"The community colleges will, even more than in the past, be the conduit for the key training to equip this country for the future." - Bill Gates, CIT keynote, November 3, 1998

The Workforce Education Crisis

The advent of our new economy, based on advanced technologies and globalization, has created a skills gap between new job creation and the lack of a properly educated workforce. Society needs improved and cost-effective training methodologies to fill this disparity. Suppliers of continuing education and corporate training, particularly community colleges, are perfectly positioned to enable economic changes to translate into new jobs and growth.

While the United States has steadily lost massive numbers of manufacturing jobs, the same new economy offers opportunities for higher paying, information-based jobs. Sixteen million jobs were created in the past decade. Advanced training programs and delivery systems are needed, though, to close the gap between jobs taken away by new technologies and those they simultaneously create.

A survey conducted by the National Association of Business Economists found that "the most serious problem the US economy faces today is a poorly prepared labor force.... [Training is] more critical to business than inflation, monetary policy or international trade." When one looks at the factors driving the growing skills gap, one understands the alarm driving the search for expanded training solutions. In the global economy, competition is becoming fiercer than ever. The rate of technological change is accelerating. International corporations possess multilingual workforces located in geographically dispersed facilities. Time-to-market pressures place greater importance in efficient and timely product introductions to meet ever-shrinking windows of opportunity. With global manufacturing and assembly, outsourcing is prevalent. Meanwhile, there is an increasing shortage of skilled workers to support the growing complexity of technology, products and services, while job mobility and turnover rates make it more difficult to hold onto quality workers.

The widening jobs and skills gap has left more than 350,000 jobs unfilled in the US. Analysts predict that there will be a million new unfilled jobs over the next seven years. A study conducted by the American Society of Training and Development concluded that in the next ten years:

• 74% of Americans working today will require retraining
• 15 million manufacturing jobs will require different skills than are required today
• 37 million people will need entry-level training
• Technical skills need updating every 4 years

All of these trends emphasize one principal factor: the increasing need for fast, consistent, comprehensive (and comprehensible) corporate training and continuing education programs. Not only is the quality of training a constant challenge for corporations, but also the costs involved are a major drain on bottom-line profitability. Companies spend more money on transporting and housing trainees than on actual training programs, with approximately 66% of training costs going to travel expenses

Corporations are beginning to turn to new technologies, particularly the Internet, for answers to their corporate training quagmires; but technology in and of itself is not enough. What counts is how that technology is integrated, applied, and if it can recreate the classroom experience in a virtual environment.

A New Opportunity for Community Colleges

Community colleges have succeeded in serving the needs of the business community by constantly changing their continuing education curricula to better match the realities of the job market. Community colleges are traditionally in close relationships with the employers of their regions. They are closest to the real needs of their working community. They understand the real-world dilemmas of working students trying to find the time and funds to meet their continuing education needs.

With seismic shifts occurring in our society, economy and technology, education demographics in America have dramatically changed. Kay M. McClenney, vice president of the Education Commission of the States, has written in an article, Community Colleges Perched at the Millennium, "According to the U.S. Department of Education, by 1995 44 percent of all college students were over 25 years old, 54 percent were working, 56 percent were female, and 43 percent were attending college part time…. In 1997, more than 76 million American adults—40 percent of the adult population—participated in one or more adult education activities, up from 32 percent in 1991."

Accompanying these demographic shifts is a change in the focus of education. The purpose of these students is not the traditional liberal arts education, but acquiring specific skills for emerging job markets. The rapid growth of technology demands that people continue to learn new skills to keep pace with demands of the new economy.

Community colleges and technical schools play a growing role in the education and reeducation of today's workforce. The challenge for community colleges will be to adopt learning methodologies tailored to the education needs of an emerging workforce. Only those institutions will succeed that are forward-thinking enough to embrace and adapt new technologies to their specific requirements, particularly the Internet. Those schools that can expand beyond the campus will benefit from the ever-increasing need for educated and accredited professionals.

To meet the challenges of the skills-gap inherent in the new global economy, community colleges need a new training delivery system. What people in the real working world need is not more classrooms, nor necessarily distance learning, but on-demand learning, a way to learn that will fit into their busy work and family schedules.

How to Use the Internet to Close the Job-Skills Gap

As training challenges increase, companies and colleges are turning to the Internet for answers to their training needs and to eliminate the heavy burden of travel expenses and infrastructure operating and maintenance costs. Web delivery of training content is promising a new generation of media-rich, cost-effective training applications.

The Internet offers community colleges an excellent opportunity to extend beyond their physical campuses to reach a much wider prospective student body. The Internet can provide access to training to anyone with a browser at anytime from any location. This accessibility is the essential factor in solving the current training crisis.

