Greenville Technical College: Industrial Training Turns to Blended Learning

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Greenville Technical College: Industrial Training Turns to Blended Learning

6/27/2003

Traditional approaches to training industrial workers in specific job skills pose many challenges to colleges and their industrial customers. To begin, on-site training programs are expensive. Not only d'es a company have to bring an instructor to its location, but it also must release a significant number of workers to the instructional sessions to make the investment worthwhile on a per-head basis. For example, Solutia Inc., a nylon products manufacturer based in Greenwood, S.C., found itself spending $11,000 per student—a significant investment—to train them to become maintenance technicians, according to David Shiplett, Nylon Platform Training Lead at the company.

However, sending employees to a community college for instruction hasn't been the solution for every company, either. Inevitably, over the duration of the course, students drop out for a variety of reasons, often because they've lost interest or it's at an inconvenient time and/or location.

Greenville Technical College knows these challenges well. The college has provided educational opportunities for business and industrial clients for more than 35 years. The continuing education division, the Buck Mickel Center, has enrolled more than 60,000 students while serving 2,000 different companies. When the school began providing custom programs for individual industrial customers it discovered difficulties with enrollment and scheduling.

"There's always attrition when you offer these classes. You start off with 12 people and by the time you get through a program that takes two to two-and-a-half years to deliver, you only have five or six students still enrolled," says Ned Horton, Director, Occupational and Industrial Relations at Greenville Tech. "At that point, companies face a difficult decision about whether to continue the program and keep spending money, or cut their losses."

One obvious solution to these scheduling problems for Greenville Tech, and for other colleges, is to offer courses online. Internet delivery provides the flexibility of scheduling many companies seek, while lowering costs. However, Greenville Tech and some of its industrial customers were skeptical that such an approach could work.

"We're old school and felt that you can't teach somebody to fix a pump online no matter how good you are," Horton says. "We also discovered that the companies we deal with want to know that somebody has watched a person put his hands on the wrench, torn the pump down, repaired it, and put it back together before they sent that person to repair a pump in their own facility."

Blended Learning
Luckily, Greenville Tech encountered PRIMEDIA Workplace Learning's new service package, PRIMEed. PRIMEDIA proposed a blended approach to maintenance technician training using Web-based delivery of content and, in partnership with colleges such as Greenville Tech, hands-on performance evaluations.

PRIMEed combines a library of more than 70 Web-delivered courses with the hands-on performance evaluations industrial customers demand. The flexibility to enable employees to take courses that fit in with their own schedules is critical, as it overcomes some of the primary problems that occurred with other methods: students dropping out because of scheduling conflicts or changes in work schedules.