Businesses need to catch up with online learning opportunities if they want to be equal to the demands of a 21st century economy, according to a British learning technology expert.

Gilly Salmon, who heads the University of Leicester’s Beyond Distance Research Alliance, says many corporate trainers are behind the times when it comes to knowledge of e-learning technologies and the educational power of virtual worlds like Second Life. Schools, colleges and universities, on the other hand, have been swift to take advantage of a host of training technologies.

Businesses unaware of such new resources, she says, are losing time and money, as well as frustrating their employees.

“I think they are missing huge opportunities at the moment,” Salmon said. “It’s a tragedy when someone from the corporate training world comes in and talks to me about what is going on in e-learning and then says, ‘I wish I’d known about all this five years ago.’ “

Salmon has called on business trainers to start talking to university e-learning teams so that they can learn from one another, with business representatives becoming associates or research partners. This would lead researchers to a better understanding of corporate training needs, and give trainers early notice of the latest technological developments.

Salmon’s team, for example, uses the virtual world Second Life to build a virtual oil rig for health and safety training. It allows students to role-play in a safe environment and costs only around £1,000 a year to run.

“I would have thought there would have been a huge application for something like that across the corporate training world,” she said.

The way people learn is changing rapidly, and it is no longer possible for trainers to draw on their own experiences of learning to inform the way they pass on new knowledge, she added. Furthermore, she said, companies can spend millions of pounds setting up e-learning courses that fail to achieve their objectives because they are inappropriately designed.

“What tends to happen in corporate training is people set targets for x number of courses to be online whereas they should look at what kind of learning works with what kind of technology,” Salmon said.

Salmon’s Beyond Distance Research Alliance won the Association for Learning Technology’s Learning Technologist of the Year Team award this month (SEPT) jointly with a team from Nottingham University.

The Leicester team was praised for its outstanding research-based contribution to the field of learning technology and for influencing the growing use of this technology at the university, while remaining committed to working with wide external partnerships. Salmon this month also accepted a UNIQUe award on behalf of the University from the European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning. This is a new quality mark that recognises European universities for their innovative use of ICT.

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