Innovative Education
Online Learning Offers Flexibility for Students, Revenue for Businesses
By Susan Kavanaugh
Most people would agree that the Internet has been a blessing rather than a
burden. It’s the proverbial information superhighway and has opened up a whole new
world of communication opportunities. One such offering is education. For busy
long-term care employees, online courses for certification or CEUs are a
convenient and respectable way to build transcripts. For long-term care
companies, e-learning is also a way to develop additional revenue and enhance
reputation. Can online education really be called innovative? While a strong
learning factor is intrinsic to the amount of information one can find on the
Internet, the variety of certifications, degrees and continuing education units
offered has shaped up to be extensive, unique, and quite frankly, innovative.
Take Your Pick
“We have 1260 hours of courses across 16 different disciplines,” says Laura
More, partner and cofounder of Care2Learn.com, an e-learning website for
healthcare professionals. “We offer a downloadable PDF for every course because
some people who are kinesthetic learners want to hold the page in their hands.
Later this year, we’ll have a course that offers more interactivity. You’ll be
able to roll over a picture and a textbox will pop up and say something like,
‘What would you do with this patient? Would you give them the Insulin 100 or the
Diabeta?’ and when you roll over the answer, it says, ‘Sorry, you just killed
the patient,’ or ‘Yes, that’s the right answer.’”
Sharon Brothers, owner and operator of four memory-care facilities in
California and Oregon and co-founder of EasyCEU.com, says her site offers 11
courses, all approved by the National Association of Boards of Examiners of
Long-Term Care Administrators (NAB). “We started with CEUs, but got requests for
the classes in the form of in-service programs so the course could be used to
teach entire staffs,” Brothers shares. “Now we offer staff training kits. One of
our programs is called Who Taught Grandma How to Box?. If you have a
resident in your care who is combative and you’d like to teach your staff how to
deal with him—walk over to your computer, press print, and for less than $30,
you can have a ready-to-teach in-service.”
Continuing education is not an optional activity for healthcare
professionals, according to More. “Even if our national association or
accrediting body does not require it, we would choose to seek our educational
opportunities to keep up with advances in clinical practice and to learn
specialty areas of treatment,” she says.
Dr. James Allen, associate professor of Health Policy and Administration at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and founder of Long
TermCareEducation.com, says that his site offers 100 courses for nursing home
administrators and assisted living administrators. All of the CEUs he offers are
approved by the National Continuing Education Review Service of NAB. More than
45 states accept the NAB-approved courses for assisted living. Allen started his
website four years ago and has been involved in long-term care education for 20
years.
“I migrated into the long-term care department; I just sort of fell in love
with the long-term care facility and the long-term care administrator’s job
because it’s one of the most complex jobs in healthcare administration,” says
Allen. “The hospital administrator has a couple of assistants, a lawyer on
staff, a medical staff, physicians and more. The long-term care administrator
has him or herself and that’s it,” adds Allen. His concern for this “underdog” led him to establish his e-learning site. He provides the content and has his
own webmaster. Allen is also a bit like the man behind the curtain in the
Wizard of Oz, answering the phones and working directly with the end user,
while at the same time, the brain behind the operation.
There are a multitude of online programs to select from, including those
affiliated with accredited universities. For instance, the University of
Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology is offering the
nation’s first online Master’s degree program in gerontology. According to
representative, Maria Henke, the degree program consists of seven, four-unit
courses, which if a student took one class at a time, he can graduate in two
years and one summer.
Easy Access
What makes online education so appealing is its flexibility. “The chance to
take a course on a Saturday morning at 9 a.m. for 20 minutes, then go grocery
shopping and then come back and work on it for the next day is just invaluable,”
explains More.
“The benefit,” adds Henke, “is that students can access the course work at
any time and from anywhere in the world.” Allen, from LongTermCare Education.com
echoes More’s statement and says that students can do courses at their own pace,
in their own home and on their own deadline.
Brothers, with EasyCEU.com, agrees and explains that it’s more than just
timing that makes online learning so attractive, but location and budget as
well. “There are wonderful conferences you can go to, but the problem is, they’re
often expensive and you’ve got to get to them, which can sometimes be a
logistical problem.” Brothers says they are beginning to partner with state
associations to offer providers from rural areas a chance to meet their
continuing education requirements. The new associations her company is making
offer additional revenue but greater satisfaction. “What’s really gratifying for
me is that I get these e-mails constantly from users who say, ‘I always go to my
annual convention, but this year I had a staffing crisis and couldn’t get there.
