What do Pancakes Have to do with Training?

Pearson's Convergence 2009 Case Study Presentation Examines Training as a Profit Center

Did you know your LMS could potentially be used to create a new profit center for your organization?  This was the subject of Pearson’s case study presentation, entitled “Training as a Profit Center,” at Cornerstone's Convergence 2009 client & partner conference.

Pearson is the leading pre K-12 curriculum, testing and software company in the U.S.  One of these programs is the Pearson School Systems, which includes solutions for student information, assessment, reporting and business.  Because School Systems is filled with several features and functions –- and schools have a wide variety of set-ups and needs –- training is critical in order to understand how to use the products. 

School districts have limited time to attend in-person training sessions, not to mention school budgets are getting smaller while the costs for Pearson to deliver classroom training (including travel) are increasing.  Training also is cyclical, making it challenging for Pearson to meet these spikes in demand. 

This leads me back to the name of my post:  What do pancakes have to do with training?

Pearson decided there was an opportunity to address these issues – AND create a new profit center – by providing distance learning courses.  Like pancakes, these courses need to be:

• Popular and “delicious” so people would “consume” them
• Quickly made, in order to meet demand and be timely and relevant
• Cheap to produce and easy to sell

As for providing online access to these courses, Pearson decided to tap into its Cornerstone LMS system, which it was already using internally for Pearson employees.  This way, school districts would be able to access the courses anytime, anywhere.

To facilitate the on-demand delivery the distance learning coursesto their extended enterprise of educators, Pearson worked with their Web team to take their internal Cornerstone system external.  Providing single sign-on for their customers was important, and the ease of configurability of Cornerstone’s system helped Pearson to enable this.  The result was Power Source, a Java-based portal designed by the Pearson team that integrates Cornerstone’s learning platform, allowing educators to go to one place to access all Pearson content.  Because Cornerstone easily integrates with other systems, users don’t see a difference between the Pearson site and the Cornerstone platform.  Pearson also worked with Cornerstone to ensure the system had the ability to accept and process purchase orders, which is the currency that schools use to pay for training. 

Pearson has a passion for the learner, so it was important to make their “hot cakes” sticky – meaning the courses needed to contain ideas that "stuck" with participants.  To achieve this, Pearson combines personalization with humor, brain-energizing content and pleasing aesthetics in order to make the courses memorable.  When users sign on to a course, the story is all about them.  Content is designed to exercise the mind and be active vs. passive.  Educators practice tasks through contextually based simulations they can apply in the real world.  And visuals for the courses fall under the “keep it simple” rule, consisting of hand-drawn graphics. 

Pearson is now able to provide educators with an affordable, convenient, simple and engaging solution for online training -– one that goes beyond WebEx and actually makes learning “cool.”  School districts can now purchase subscriptions to an entire series or course library and access it anytime, anywhere.  And since the solution is SaaS-based, scalability is a non-issue -– whether you have to train educators in one district or throughout an entire state.  It also has created efficiencies for Pearson –- with trainers having more availability to provide online support for educators vs. flying around the country to meet with individual clients and having limited availability. 

And that, folks, is the secret to making sure your learning courses sell like hot cakes.  
 

Charles Coy is the Product Marketing Director for Cornerstone OnDemand