To address the job-skills gap, community colleges must adapt asynchronous learning methodologies to conform to the new demographics and lifestyle of the continuing education student-body. The contemporary community college student is as likely to be a professional seeking certification or an adult seeking retraining as he or she would be a full-time student recently graduated from high school. Asynchronous activity, or activity done at the student’s own time and pace, is critical to offer the broad, on-demand accessibility necessary to address these individuals’ training needs.

Asynchronous training tools for the Internet allow users to access training materials, take tests and share files with instructors and fellow students at their own convenience. Web-based, self-paced products offer a continuous learning environment. The student interacts independently with the courseware. Even though there is no need to convene people into an audience for the training experience, the Internet’s streaming multimedia and interactivity, with instant messaging, email and hyperlinks, create a learning environment that enables rewarding interchange between student and teacher.

How to Create On-line Continuing Education Learning Environments

The benefits of the Internet-based, virtual classroom are clear:

• Self-paced, on-demand training
• Dramatic cost savings
• Flexible and easily updated, customized, personalized content
• Interactive communications and multimedia for student/instructor dialogue
• Reduction in training time
• Reduction in travel expenses
• Low cost of creating/purchasing training
• Improved learning performance

To receive these benefits, though, community colleges need an Internet-technology solution that incorporates the following factors:

• Interactivity
• Measurability
• Timeliness
• Cost-Effectiveness
• Accessibility
• Scalability
• Integration
• Security

The primary function of web-based training software is to manage the delivery and flow of content – both courseware and tests. Currently, Web-based training solutions are kludgy affairs patched together from several different proprietary and expensive applications. What the education community needs is a complete, seamlessly integrated, easy-to-use online learning system for putting courses on the Web.

To replicate real-world training, the online learning system must be a container of robust interactive, communications, network and knowledge database functionality, "smart" courseware templates and open-standard Internet technologies which, together, form a resource-rich virtual classroom and remote certification platform. All that should be required is basic PC equipment and any industry-standard Web browser, without any proprietary plug-in. The ideal platform is easy to use to load courseware, without requiring any programming skills. It should include:

• The ability to input courseware from familiar applications, e.g., Word or PowerPoint
• Web-based data entry, eliminating proprietary authoring tools or uploading programs
• Automated test set up wizard, without requiring any programming
• Discussion groups
• Keyboard-based chat sessions
• Threaded bulletin boards
• Email to instructor and others taking the course
• Pre-recorded streaming multimedia for more compelling courses
• White boards, application sharing, and conferencing
• Downloadable reference materials, bibliographies, articles, papers, etc.
• Hyperlinks to Web sites
• Courseware search facility
• Ability to set performance criteria and control pace and testing thresholds
• Assignment creation and issuance
• Student progress tracking
• Self-correcting tests with instructor comments
• Conclusion: The Virtual Community College Partnership

A serious skills gap threatens society’s ability to reap the benefits of our new economic order. Community colleges have an opportunity to solve the skills-gap by providing training to fill specific labor market needs and serve the demographics of the continuing education and retraining markets. The Internet provides a new training delivery system for community colleges to help educate the workforce.

Until IntraLearn Software Corporation, a comprehensive Web-based training solution that provided self-paced learning and a high-degree of interaction has been missing from the distance-learning marketplace. IntraLearn has leveraged the most advanced Internet-centric communications capabilities to deliver a virtual classroom that possesses even more resources, interactivity, monitoring, threshold-testing and certification assurances than a classroom in the so-called real world.

IntraLearn is a sophisticated relational database-driven software system designed to make it easy for instructors to place classes into the single database and onto the Internet securely and consistently. No programming skills are required to load existing courses into IntraLearn. IntraLearn generates a dynamic online classroom, with powerful interactive features that include email, chat, live hyperlinks, discussion rooms, instructor Q&A, FAQ, and streaming multimedia. Using only a standard Internet browser from any location, students may register, take a class, submit tests with immediate scoring, communicate with others and receive certification upon satisfactory completion.

Requiring more than just a product, community colleges need a technology partner who can help them use the Internet to bridge training programs and the business community. A partnership with IntraLearn eases the transition to high-quality online courses with technical services, including course creation, courseware conversion, content enhancement, instructional design support, enhanced administration and reports, installation, training, technology management and secure commerce. IntraLearn will even host the server for a community college’s online courses.

IntraLearn Software Corporation is committed to providing community colleges with the Internet expertise, Web-based products and technical support to help them educate the new workforce. IntraLearn is a one-stop solution for community colleges searching for a way to use the Internet to educate the new workforce.