Company: Telefónica
Business: Telecommunications
Location: Madrid, Spain and Latin America

The Company
Telefónica is the national phone company of Spain. Telefónica either owns or has a majority positions in many Latin American telecommunication companies. With yearly revenues of $50 billion and over 100,000 employees in 20 countries, Telefónica has major training needs.

The Challenge
Training is a priority in the fast changing world of the telecommunications industry. Telefónica wants employees located anywhere in the world to receive the same training on the same subjects. Initially Telefónica's corporate goal was to move 50% of their training to e-Learning by 2007. In 2004, Educaterra,Telefónica's education division provided Telefónica's more than 90,000 employees with over a million hours of training. At that time they were using Adobe products and produced around 50 e-Learning courses a year. To reach their goal by 2007, they need to increase production to 500 courses a year, while maintaining the same budget. “It currently takes six people four months to create an e-Learning course using the most popular development tools available.” said Daniel Purlich Director of Content at Educaterra. “From a strategic point of view I am always on the lookout for ways to improve our current paradigm. We need to streamline our approach to creating e-Learning so that we can produce more courses, faster. Fundamentally we need to push e-Learning to the subject matter experts, using my people’s instructional design knowledge and graphic ability to move courses to the next level. When I saw ReadyGo Web Course Builder, I knew this is the right kind of tool to meet our objective.”

The ReadyGo WCB Solution
“Initially we had resistance from our traditional course designers. They had always used WYSIWYG development tools. They did not think a structured tool would provide them with the flexibility they needed to create courses.” said Purlich. “Eventually a new employee took the chance and used ReadyGo to build a course. A course that typically took six people four months to create, took her one-week to create using ReadyGo WCB.” Within six months Educaterra produced over 300 hours of course content using ReadyGo WCB, receiving a 10-fold productivity increase. ReadyGo shortened Educaterra’s development cycle from 20 man-weeks per course to two man-weeks per course. Using ReadyGo the cost to produce 10 hours of training is now $5,000 down from $50,000.

Storyboards, web design, and instructional design are built into the ReadyGo WCB. ReadyGo’s structured approach simplifies the process, letting employees focus on content. “We did not find that the structure inhibited our ability to create interesting multi-tier courses” said Purlich. ReadyGo uses a master template that relies on style sheets. Educaterra’s web designers easily created master templates that met their exacting design requirements. See some samples courses produced by Educaterra.

Additional ReadyGo features that were important to Educaterra include:

1. ReadyGo courses are all SCORM compatible. ReadyGo created an LMS pack specifically for Telefónica’s proprietary LMS platform and evaluation methodology.
2. Since courses are all in standard HTML, the student’s browser renders the course. This is very important since screen size and resolution vary depending on employees’ needs and preferences.
3. End-user departments need to be able to update courses without involving Educaterra. ReadyGo WCB’s user interface is easy enough to give to departmental employees.
4. ReadyGo WCB is available in Spanish, Portuguese, and English

Educaterra met their e-Learning goal. They included Rapid e-Learning into their standard business practices. “The project managers can quickly look at a new project and identify if it is a traditional project or a rapid project.” exclaims Purlich. Once employees understood the difference and benefits of each approach, there was no longer resistance. The most recent project completed by the rapid e-Learning group is a “100 hour course” given to all new sales people. Purlich explains “It would have taken us many years and cost millions of dollars to produce this course using traditional methods. With ReadyGo WCB, we produced this course in a half a year for about the cost one traditional course.”

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