I’m in trouble if I don’t get my CEUs from somewhere, so I’m glad to know about
you.’”
“We even have students who are online in Germany at a military station,”says
More. “We have service nurses in Brazil and Mexico. And, this is going to sound
a little odd, but nuns who are nurses. We have a discount program with the
Little Sisters of the Poor, and they have nursing homes all over the world and
some of them are accessing from really remote locations.”
Additionally, Godfrey Parkin, president of the elearning company MindRise
cautions that anytime, anywhere-access presents one important concern: leaner motivation. He says, “An e-learner must be more motivated and
committed than a classroom learner, willing to take responsibility for his or
her own progress rather than being pulled along by the rest of the class.”
Mind Your Technology
One of the most challenging aspects of running an online education site,
according to Brothers, is the technical part. “Finding a web designer that could
grasp what we wanted to do and who was financially feasible took us months,” she
says. “We also find that our original concept with our website changes every day. We have to say
‘enough’ sometimes.”
“It’s all about bandwidth,” adds More. “Some users are still on 24K dial-up
so we sometimes have to wait for bandwidth to get small enough before using some
technology. Right now, we do not offer streaming video because of asynchrony-the
mismatch of sound to the movement of the speaker’s lips.” An IBM study has
supported the fact that asynchrony is not only distracting but actually
interferes with a viewer’s belief in the learning material. “When we started our
website, we asked focus groups and users what their biggest barrier to accessing
the site would be and they all said ‘technology.’ ‘Don’t crash my computer;
don’t use extra bandwidth; don’t make me download another software program that I have to use,’”
continues More.
Students and users of online education want to look for ease of navigation
when considering use of a site. If the buttons or messages are hard to
understand, chances are the courses will reflect a lack of quality or attention
to detail. Additionally, don’t be impressed with “bells and whistles.” While
this may suggest extra effort on a webmaster’s part, these may not necessarily
reflect the quality of content.
Online Education as a Business
Offering online education can create several different revenue streams for
businesses and entrepreneurs. More explains, “One of the things that we do
that’s been very valuable in a post-acute market has been a customized online
university—an example would be the American College of Healthcare Administrators
(ACHCA) University.” Care2Learn.com created and maintains the site and runs it
in a revenue-sharing venture with ACHCA. “We are looking to corporate clients
for additional ventures. We can build something that easily accommodates
client’s special requests,” More emphasizes.
Dan Hughes and Matthew White have been following e-learning trends for years.
They are founders of SmartPursuit.com, a company profiled in The Wall Street
Journal and Monster.com’s “Provider of the Week” column.
SmartPursuit.com offers clients the opportunity to build and customize
e-learning sites. “We saw there were a lot of organizations out there missing the opportunity
to have digital online training or e-learning integrated into their training
environment because it was cost-prohibitive...small to medium-sized businesses
especially had problems,” says COO Hughes. “The business concept we had was first, let’s build the very
best course-management system for the small to medium-sized business. Second,
let’s go out and find the very best content and tell these content providers
‘Why don’t you license your content to us and we’ll re-purpose it and sell it to
smaller markets?’ They love it because many can’t afford to hire direct sales
forces to penetrate these niche markets.”
An online education website can be customized and built for companies (such
as long-term care provider organizations) in as little as 48 hours. 200 courses
are immediately available, primarily in human resource management, sales,
customer service and new employee orientation. Long-term care courses will soon
be available as more joint ventures are formed with pending partners.
One of SmartPursuit.com’s greatest attributes is its maximized use of
technology. “When you have more dynamic content, you engage the learner and they
retain more,” says CEO Matthew White. “When Dan and I were looking at content
providers, we sought completely interactive, multimedia, really engaging sound
and video—and it’s kitschy and there’s a storyline. Ours run like TV shows
basically. We’ve found this to be the most effective type of learning.”
Whether seeking online education or exploring its opportunities for revenue,
there are a multitude of companies to choose from. Go online and explore the
offerings, or check with your colleagues to see what they are doing. In the long
run you’ll have the chance to save or make money and have a fascinating
time in the process.
RESOURCES:
www.Care2Learn.com
www.EasyCEU.com
www.LongTermCareEducation.com
www.MindRise.com
www.usc.edu/dept/AgeWorks
www.SmartPursuit.com
|
