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Greenville Technical College: Industrial Training Turns to Blended Learning
6/27/2003
"They can take three hours to go through a Pneumatics I course, or they can take 30 hours to go through it," says Shiplett. "They can go through it over and over again until they get it in the privacy of their own home without being rushed or embarrassed because they didn't get it the first time."
Hands-On Performance
The hands-on element has made the difference for companies such as Solutia.
After a student completes a course online, Greenville Tech assesses the student's
abilities to perform what he or she has learned through hands-on performance
evaluations administered on campus or at a company's facility. The performance
evaluations ensure students have retained what they learned in the Web-based
courses and can demonstrate their ability to apply the skills on the plant floor.
Greenville Tech supplies the facility and equipment, as well as the instructors
who will evaluate the students.
Horton likes the plan because it gives his college the kind of flexibility it needs. "One company may have three different training tracks that they want their people to go through," Horton explains. "In the past, it was one size fits all, but now we have a tremendous amount of flexibility, not only in time, but also in actually customizing the program to meet the needs of individual customers." Some hands-on evaluations run for four hours while others may only last an hour. Greenville Tech sets its evaluations up in eight-hour blocks to be able to include several different sessions on one day.
Another critical component of PRIMEed is the Learning Management System (LMS) developed specifically for the new program. What makes the LMS unique is that it has automated all steps of the process, from scoring the results of a competency evaluation, to enrolling students in specific courses, and scheduling them for the accompanying hands-on testing.
Once a student has met all of the prerequisites—the courses they must pass as determined by the initial competency evaluation—the LMS automatically provides them with the available hands-on evaluation schedule. Students cannot enroll in the hands-on component until they have mastered the theory behind each skill.
Beneficial Results
According to Horton, Greenville Tech has been able to meet the needs of its
industrial customers in a flexible format. In addition, the PRIMEed
program enables the school to keep its costs down, which results in lower costs
of training for its customers.
Horton feels the same benefits accrue to the companies his school serves. They can train more people for less money and do so in a customized format. "If I offer courses to the public I have to aim for the average student, but if a company only has electrical issues, I can create a custom curriculum around its requirement."
For Solutia, the greatest benefit has been the post-course competency evaluations. In addition, company personnel have discovered the coursework is much more rigorous than they expected and more demanding than what they took in a classroom. Shiplett says his supervisors also love the fact that his costs are only one-tenth of those he used to pay for traditional training.
The use of Web-based courses in combination with hands-on performance evaluations, all administered by a learning management system, g'es a long way toward realizing the benefits that new, technology-based learning systems can offer.
For more information, contact Ned Horton, director of Occupational and Industrial Relations, Greenville Technical College, at hortenehh@gvltec.edu.
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