If my organization (an airline) were going to launch an online initiative in the next 12 months, according to Bates, Managing Technological Change, chapter 7 (pages 173-179) I would choose the partnership funding to find funds to run the program with an arrangement based on external accreditation. I would find the best aeronautical programs that Colombia have and I would propose them to partner with us to design an online program for the flight attendance. The flight attendances need to demonstrate their skills and capabilities based on accredited licenses and it could be a successful way to implement the program and have better costs for all the constituents.

The airline can gain formal academic accreditation for its programs for their employees and have better employees performance results and better talent and potential based on their professional development. The universities can gain new students, take advantage of their brand management by partnering with a good reputation airline brand that could bring more students for their programs as a synonymous of good quality, excellence in education and the ability to connect the university programs with real corporation for better future. This partnership would be a win-win strategy for the partners.

From the beginning it is important to involve university and airline to design a business case and answer all the possible issues we could address in order to fill all the expectations and present the project to both board of trustees.

In the corporate world I see the following benefits for blended learning:

1. The organization could be more flexible about the type of training its audience is going to receive based on their learners needs, interests and expectations.

2. Learning is considered a continous process, then blended learning offers different maneers to interact with teaching in a defined period of time.

3. In a world where the audience gets busy at work, having presential and virtual activities will allow employees to interact actively and promote innovation meanwhile boring is avoided.

4. For control and audit proposes, it ensures that they will have evaluation for all training methods, and assesments could be choosen for different purposes depending on the audit goals.

5. For facilitators that don’t have many experience using technology, having both approaches (class room and virtual) will give them a certain grade of security meanwhile their acquire the new skills.

These are the challenges I observe for blending training:

1. When employees are located in differente geographical regions, having a presential classroom implies traveling costs. We need to understand very well the demographics of the target audience to avoid this obstacle.

2. We need to monitor the self pace interest the employees have with the training innitiative, in order to ensure a satisfactory completion rate.

3. Content analysis, audience analysis, media analysis and goals analysis might be an important phase of the planning to deliver the best training methods for the right audience.

4. Build case studies for the organization former learning programs with the aim of continously improvement, cases that would be shared with the leadership team to get their advice and commitment with the learning process.

5. Maintain the learning approaches up-to-dated and useful for the audience, and understand when is the proper time to adjust and change the activities.

6. It needs a greater support from facilitators, mentors and support staff for students, in order to maintain employees engaged with all the training activities and monitor their performance.

Based on Educase Interactive Top Ten IT Issues 2000 to 2014 article, I learned that through the years, issues have change; although, there are some that remain as top issues along the time: Funding IT strategically and Administrative/ERP/Information systems. There are others that have been challenges most of the years, like faculty development, support and training, governance, organization and leadership, and disaster recovery/business continuity. The one that impacted me the most is that change management has only been an issue for one year: 2008. E-learning involves change management and it is particularly  odd that this hasn’t been an issue along the time.

Other thought that comes to me, is that there are issues that appears early in the first years and come back in the current years, like assisting faculty with infrastructure technology and IT staffing models. It seems that organizational structures change in a lower pace than the e-learning IT infrastructure needs, and future planning need to be implemented in order to avoid these issues.

If I was the e-learning director of an organization, my two budget priorities for next year will be focused on:

1. Funding IT strategically

2. Establishing a partnership between IT and institutional leadership

This two priorities will address the e-learning infrastructure needs and will focus the organization around the vision and purpose of the institution, having great conversations of the strategy based on the IT requirements to support the strategy and generate expected outcomes.

I really enjoyed the two weekly videos. Steve Jobs amazed me by telling that he didn’t use to have committees in Apple and the directors used to meet once a week for 3 hours to address the main problems and decisions. And it was really wise to think that if HR hires great people, leaders must to allow them to make decisions. On the other hand, Jack Welch point of view about HR, looking at the HR role as one of the two most importat roles of the company, made me proud of my role. We are the driving force behind the future of the team, fitting the best players and sitting in every meeting to be involved in each decision. I loved both point of views and agree with both of them.

On the other hand, following Khan, Managing E-learning, Chapter 3 and Bates, and Bates, Planning and Managing Courses and Programs, Chapter 3, my Aha moments were:

1. The P3 continuum -People, Process, Product- methodology for managing e-learning initiatives. It was really clear for me to learn about the different roles of a project, and how one person can have different roles depending on his/her skills, experience, background and interests.

2. I really enjoyed to play the role of the e-learning manager for the pharmaceutical organization, to address managerial issues and imagine how could we solve some of the daily basis we can have. Problems that in the most of the times have people involved so we need to take care of them to engage people and allow their development and results.

3. My last Aha moment was the key points to have in mind to deliver great courses following Bates and Khan:

a. Assess audience needs based on leaders, customers and employees point of view to deliver the right e-learning programs.

b. Have a clear understood mission, vision, values, purpose of the e-learning department aligned with the company ones.

c.  Permanently monitor quality and the program schedule, clearly following each milestone defined and deadlines and give feedback each time it is required.

d. Involve in the testing phase actual employees, interns and customers and allow the team itself be involved in this phase to clearly deliver the right and expected product.

e. Celebrate achievements and keep a recognition program for the team in order to incentivize the goals. accomplishment and their engagement with the project

The two most disastrous e-learning projects failures that I have experienced are:

1. Failure to gain long-term, on-going support from management. In my experience, I have ask for management support, and although they are convinced about the e-learning program is necessary and valued, they don’t act as a role model involving themselves and participating in the program. Possible solutions: a. Find a common “self-studing” schedule where all the leadership team has the responsibility to perform the e-learning exercise. With a non interruption code policy they will try to keep the space for what is intended. b. Incentive any recognition program when leaders accomplish their e-learning activities. c. Involve management in the planning, needs gather and design of the e-learning initiatives, so they are going to be ambassadors of the e-learning experience. d. Present quarterly KPIs and connect e-learning achievements  with business results (ROI).

2. Failure to keep all customers/stakeholders involved and aligned with the e-learning goals of the organization. In my experience, although the e-learning goals are met with the organizational strategy and needs, overload, limit of time, think that e-learning is not important and urgent task are first and lack of interest makes that customers/stakeholders don’t be involved with the e-learning programs. Possible solutions: a., b. and c. from point 1 are totally aplicable + d. Include e-learning development objectives as a performance smart indicator to improve personal and professional development e. Communicate achievements, e-learning KPIs, and testimonial quotes to attract more audience. f. Ensure e-learning goals are designed with customers/stakeholders input.

Elearning is a huge undiscovered world for developing human beings through the internet or web services. This is intended to teach the audience with any topic of interest, using media, asynchronous sessions, blogs, forums, and other resources to approach the development of a specific knowledge. All the contents might be planned, designed according to the audience needs, and delivered in a simple way to ensure students can take advantage of the elearning at all.

Elearning is a great scenario when organizations need to deal with time issues, geographic different settings, diversity and inclusion initiatives and adult education, among others. Not always it implies lower costs, sometimes this is not the primary intention. It involves to be connected in a modern world and it allows people to maintain updated with the newest available technologies.

Elearning requires a big amount of self management, because this is a huge component of the own responsibility a student must to compromise to become a successful student.

According to the book Managing E-learning: Design, Delivery, Implementationand Evaluation by Badrul Khan (c) 2005, Idea Group, Inc. the definition of e-learning is:

The management of elearning consists on the whole administration of the initiative to ensure its success. It engages planning, design phases, materials to be used, resources, costs, instructional programs, time definition, evaluation to prove students knowledge acquired and to understand the quality and feedback of the elearning itself, common obstacles and challenges, etc.