on where and how sex exists in cyberspace and how one could access it.

Kenneth Dam's edited collection of essays Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society, 1996, is a thorough and scholarly effort.

Jean Guisnel's Cyberwars: Espionage on the Internet, 1997, is a popular, readable treatment of the same issue.

Not everybody accepts the current merits or future potential of hypermedia. Some of objections to hypermedia represent legitimate responses to hypermedia hype. Other assertions are not entirely accurate but have found considerable acceptance in some parts of the business and educational communities. Interesting approaches to these issues appear in:

Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil , Anchor Books, 1995.

Thomas K. Landauer’s The Trouble With Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity , MIT Press, 1995

J. Dianne Brinson, Mark F. Radcliffe's Multimedia : Law and Business Handbook: A Practical Guide for Developers and Publishers, Ladera Press, 1997 is what the authors describe as a "preventative guide," pointing out potential problems to the non-lawyer.

A useful benchmarking tool is the Critical Guide to Management Training Videos and Selected Multimedia, 1966, edited by William Ellet and Laura Winig, a publication in the Harvard Business Reference series.

Thomas Duffy and David Jonassen's Constructivism and the Technology of Instruction, Lawrence Earlbaum, 1992, is a collection of essays and dialogs between training professionals and academics on how a constructivist perspective changes training in general and especially the use of technology in instruction. It's a very thought-provoking book.

Two excellent Web sites on training and executive development that contain extensive material on newmedia and training are

WebTrack, a print and on line service from Jupiter Communications that follows and analyzes Web advertizing, is available at www.jup.com/newsletter/webtrack/

Margo Komenar's Electronic Marketing, Wiley, 1996, is much recommended by sales and marketing professionals and includes extensive case studies.

The most accessible detailed demographic studies are available in the US Government Documents collections on the Web. Although a bit dated (generally 1995 with updates in some cases) they are still useful in a variety of analyses.

provides demographic breakdowns, location, education, income

provides detailed data on age, education, gender, race, ethnicity in labor force, disability, employment statistics with detail down to the county level.

A good and very detailed source of demographic information on Web users is

Valuable context for such information, including a discussion of the data collection methods used by the various reporters, is available from Project 2000, an ongoing study of internet commerce by the Owen School of Management at Vanderbilt University