Using Experts

Most training will involve an expert at some point - in some cases, she will arrive to personally tutor your students, while in other instances, she may provide written materials and never meet anyone on your staff. A good expert is key to successful training - but the expert's time is expensive, and in some cases may be very limited.

How can you design your training program to get the most knowledge transferred from your expert to your students in the most efficient possible manner?

Prewritten material is a good way to get an expert's instruction transferred to the most possible students for the lowest cost. However, some instructors, and some subject areas, are better suited to this than others. Prewritten material is generally best for developing a base of understanding:

• A common vocabulary
• Establishing prerequisites
• Introducing ideas

No matter how skilled the expert, or how well-thought out the instructional design, most training can benefit from a spirited question and answer session between students and the instructor.

1. Students can ask questions. In addition to clarifying points that might be ambiguous, they can ask about the finer details that did not flow into the original material.
2. Instructors can see which ideas penetrate and which do not. As the instructor asks her students questions, she can more accurately gauge which areas of the material are proving most difficult and might require some revision.
3. Current topics can be discussed. No matter how current the course is when it is completed, in many fields new information appears constantly. The expert can discuss the implication of this week's Supreme Court ruling, relate important course concepts to case studies pulled from the headlines, or take questions about a new biomedical protocol.

In the past, student-expert interaction required booking time from the expert and bringing him together with the students - an expensive and often unfeasible undertaking. However, e-learning provides several modes of communication that can make interaction with even world-class experts more accessible:

• private course-based email Setting up a simple link that lets students send messages directly and privately to the expert is a great way to add interaction inexpensively. The expert can answer all questions, or only the most thought-provoking questions, and may only need to spend a few hours a month, depending upon the number of students. For certain frequent questions, the same answer can be recycled back to students, saving time and energy.
• course-based email lists Email lists allow students to answer each other's questions and bring up points suggested by the course material. The expert can monitor the discussion and jump in as events warrant.
• threaded bulletin boards Threaded bulletin boards, like email lists, allow students to answer each other's questions and generally work problems out amongst themselves. Bulletin boards can be set up to be more structured than an email list, if that is desired.
  All of these "asynchronous" modes of discussion have the feature that students don't all need to be accessing the system at the same time in order to have a lively, stimulating conversation. Instead, each person can particpate at his convenience, and take the time to write thoughtful questions, comments, and answers. Further, a written record of the conversation exists and can be made available to future students.
• web conferencing Web conferencing generally is set up so that each participant has an audio channel (perhaps through a phone) and a video channel. This technology can be used to present a slide show or a chalkboard-style lecture over the internet. It is time-intensive, since all participants must be available at the same time, but it does bypass travel time.

Carefully designed e-learning can be used to make experts more accessible to your students at a lower cost, increasing mentoring and understanding, and giving your learners a new resource for their on-the-job needs.