Computer-based Training for Financial Management Systems: The City of Scottsdale Experience.

• Author: Clifford, Craig

Computer-based training allows users to have complete control over their learning experience. Users navigate through the course material at their own pace and focus on training that is most relevant to their needs.

Like many other organizations, the City of Scottsdale, Arizona, recently spent considerable time and money to upgrade its financial systems and address Y2K issues. In the past, efforts to train departmental system users on system changes and procedures have been costly, time consuming for trainers, and inconvenient for students. After looking for alternatives to leverage the staff's capacity to teach users about financial systems, accounting, and budget policies/procedures, Scottsdale decided to use computer-based training.

Computer-based Training

Computer-based training (CBT) is the combination of multimedia (text, graphics, audio, and video) to present a course of instruction in an interactive format. Computer-based training can be delivered to students over the Web, LANs, or CD-ROM. To take a course, a user simply needs a computer and very basic computer skills. CBT recognizes that learning curves are different for everyone and allows students to work at their own pace and focus more attention where needed. Review of subject matter is facilitated by replay of relevant sections, at the student's own speed and convenience. It can be used to train new users or current users who simply need to review lessons.

Organizations can either purchase existing courseware or use authoring software products to create their own training programs. Authoring software assists training developers and subject matter experts with creating interactive, media-rich learning tools. The software allows a user with little technical proficiency to import and/or create text, graphics, shapes, animation, audio, and video to produce a training program. There is currently a wide variety of authoring software products that can help an organization produce computer-based training at a nominal cost.

Benefits of CBT

The primary benefit of CBT is that it allows students to have complete control over their training and learning experience, which results in faster learning and better retention of the subject matter. Students navigate through the course material at their own pace and focus on the training that is most relevant to their needs. According to an IBM study, retention increased by 31 to 50 percent when students used interactive training materials as compared to traditional methods. Educational studies have further shown that learning time can be reduced by as much as 20 to 80 percent when compared to instructor-led training (Multimedia Training Newsletter Study, 1996). Other benefits include:

* cost effectiveness;

* frees subject matter experts from training others;

* always available;

* consistency of course presentation;

*...