"Prudential added a Learning Content Management System (LCMS) in 2002, as a repository for all learning content created by the BTDs throughout Prudential. The LCMS also provides a common platform, or “glue,” for the rich mix of authoring tools that our developers use, as well as for Microsoft Office®applications, and other software used for the various delivery outputs (LMS, CD-ROM, print, etc.). We began launching courses from the LCMS in 2003."

Prudential Financial serves individual and institutional customers worldwide and includes The Prudential Insurance Company of America, one of the largest life insurance companies in the U.S. These companies offer a variety of products and services, including life insurance, mutual funds, annuities, pension- and retirement related services, real estate brokerage franchises, and relocation services. Prudential’s learning community consists of over a dozen business training departments (BTDs) that serve Prudential’s employee development requirements. These BTDs are responsible for creating the end-training products for their respective departments, including Operations, Systems, and Sales, among others.

In terms of organizational structure, the BTDs are located in Prudential’s three business divisions — Insurance, Investments, and International Insurance and Investments. The Learning Organization, located in the corporate Human Resources group, supports these BTDs. The Learning Organization is Prudential’s corporate learning department and is responsible for providing the learning infrastructure to the BTDs, and for supporting their training strategy, design, development, and delivery needs. In addition, the Learning Organization creates enterprise learning content, such as risk management and ethics training, and it negotiates enterprise content contracts.

Prudential purchased its first standalone e-Learning courses and installed its first Learning Management System (LMS) in 1998. Two years later, we moved away from a learning-lab model and made all e-Learning accessible from the desktop. In 2001, we began deploying e-Learning through a new corporate Web-based LMS. Today, Prudential offers over 300 e-Learning courses, with 20% of these custom created in-house or in partnerships with vendors; this percentage is expected to grow in 2004.

The use of e-Learning grew in 2003, after Prudential announced a “no-fee” policy for the online offerings (known as Web-based training, or WBTs). In 2002, learners accessed an average of 600 WBTs a month. In 2003, that number rose to over 1500. (See Figure 1.)

 

FIGURE 1 Usage of Prudential’s Web-based Training offerings increased dramatically after a no-fee policy was instituted in February, 2003

 

Prudential added a Learning Content Management System (LCMS) in 2002, as a repository for all learning content created by the BTDs throughout Prudential. The LCMS also provides a common platform, or “glue,” for the rich mix of authoring tools that our developers use (Authorware ®, Trainersoft®), as well as for Microsoft Office®applications such as Microsoft Word® and PowerPoint®, and other software used for the various delivery outputs (LMS, CD-ROM, print, etc.). We began launching courses from the LCMS in 2003.

Prudential’s e-Learning strategy

Prudential’s strategy is to move to a just-in-time and just-for-me learning delivery environment. The goal of this strategy is to deliver targeted and personalized training interventions to end users when they want, and how they want it.

Just-in-time learning focuses on speed-to-delivery. Learners will be able to access training when they want. Just-in-time-learning promotes flexibility of content delivery and will lead to a more convenient and useful training experience. In practical terms, this will mean learners can take targeted training in a shorter period of time. The LCMS supports this goal, since it will allow learners to interact with“parts” of courses, instead of an entire course. We define these “parts” as Learning Objects (LOs).

Just-for-me learning is concerned with the personalization of the training. Learners will be able to take training that is shorter, and that is in a form that best helps them transfer the knowledge into productive workplace activities. The goal is for content to be packaged for the learners’ situation. An example of this would be to provide given content as a formal course, as a job aid (for example, as a printed document), or as a simulation.

In order to support just-in-time and just-for-me learning, training interventions will move away from traditional course structures toward learning objectstructures. Training, in other words, will be broken down into learning chunks. With a more modular approach to content creation, learners will be able to locate and make use of the chunks or objects they wish from across the organization’s training curricula. Objects can also be delivered in multiple outputs (i.e. paper, CD-ROM, Web) appropriate to individual learning styles and situations.

From the developers’ point of view, there are advantages to LO design. Developers can create a more blended learning approach when delivering objects to their training audience. As described later in the article, we define our objects aroundtheir relation to objectives and time. That is, Learning Objects are terminal objectives and are no more than 25 minutes long. Since objects maintain consistent structures in regard to objectives and time, developers can better match specific LOs to their target audience (i.e. search for objects by objectives). In addition, object development allows for the ability to combine and recombine content with other content thus eliminating redundancy and speeding up the content creation process across the development community. The benefits derived from this include the increased speed in development times, the ability to review other developers’content across the enterprise, and the potential increase in quality as a result of leveraging and repurposing corporate resources.

Realizing the e-Learning strategy

To implement this strategy, Prudential followed this process:

• Learning content authoring: choose an LCMS
• Learning object guidelines: define learning objects
• Instructional design principles: define quality level for the objects
• Instructional design review: create a coaching environment on design
• Content audit: ensure the guidelines are followed

Learning content authoring

An LCMSarchitecture creates a “middle area” in which content can be stored, and then delivered and published to a LMS in a form that complies with standards such as