See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342501481 Presentation on e-learning delivered to Infotech 2020, Belgrade Serbia Presentation · June 2020 DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.10494.00323 CITATIONS READS 0 5 1 author: Michael Bittle IBCT 2 PUBLICATIONS 0 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Infotech 2020 - E-learning for Business Continuity View project All content following this page was uploaded by Michael Bittle on 27 June 2020. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.
Presentation to Infotech 2020, Belgrade Serbia, June 2020 Good day. Many thanks to the organizers of Infotech 2020 for inviting me. It has been 3 years since I was last in Belgrade, and I would happy to be there with you today in person. I'm going to share with you today the importance of business continuity management training and particularly online training, especially during this time of COVID-19. My name is Michael Bittle and I am the Managing Director of the Institute for Business Continuity Training https://www.ibct.com. I actually began working in the computer industry in 1969 as a keypunch operator, back in the days of overnight batch processing. Fortunately, my job became obsolete as on-line processing became the norm during the 1970s, and users became connected to mainframes via CRT’s. Any downtime could immediately disrupt business operations, so maintaining ‘high availability’ networks became critical. Back then, if you wanted to learn how to protect your data center, you had to learn on the job the hard way. And if you wanted to know how a computer worked, well, you had to build your own from parts from the Devry Institute. In the 1980s, data processing moved out of data centers and onto mid-range computers and standalone PC’s. IT Disaster Recovery became a real profession. To become certified as a CDRP, a Certified disaster Recovery Planner, you had to take a 5-day course in the US. Only a few companies in the States provided onsite classes and usually only Fortune 500 companies could afford the time and money to send their people for training. Luckily, some correspondence schools also offered computer training courses, and they would send out their weekly printed lessons to us by snail mail. The 1990s brought us the Desktop Revolution, putting technology on everyone’s desk. High speed digital networks and the internet permitted global connectivity. Tolerance for downtime began to disappear. Companies started to realize that it was not enough just to protect their computer systems; what about protecting their ability to provide goods and services to clients? So out of Disaster Recovery Planning came Business Continuity Planning.
Business Continuity answers the question "how do I help keep my business up and running no matter what! Not just about IT but the whole business. It means creating a suite of documented and tested procedures that make sure your business does not experience unacceptable interruptions in any of its key activities. It extends traditional IT Disaster Recovery. It includes Crisis Management PLUS the actual Business Recovery or Business Resumption Plan to recover key business activities and continue providing core products and services to customers. It is obvious that the survival of your business can not be left simply to chance. So what are you going to do to learn business continuity? Read a book? Fill out a template? Hire a consultant? You have to know what to do, and how to do it. Business continuity training and professional certification are essential for anyone to take your advice seriously. And that's where companies like IBCT come in. It was right after 9/11 in New York, that we started the Institute for Business Continuity Training. Our goal then and now was to teach everyone who wanted to learn about business continuity management, not just the Fortune 500s. Most of our students were IT Specialists like you, looking to expand their understanding of business recovery beyond IT. We knew that everyone could not come to the USA for a training class. So we adopted remote learning. Indeed, our first distance education courses were simply CD-ROMs mailed out to students much like the correspondence courses that used to be sent through the mail. For many students, this correspondence school method was often the only option they had to further their business education. Thanks to dropping costs of technology, we were soon able to improve on this method, by uploading PDF lessons onto protected directories on our company website. Then, as internet speed improved into the early 2000's and online applications such as Moodle became freely available, the option of really learning online improved. About 10 years ago, IBCT partnered with the United Nations to develop a 21st century approach to online business continuity training for disaster managers living and working in some 20 different countries in the
Caribbean. These were people who never would have had the time or money to attend an in- person class. This experience enabled a significant expansion of our efforts in online training and it has grown ever since. COVID-19 provided us with another opportunity. Months ago, it was obvious that no one was going to attend an in-person class any time soon. It isn’t just the quarantine issue. Companies are having to lay off staff and are going to have to cut back on travel and training expenses in order to survive, just like the did during the 2008 economic crisis. So we decided to use this time to completely revamp our online courses. The major drawback to developing online training courses is time. Estimates say that it takes 180 hours of work to create 1 hour of an online course, and most companies cannot afford that kind of investment. The downtime created by COVID-19, when everyone was self-isolating, gave us all the time we needed to completely redo our own coursework and to put it all online at https://www.BCMcourses.com. We can thank “the cloud” for enabling this technology to work, since hosting it on one of our own servers would have been cost prohibitive. Once we decided to update all of our courses, it meant that we could apply the recently revised international standard ISO 22301. And increase the number of courses that we offer. Courses that could not be delivered in-person are now be offered online. For example, I wanted to teach a CyberSecurity class. Now, we have been able to put that course online. You can see it on our new website www.bcmcourses.com. We have about 10 courses online now and many are typically about 25 hours long organized into individual half-hour lessons. many courses result in professional certification. One obvious benefit to online learning is that if you live far away from a course location, you can still take your class of choice. At a significantly reduced cost. Just this week we had students registering from Ireland, Trinidad, the UK, the USA, and other countries. We could not to go to
each one of them and they could not come to us, because of COVID-19. So the online experience is a good compromise. So you might ask, lessons have we learned about distance education over the past 20 years? First of all, adult students retain only about 20% of what they are taught, unless the learning is reinforced in different ways. And these days there are a number of methods tools to help do this. First and foremost, using audio and video. While video and audio is not new, the PDF and older SCORM versions of online lessons did not allow us to use them. Technology now makes this available and makes the content easier to learn. Second, using an adaptive learning environment lets students learn at their own pace rather than according to the instructor’s timetable. This means you can review lessons as often as you need, to reinforce your skills. Third is the “Bring your own device” approach. Gone are the days when everyone used desktops for their courses. The new platforms provide a flexible program for personalized learning. Students use smartphones, tablets, laptops, whatever they wish, and the course material syncs across all devices, and easily adapts to each person. What is the future of business continuity education? I believe it lies in Virtual reality. Our goal is to recreate the classroom experience right inside your office or cubicle. This has proven very effective in other fields. And it should work for business continuity management as well. Stay tuned. I hope COVID-19 has been a wake-up call for you. Information technology is important. No question about that. People are important too. And both ICT and People together play a vital role in keeping your business up and running. Business continuity is becoming more and more necessary.
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