DISTANCE LEARNING: A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE?

13 November 2001

During the next 10-20 years, there will be substantial growth in the use and acceptance of distance learning to either augment or replace traditional educational environments. That, according to the Cutter Business Technology Council.

Cutter Business Technology Council Fellow Ed Yourdon says that for businesses, using distance learning for training purposes will not only save the company money and eliminate logistic problems, but could lead to a strategic competitive advantage.

"If distance learning sounds attractive to your organization, the next few years should not be the time when your organization announces its success by saying, 'With distance learning, we cut our training costs by 10%'," says Yourdon. "Instead, you should be looking for statements like, 'Distance learning opened up markets for us that would never have been possible before, or distance learning made it possible to provide some training experiences that would not have been possible in any other way'."

But, don't expect classrooms or teaching facilities to vanish soon. The Cutter Business Technology Council says that there are still some stumbling blocks for distance learning to become the norm. They include:

• Insufficient bandwidth
  
  
• Limited courseware development skills
  
  
• Distance learning may not substitute for the experience of face-to-face interactions between teacher and student
  
  

In addition to corporate use, distance learning will also have an impact on society, the most common practices being for hobbyist forms of education and one-on-one mentoring.

"It's important to remember that the consumer marketplace is entirely different from the business marketplace," says Yourdon. "Even in advanced countries, the penetration of the Internet into the home has only reached the 50% level. In rural areas of North America and Europe, it's lower; in developing nations, it's lower still. This will certainly change over the next decade or two, but it is extremely optimistic to assume that a majority of the population will have access to the Internet in the foreseeable future."

--Cutter Consortium

[These statistics were taken from Cutter Consortium's Business Technology Trends and Impacts Advisory Service. For more information, please contact Dennis Crowley at +1 781 641 5125 or +1 800 964 5125 or e-mail dcrowley@cutter.com or visit http://www.cutter.com/consortium/index_trends.html.]