As product life cycles shrink, companies need to train their sales forces and distributors--as well as educate end users--in less time. The faster pace has led to an innovation called rapid e-learning. The term describes a variety of live and on-demand technologies that help companies create and disseminate training materials or important corporate updates on the fly, including ASP-based software tools, virtual classrooms, even podcasts.

    Rapid e-learning tools are on the upswing because companies are on the hunt for training that’s more informal, quicker to create and cheaper, according to industry analysts. Rapid e-learning currently accounts for a third of training-related projects and is expected to account for half of all training-related projects by 2008, according to a May 2005 report by Bersin & Associates, an HR training consulting firm.

    The trend is one force behind recent merger and acquisition activity in the e-learning industry, which has seen larger learning management system vendors snapping up smaller competitors with rapid e-learning products, such as Saba’s deal for Centra that is expected to close in January 2006, says Peter McStravick, an HR training industry analyst with technology research firm IDC.

    In addition to using rapid e-learning for traditional training applications in sales or compliance, companies are employing it in nontraditional ways--for example, in marketing and corporate communications. One customer of Brainshark, a rapid e-learning vendor that turns PowerPoint slides into training programs, has used the company’s technology to broadcast information about executive compensation to 3,000 managers. "Before, they’d have to fly an executive around to tell people about the plan," Brainshark CEO Joe Gustafson says.

    Another company that has embraced rapid e-learning is BlueCross/BlueShield of Florida, the $10 billion health care insurance company. Previously, training that BlueCross/BlueShield provided for several thousand of its independent agents and brokers consisted mainly of sending out e-mail with PowerPoint presentations attached. Those attachments, however, often got deleted before they were read, company officials say. In late 2002, the company rebuilt its entire health insurance product line and needed to distribute a lot of new information about it. One-on-one presentations were too expensive, so sales training personnel uploaded PowerPoint slides to Brainshark’s ASP and used voice mail to record audio commentary, and Brainshark combined the audio and visual and e-mailed it to the company’s independent agents.

    It was slow going at first as the sales training team learned how to use the new tools and built up a PowerPoint slide library, says Scott Bryant, the company’s sales training director. "As soon as those were ready, it worked great," Bryant says.

    In fact, the experience has been so positive that BlueCross/BlueShield is using the same technology to train its 250-person internal sales staff on new products such as Medicare Part D. "Salespeople and agents and brokers didn’t like to take a day out of their lives. They’re losing money when they’re sitting in a classroom. Now a lot of them can go self-study," says Jep Larkin, BlueCross/BlueShield’s director of sales communications. Once BlueCross/BlueShield signs a new customer, the company uses the same rapid e-learning technology to educate the client’s employees on its products.

    HR and learning industry analysts expect innovations to continue in virtual-classroom and other technologies that let companies create learning and training content in a matter of days or weeks. According to Bersin & Associates, some of the major vendors in the field include Macromedia, Brainshark, Articulate, CourseAvenue, DirectWeb, Learn.com, Centra, iLinc, Interwise and WebEx.