One of the leading online training programs in the federal sector has an interesting idea to improve the completion rate and overall quality of its online courses. The USDA’s AgLearn program has plans to install social media and “Facebook-style” aspects to their training program in order to provide a more traditional classroom structure to the emerging world of online training.  Some of these aspects include blogs, wikis, groups, and comment/user tracking.

OhMyGov recently spoke with Stanley Gray, the USDA’s director of e-training, about this new idea and how it is coming along:

OMG: For those who aren’t familiar with AgLearn, can you give a little background about it, what it does, who uses it, and for what purposes?

Gray: AgLearn is a learning management system. We have about 130,000 users. This includes all of USDA’s employees, a number of partners that are closely affiliated with the USDA, and basically people who work alongside USDA employees. 

We put a lot of emphasis on the online training aspect. Our online training handles a lot compliance training, mission-related training, and discretionary training. We have over 5,000 online courses and 12,000 online books from a variety of vendors that offer “off the shelf” type training. 

What kinds of social media aspects are you planning to add?

Our strategy is kind of coming together in pieces, as the technology is available. We expect at the beginning of the year, our vendors will be able to connect users who read common books to share their comments. We also hope to incorporate “Facebook-style” qualities where you can see a profile picture, follow other users and their comments, and join groups. We want to build knowledge-transfer model.

We are also going through an upgrade with our learning-management system vendor.  They are incorporating an open-source system called Lifeway that has blog and wiki capability in itself. 

Incorporating social media into a training program, where did the idea come from?

One of the main issues with online training involves a lack of structure. When you go to a classroom you have people who you are interacting with on a peer level. That leads to some discipline with completing the course. When you are out in Nebraska in a small office of USDA only you know you are taking the course and there isn’t that same type of feedback and structure that there is with an online course. People don’t have the same type of incentive to finish courses and we see that in our numbers.

How far along are you in the process of updating the AgLearn system to incorporate these new aspects?

We are working as we speak on the technology rollout. There are some prerequisites we have to get ready first. Probably in the spring, we will have the initial rollout.

What are some of the goals of this program?

The knowledge-transfer aspect is sort of the holy grail. Training is 20 percent formal in the classroom and 80 percent is outside of that. We want to connect people up so they are exchanging knowledge in that knowledge-transfer model I talked about earlier.

What are the costs of incorporating this program to your department?

We track this pretty well. Our learning management system is regarded as the leading one in the federal sector. Our payback or return on investment was over 22 million dollars, which is over five times what it takes to operate and we are at nowhere near capacity.  We could train a lot more with the same amount of money invested.

Online training, as a whole, is much more cost-effective. It is a fraction of the costs of traditional instructor-led training.

Is social media the only way that you feel you can enhance online training or do you have other plans for the future?

We are bringing in more popular content like Rosetta Stone. And we are also reaching out to structure with webinars where people might take an online training course and then have an opportunity to ask questions to an online instructor.

The AgLearn website is http://www.aglearn.usda.gov