Nynex Ready to Take Next Step in Multimedia:
Multimedia taken beyond the learning center
and onto user's desktops
Service News, December, 1995

Info For You

NEW YORK, NY - A believer in the merits of electronic education platforms, Nynex's director of training and education, John Connelly, has found a tool he hopes will maximize his current computer based training program by bringing an embedded learning system onto end users' desktops.

During the past six years, Connelly has established 12 learning centers in high-volume office buildings where tens of thousand of employees, whether administrative or field operations, can come to take a wide variety of PC literacy courses. "We are up over 11,000 training days this year so far in the multimedia training, " he says.

Employees can choose from about 35 multimedia courses, or about 20 computer based training courses available at the various learning centers. The courses cover everything from Lotus Notes, to Microsoft office Suite, to proprietary Nynex applications. Each learning center is staffed with a facilitator, which allows individual students to take different courses during the same session. "When we started, we started with ten students taking one course," says Connelly. "Then it dawned on me, because it's self-paced and learner controlled, I said we could have every student in the learning center taking a different course if they wanted, as long as the facilitator is able to monitor and support the student."

Connelly says that the facilitator brings the human element into the learning centers, and therefore helps combine the best of traditional classroom techniques with the best of electronic learning products. However, Connelly says he believes that as employees become more comfortable with electronic learning platforms, it's possible that they could navigate multimedia products on their own. And that's the next step in Connelly's training plan.

"If we could take that training and cut it up into snippets of information, like on-line help, or on-line reference material, and put it right in the workplace, right where the employee is working so that they can access the information when they need it, in small bits at the time they need the information, then they don't even have to leave the workplace," says Connelly.

Nynex's solution is to pilot a new product from PTS Learning Systems based in King of Prussia, PA. Its new On-Demand Interactive Learning multimedia product allows users to select from three on-line learning modes at their desktop. The most advanced mode guides users through a specific task using text, graphics, sound and an animated laser pointer inside the live application in which the user is working.

"It's called the concurrent mode, and we refer to it as 'lightning learning,' as a catch phrase," explains PTS's vice president of marketing Rodman Heckman. "It shows you what to do, and once you've done it, it checks it off. If I went through eight steps on how to save an existing document, when I got finished I would find that I got my work finished at the same time [as I was learning how to do it]. And that's why we call it concurrent."

Additional choices include an Animated Demo that allows the user to simply watch the correct steps, and an Interactive Teacher that delivers the lesson in a simulated environment, while the student repeats each step to complete the activity. Another feature on On-Demand Interactive Learning is that it can be delivered over a network, which is what Nynex intends to do. "This product is easily networkable because it doesn't have all of the bandwidth-using things like full-motion video, the things that the network manager would object to," says Ellen Julian, an analyst at research firm IDC, in Framingham, MA. "It's more readily usable on a network than perhaps some other multimedia products out there."

Connelly intends to pilot the On-Demand Interactive Learning product in the New York Nynex building where he works. "We'll be using the infrastructure within Nynex, the LAN learning environment for the On-Demand product," says Connelly. "So the key in the future is to use the network to deliver training to wherever. Using a resource that is already there and expanding it to handle this type of thing."

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