Training with the Boeing Education Network
The greatest volume of streaming on Boeing's intranet involves corporate training. There are up to 30 courses at any given time in Boeing's Video-on-Demand Learning Center, covering subjects ranging from export control to ethics training to parts interchangability. Programs originate in a number of ways. "The majority of them are identified by our lead organization, Learning, Education and Development, and are compatible with our other curricula," Hailer says. "Another way is by requests from our focal points across the United States. We have a monthly teleconference with them where they identify their local needs. And then a third way is that organizations come to us with their specific needs and say they want to use our facilities to get a class out to their people."
Video on demand training varies in length from 10 minutes to one hour. Viewing is occasionally mandatory for certain groups of employees; one company-wide course, "Drug-Free Workplace," was seen by an audience of 50,000.
"You've got people in Wichita who make a forward section; You've got people from Grumman who make a tail assembly; You've got people in China who make landing gear. And then you have the general public that says, 'Hey that would be kind of neat, to see the first flight.'"
Boeing's other major training program is the Boeing Education Network, or BEN. BEN broadcasts 65 hours per month of original live programs over satellite to 85 classroom sites around the country. BEN also broadcasts eight hours monthly for Boeing groups that want to get their messages out to their own people. In addition, Boeing supports its engineering groups by offering 16 hours of college courses each week in partnership with Washington State University.
BEN operates out of its own studio equipped with three remote-controlled cameras. Using customized software on a Mac computer, the instructor can program all events — camera cuts, pans and zooms, slide changes, etc. — to occur at the touch of a button. Individual student responses (with names and locations, so the instructor can respond directly to student questions), as well as graphs of the collective response, appear on a monitor in front of the instructor.
BEN's broadcasts have been live, scheduled programs with one-way video and two-way audio to monitor student response. But recently, BEN began tests of live webcasts, starting with 25 streams to see how programming would play on the desktop. Success was limited, according to Hailer. "We didn't set up any interaction for the streaming sites because you've got people hearing it in real time, people hearing it with the 2.5-second delay over satellite, and people [on the Web] hearing it 25 seconds later," he says. "It's pretty hard to take those three things and make it interactive for all three media. We anticipate that it's going to require a slightly different design to do streaming courses well. Streaming is definitely in the future, but it's a whole new arena."
Hailer is open to partnering with vendors that have worked their way through some of these problems, but he sees some obstacles, including pricing. "Most vendors probably think of a company as being 5,000 to 7,000 employees, so when they apply their pricing formulas to something as huge as Boeing, it simply makes it not affordable for us," he says.
Weitz notes, "I had one vendor come in and tell me that the product we were looking at would cost us $695 a seat." With 120,000 PCs distributed throughout the company, it would have cost over $83 million. "We laughed a lot," Weitz says. "We said we were thinking more like $1 a seat."
Ironically, one of Hailer's concerns is that streaming media training may be too convenient. He says, "One of our concerns would be how much individuals value those programs. Right now, to attend a course in the classroom you have to sign up, set aside time in your schedule, and plan your work around that classroom event. You really make a commitment to go to a learning experience. If streaming is available any time in your cubicle, then it doesn't seem to have the same value. How many other screens are you going to have open on your desktop when you're supposedly participating in a streaming learning experience? These are some issues that we just don't have experience with."
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