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In January of 1999, Inside Technology Training editor Elaine Appleton gathered together seven experts in education and training for a wide-ranging, passionate conversation about learning online. Following are highlights of Bill Schabel’s comments in that forum.

Elaine Appleton: In a world that’s focused on mass markets and where volume means a lot, the move to distance learning isn’t a pure instructional move. It’s really driven by economics and efficiency. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it’s different from the traditional motivation for good teaching. So in that environment, how would you define what good instruction is at a distance?

Bill Schabel: I define good instruction simply as instruction that meets the learning objectives, whatever they are. And to me, one of the traps is when that changes because of the technology. Technology should remain transparent. You have to design the learning process a little differently depending on how you’re delivering it, obviously, but it should have minimum impact on what is delivered to the students. [It should be] a tool, as opposed to something that changes the whole nature of learning.

Elaine: Do you think it’s really being used as a tool?

Bill: I think more often than not that people get enamored with the technology – it’s neat, it’s cool, let’s try it this way – and they do it for the wrong purposes.

Any time you use the technology just for the sake of using it you have a potential problem. Then you’re abusing it. Classic example: NFL play-by-play announcer John Madden. They reportedly had to put limitations on the telestrater he uses to draw the X’s and O’s on screen. They basically said, “Look, you’re driving people crazy, you’re using that thing to much. Stop it!” He had a piece of fantastic technology, but he used it so much purely for the sake of using it that it became a distraction, instead of a useful tool.

Elaine: What will you be doing at the Southern Company as you grow even more, to get the training out to all those people?

Bill: Whatever it takes. Our challenge is to do more training, with less money and with turnaround speed like we couldn’t even have imagined five years ago. So, it’s whatever technology can help us do that.

We just finished a distance learning program that enabled us to put several thousand people through a mandatory training program in a matter of weeks. Traditionally, I mean, you do the math, if you have 50 people in a class, how many classes would that take? How many people would have to travel to a training site to complete that training? How many facilitators would you have to have? We were doing several hundred people at a crack – basically accomplishing the same thing with far less time, not to mention travel savings a significant reduction of time off the job not to mention more consistent instruction.

Elaine: What does all this mean to our readers, most of whom have been doing traditional classroom instruction for a long time? How can they get the skills that they need to either develop asynchronous programs or to be facilitators online and to move into this new world? Are they prepared?

Bill: I think a lot of them aren’t prepared. But, if they’re smart, they will get prepared and quickly. If you’re sitting around waiting to see what’s going to happen next, and you’re not ready, you’re going to get hit with a wave that you’re not ever going to get up from.

To me the hardest thing for a traditional facilitator to change is their mindset. If you are a really strong advocate of facilitator-centered learning, you are bound and deter-mined to fail with distance learning technology. It just won’t work. One of the keys to being effective with all of this new learning technology is making it more participant-centered.

The good news it that it can rejuvenate your career. I’ve always enjoyed training, but got the point after 20 plus years that I thought I had “seen and heard it all”. Getting involved in distance learning has been like starting all over again for me in a lot of ways. And I was afraid of it at first, I don’t mind telling you.