Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1275152
AUGUST 2020 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 69 because the people they live with aren't used to having an office environment in the house. We talk about managing the stress that comes along with it. It hasn't been a huge issue rela- tive to what we do, and I don't see it changing our training program. Plaza: The current crisis has changed a lot of minds about online training and even test- ing. Many of us had reservations—especially my generation and prior—because we mostly went to school in a classroom. We were not exposed to online training or online education, for the most part. We saw it as a shortcut that was possibly not as effective and too open to chaos because there wasn't that direct connec- tion with the instructor. But people taking our online courses have seen that it's not the case. You can get the same—or, in some cases, even more—out of an online course. You can focus more—assum- ing that you can control your dog and maybe keep the kids out of the room for a little bit— because you don't have to drive anywhere and you're in your home. You get to easily sched- ule your time to do your work and focus on the content at hand. They also have access to that instructor. With Susan, they can talk to her two hours a week as well as email her. Depending on the instruc- tor, you can call them. Look at the modalities over the years—radio, TV, and then comput- ers—each one was heralded as a better tech- nology for education. There were radio dis- tance courses in the '30s and '40s. Then, we had TV, and we all thought this would revo- lutionize education—think of "Sesame Street" and shows like that. Computers came along, and we thought, "This is definitely it." However, we've seen—over and over again— that it's not the technology; it's the instructor, the motivation of the students, and the content. In head-to-head studies of the same content delivered through various modalities—such as computer vs. classroom—there is no differ- ence. The actual difference comes in the con- tent, the strategy the instructor uses, and the motivation of the instructor; it doesn't have to do with the technology. That's what we see in Susan's class. Someone could teach the same content live, and we would have less satisfac- tion because it's not Susan and her strategies. Matties: It reinforces the idea that they see it online, as well as replay the entire session. If you miss a live classroom, it's gone, and you wind up with a "Swiss cheese education." Plaza: That's right. It's as fast as you can write and take shorthand or whatever. Matties: One of things that we've been talking about is the resurgence of total quality man- agement (TQM) with the environment of con- tinuous improvement. You're looking at not just teaching these people how to do a job but how to continuously improve their job perfor- mance. What do you see around TQM or man- agement styles these days? Mucha: Believe it or not, we talk about TQM in the manufacturing section of the course material, as well as Lean manufacturing. But again, the whole thrust of the course is that if you really sit down and study quality manage- ment theory over time, you'll find there have been 3–4 original ideas that everybody has built upon. Continuous improvement has been embedded in every quality methodology since the '50s, and it applies in leadership and man- ufacturing all across the board. Most companies have a goal of continuous improvement. Getting into the whole nature of certification programs, this is an important theme as well. I've been pursuing certification programs throughout my career—even though I have two degrees related to my job—and we learn a lot as we do our jobs. The difference in a degree program is that you have a platform and can look at a body of knowledge in a very sys- temic way. You build core skills, and then you look at the whole body of knowledge and say, "I understand how all this interacts together." The same can be said of certification pro- grams. You take a body of knowledge, present it in an organized fashion, and give everyone the same core foundation to build off. Going back to your question about TQM, revving up