Cisco Systems Ventures into the Land of Reusability

Case Study: Cisco Systems Ventures into the Land of Reusability

By ABuchiri

Here's how Cisco Systems transferred its instructor-led Career Certification courses into an e-learning format to better streamline lessons, allow thousands of employees to learn at their own pace, and arm its closest learning partners with reusable learning objects they could repurpose into customized course offerings.

In 2000, Cisco CEO John Chambers said that he wanted Cisco to be THE e-learning company, and he was looking to its Internet Learning Solutions Group to deliver that vision. To answer the call, the group decided to implement a reusable learning object strategy. At the time, Cisco Career Certification courses were delivered almost exclusively in an instructor-led training format, which included 1,000-plus page student guides that were available only in Microsoft PowerPoint and Word formats.

Enter Evolution, a new development and delivery tool produced by startup company OutStart that enables developers to author e-learning content in an application that automates the creation, tagging, storing, and searching of objects in a database environment. Instead of a traditional flat file in a desktop application such as Microsoft Word, Evolution is a Web-form, database-driven tool. Although development of traditional training entails programming at the back end to publish to the Web, Evolution enables authors to update content on the fly and immediately review a Web-based rendered result. However, that requires authors to write in a client-server environment--with associated server performance issues--rather than to the desktop. It also means that development and production work can occur in one tool rather than passing a storyboard to a production team for Web programming.

Through the use of a reusable learning object strategy coupled with OutStart's Evolution authoring tool, we were able to redesign and rewrite all eight of our certification courses and create one content set, which ensured that courses were consistent in instructional design and technical accuracy, as well as globally. In addition, Cisco Learning Solution Partners who embraced a blended approach now can provide a package of offerings for each course: traditional classroom training, live virtual training, or self-paced e-learning. Partners also can take our source content and create customized solutions for their customers by combining a variety of RLOs into new offerings. Although many learning partners were reluctant to move to an e-learning format for delivery, they came to realize that their internal classroom instructors could benefit from a new authoring approach. Indeed, many instructors were already using the Web-based product in their classroom rather than their traditional overhead slides, taking advantage of high-quality graphics, animations, and interactive exercises.

Sound good? It is, but direct Web authoring requires a significant amount of preparation on the front end of course development, which required Cisco authors to make a fundamental change to how they developed content and to use a new, early-adopter application. Even though Evolution was already being used on a limited basis by a small group of developers within Cisco, the ILSG team needed meaningful user feedback before we extended the application to other internal groups. Key word: meaningful. So in the early implementation phase, management decided to include a gripe session during its weekly status meetings. We invited a group of Cisco course writers, editors, graphic designers, and reviewers to have lunch on us and offer feedback on Evolution. We deliberately included a group of non-technical employees to review the application because we thought they would give an unbiased opinion of the software.

In the first few meetings, we faced a frustrated and reluctant set of players who were more than happy to articulate their concerns. Authors worried about using a new tool to write courses and perform maintenance. Editors said they couldn't imagine rewrites without redline paragraphs and call-outs. Subject matter experts balked at learning an entirely new application for submitting course feedback. Armed with that input, we realized two things: The development team needed to embrace a new way of doing work, and success required a close partnership with OutStart to improve Evolution's features and capabilities.

Having gone through this type of implementation, here are some key steps that you can use to help ease the inevitable growing pains that come with moving to a database-driven e-learning environment.

Pilot content that isn't a top priority. That may sound backward, but converting less visible content lessens pressure and can give you more time to tweak problems that arise. Expectations are high for critical content, and the sheer breadth of the project can be overwhelming and time consuming, forcing costly shortcuts.

Choose developers eager to try new tools. Ultimately, developers are the people who must advocate conversion efforts. If