Case Summary:
Global Knowledge, a worldwide leader in IT education and enterprise training solutions, needed a solid and scalable platform for delivering its virtual classroom e-Learning training programs. The company currently offers over 700 courses in 21 countries and in 13 languages every day for such leading companies as Cisco, Microsoft, Nortel, Oracle, Legato, Enterasys and Compaq in addition to a broad array of industry curriculum and certifications. Over the last 2 years, Global Knowledge has begun offering a broad menu of these classes as instructor-led, virtual e-Learning courses but needed a technology platform to effectively address their customers’ virtual training needs around the world.
Global Knowledge customers, located throughout the world, attend virtual classes through various connections — dial up modem, DSL, cable modem and corporate LANs behind firewalls. The courses are equivalent to traditional instructor-led classroom courses — complete with subject matter experts as instructors; live hardware and software practice labs, discussion groups and live teacher/student interaction.
The rigorous training needs of their customers, combined with widely dispersed geographical locations, required that Global Knowledge have a training platform that could:
- Offer high quality Global Knowledge content and instruction consistent with the in-class experience;
- Reduce travel time and training-related expenses;
- Eliminate the need for extra phone lines and conference call fees;
- Consistently and effectively penetrate corporate firewalls and proxy gateways;
- Scale to support any number of students per day;
- Efficiently support, and not drain, existing network capacity; and
- Provide the highest quality classroom audio interaction between students and instructors.
The Solution:
For Global Knowledge to provide an Effective Virtual Classroom e-Learning platform, it should work a vendor that:
- Provides top-notch, consistent worldwide customer support;
- Showcases an immediate, real-time response rate to questions or problems;
- Demonstrates the technical ability to scale alongside the growth of Global Knowledge’s business.
- Is bale to effectively penetrate corporate firewalls and proxy gateways;
- Provides high-quality 2-way Voice over IP audio capabilities for student and instructor learning and collaboration; and
- Provides an Enterprise class, high-availability delivery and support infrastructure.
Global Knowledge should choose Interwise’s ECP because it addresses communications, collaboration and learning in a single, integrated Web-based platform. The company should choose to use a hosted solution, allowing it to focus on excellence of curriculum and instructional design. Its internal infrastructure should not be affected by the change.
To offer over 700 courses in 21 countries and in 13 languages every day for leading companies like Cisco, Microsoft etc in addition to a broad array of industrial curriculum & certifications, a very responsive technology technical support team along with the above mentioned characteristics of a vendor eases the process.
To reduce the technical problem, Global Knowledge should stabilize the platform used for its Virtual Classroom e-Learning through vendor support that assists them in effectively penetrating corporate firewalls and maintaining system performance levels regardless of a student’s location, various connections like dial-up, cable, modem and firewall restrictions.
Thus Global Knowledge can allow all learners to become life-long learners, expanding both professional and personal interest areas and knowledge bases.
Annexure:
Interwise helps organizations address the communications challenges presented by dynamic business environments, global marketplaces and geographically dispersed stakeholders. The Interwise Enterprise Communications Platform (ECP) is a single platform for live collaboration, communications and eLearning.
Interwise Enterprise Communications Platform (ECP) is a single platform supporting web meetings, e-learning, online seminars, webcasts, on-demand recordings, and traditional voice-only conferencing. ECP’s primary interface is through the Communications Center, a web-based facility to schedule events, register and invite users, authenticate access, track and report system usage, and store and distribute content and recordings. To drive usage and establish Interwise ECP as a core enterprise application, Interwise adopted a radical pricing policy that makes the application available to unlimited users for unlimited sessions. Unlike other competitive offerings that rely on concurrent user pricing or expensive phone bridges, Interwise’s pricing model allows companies to proliferate the technology throughout an enterprise at the lowest cost.