📝 Module 7 Section 2 - Exercise 24

There are technical limitations to e-learning. In many companies, the communications bandwidth required to deliver high-quality class material over local area networks to employees' PCs is not available. There are also problems in using techniques such as internet telephony. 'Online learning may be mature now, but what is not mature is the way it gets through to trainees. The virtual classroom can be very rickety,' claims Mr Hagen of Wide Learning. There are additional costs, too. While an hour's lecture in a classroom may call for 50 hours of preparation, an hour's worth of e-learning requires an average 250 hours' development time, according to Mr van Dam. On top of this come various management overheads. Although online training can be done on a self-access basis, in practice, trainees still need prompting to remember training times, deadlines and course assignments. Meanwhile, e-learning still has a long way to go. Most users are multinational companies with more than 5000 employees. There is still a huge untapped market among smaller enterprises. 'Eventually I think we'll see around 50 percent of training being done online,' forecasts Mike Maunder, vice president of international operations at Saba, the training company. 'However, it seems unlikely that all the training centres will be shutting their doors just yet.'