What CE Could Be

Last issue I spent considerable time articulating how online continuing education can go wrong. How it could dumb-ify CE. One man from Tennessee, fearful of what might be coming down the pipe, created a spoof site called www.learnnothing.com relating his concerns. It was a poignant example of what our industry should be ready for. This time I’d like to talk about what continuing education could be, and perhaps already is on certain sites.

My experience was gleaned not from an insurance course, but from www.defensivedriver.com. While it’s not an apples to apples example, it’s not quite apples to oranges. The two have much in common: you put it off until the last possible minute, it involves a commitment of time, there’s a nominal exam at the end to ensure that you’ve read the material, and then you receive credit for your course work. I’ll call it green apples to red apples.

When I first decided to take my driving course online, I must admit sneaky visions infiltrated my thoughts. Why spend six hours sitting in a small room in a dank strip center with a bunch of people you don’t know when you could probably zoom through the course material in an hour or so and take the exam in another ten minutes. Time invested, I wistfully believed, would perhaps just exceed two hours.

Time I actually invested in the program: Just over six hours. Not a minute less than what I would have spent down at the comedy gym. The difference was, it was on my terms, at my speed, with breaks for dinner, to walk the dog, and to watch a quick episode of West Wing. I could take two. days I could take a month. As I was pressed for time, I took two days.

How did they make me spend time on the coursework? I wasn’t difficult. They built a timer into the system. Each lesson took a certain amount of time. Say 45 minutes. Once you’ve read through the material, watched the films and played with the animation, you are not allowed to move onto the next lesson until 45 minutes has elapsed. (The timer in the corner keeps you advised.) They’ve also built in a system that logs you out if you are idle for more than five minutes. So even if you’re not reading anymore, you at least have to actively be moving about every few minutes.

They also built in a system to protect against fraudulent use—say, if you let your seven-year-old son click through the exercises and guess on the questions that come in each section. They ask random questions throughout the course, and then repeat them later in a different order (no all “B” answers for this one). What’s your favorite salad dressing? What color is your oven? What’s your mother’s eye color?

If you take too long to answer a question or contradict yourself later in the course, you earn a “demerit.” Three demerits and you’re logged off automatically and have to talk with someone at their office to explain your deficiencies.

There were ways, of course, around spending every minute working on the course. For example, after reading a chapter, when I just had to move the mouse around every five minutes to finish the time, I would read stories on the Internet. Five minutes here, three minutes there. I called it my doodle time, which equates with the time I would have spent scribbling in my notes or looking blankly at a wall during a “live” course.

The insurance industry has been perpetually behind the technology curve. There’s something in its old-time philosophy that prevents timely innovation. Its sheer mass prevents rapid change. But that doesn’t mean it can’t adopt technology from its swifter counterparts.