More than 20 million students are inspired every year by innovative educational products from Pearson Digital Learning. The company’s solutions help pre-kindergarten through high school students from more than 50,000 schools excel in a variety of subjects. For example, the company’s SuccessMaker Enterprise product teaches reading and math to students in elementary and middle school through digital courseware. The company is part of Pearson Education, a global leader in integrated educational publishing.

The Challenge: Reduce Time and Travel Costs for Product Training

The regional educational consultants at Pearson Digital Learning are experts in the products they deliver to schools. “Our network of educational consultants help schools across the United States implement our products,” explained Stephanie Donachy, lead consultant for professional development at Pearson Digital Learning. A training team at the company’s headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona, is responsible for making sure these consultants get the product education and information they need. Yet because the training team has limited time, traveling around the country to educate the consultants was impractical. Flying consultants back to headquarters was unproductive and expensive.

Furthermore, because the educational consultants work from home, driving or flying to remote schools to conduct product training with teachers led to high travel expenses and lost productivity. “The educational consultants are often not within easy driving distance of the school, so they needed to incur travel costs and spend time traveling,” explained Donachy. “Our consultants should be training customers rather than sitting in a car or an airplane. To save money and boost productivity of trainers and consultants, we needed a way to conduct effective remote training for both our consultants and customers.”

Implementing Citrix GoToMeeting Corporate

Today, Pearson Digital Learning uses Citrix® GoToMeeting™ Corporate to provide fast, cost-effective remote training over the Web. The company chose GoToMeeting Corporate for its ease of use and flat-rate pricing structure. Without leaving their desks, the training team at headquarters conducts regular product update training with small groups of the approximately 100 educational consultants. In turn, the educational consultants use GoToMeeting Corporate from home to conduct what the company calls “connected training” for thousands of customers in school districts. Other company employees also increase their productivity by using GoToMeeting Corporate to hold collaborative meetings with colleagues located elsewhere.

Supply Valuable Product Knowledge to Employees

The training team at headquarters uses GoToMeeting Corporate to keep the educational consultants apprised of new products and features. “We’re preparing for a major product launch right now, and all of the training for our field staff is going to be done through GoToMeeting Corporate,” said Donachy. Consultants now receive product training more frequently, and as a result, they provide better information to customers.

Because the training team travels less frequently thanks to GoToMeeting Corporate, travel expenses for the department have been cut substantially. “Our trainers now have few travel expenses. Our department is saving unbelievable amounts of money with GoToMeeting Corporate,” explained Sandi Boggs, lead consultant in the company’s advanced support group.

Deliver Time-saving Customer Training

With many customers located in remote school districts, it’s often difficult to deliver in-person training. “For these customers our educational consultants offer ‘connected training’ using GoToMeeting Corporate,” explained Donachy. Today, 10 percent of customer training is conducted using GoToMeeting Corporate, and the company expects that percentage to grow rapidly. “GoToMeeting Corporate helps us facilitate powerful product training without needing to travel. We can provide quicker training for our remote customers.” During a training session, the educational consultants use the Desktop Viewing feature to easily demonstrate to customers how to use the software.  As a result, the company is able to lower travel costs and customers are more satisfied because they receive important product training faster.

GoToMeeting Corporate makes it easy to conduct training on short notice. Recently, one of the company’s educational consultants had a personal emergency and was not able to conduct some important product training on site at a school. “The consultant called me the evening beforehand and explained that it would put the school in a tight spot if we cancelled the training,” recalled Donachy. “The next day, we conducted the training remotely with GoToMeeting Corporate. We were able to remain credible in their eyes.”

The No Child Left Behind Act requires teachers to spend more time in the classroom, and it is challenging for school districts to find qualified substitute teachers on short notice. “Superintendents are becoming less willing to allow teachers out of school for professional development during the school week. Because we can deliver training when needed in two-hour segments using GoToMeeting Corporate, schools do not have to incur the extra expenses of hiring substitutes,” said Donachy.

GoToMeeting Corporate Stands Out with Flat-rate Licensing and Ease of Use

Before finding GoToMeeting Corporate, the training team used a different Web conferencing product. With the former product, each student in the training session required a license, making scheduling difficult to manage. “We needed a common calendar to keep track of how many seats we were using so we wouldn’t incur overage charges,” recalled Donachy. “We decided to switch because it wasn’t easy to use.”

GoToMeeting Corporate offers All You Can Meet™ licensing – unlimited meetings for a flat fee. Using this pricing model, Pearson Digital Learning significantly lowered online training costs and increased training capacity because each trainer can teach up to 25 students for one flat rate. “Now with GoToMeeting Corporate, we can hold a training session whenever we want without worrying about scheduling or the cost,” said Boggs.

The ease of use of GoToMeeting Corporate means the company can quickly deploy meeting technology without training. “I was able to learn and start using GoToMeeting Corporate literally within ten minutes,” said Boggs. For the company’s customers, who are often not technically savvy, the simplicity of the Citrix solution is welcome. “GoToMeeting Corporate has been a big hit with our customers as well,” she said. “I just can’t even imagine life without GoToMeeting Corporate.”

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