Learning by Email

The following companies participated in the ABC R&D Project 1999-2001:

Abbott

AIG Life

AstraZeneca

BASF

Cerebos

Chevron

Ciba

DuPont

Electrolux

Ericsson

GlaxoSmithKline

Nestlé

Nokia

Philips

Procter&Gamble

Siemens

Sony

Unilever

Email and Business Communication

"E-mail, perhaps the most basic of online services, continues to grow beyond all expectations, and with its expansion come intriguing new questions about how interpersonal communication and commerce are changing."

"The Internet Report: Surveying the Digital Future"

US Center for Communication Policy

Email has very rapidly become an everyday working tool for millions of people around the world. We now communicate more easily with more people in more places than ever before.

Email has changed the way we work. More of our communication is in writing. Writing takes more TIME than speaking; and the scope for misunderstanding is greater.

In short, your professional effectiveness now depends on how well you write.

Training for the New Reality

Email replaces not only letters and memos, but also 'phone calls and even face-to-face meetings. To the formal language of letter writing, we add informal "email conversations." Business writing is changing; the English language is changing.

Writing uses different skills to speaking; and its teaching requires different approaches and techniques. The classroom, a face-to-face situation, is good for learning to speak a language; but it is not well suited to developing your writing.

Email offers us a unique opportunity. If we can communicate through email, then we can use it as a medium for teaching and learning. Just as the classroom allows us to teach speaking through speaking, email can allow us to teach writing through writing.

The ABC Learning by Email Project (1999-2001)

A perfect opportunity, but teaching by email had never been tried before. Training materials and techniques designed for the classroom cannot simply be transferred to email. So, in order to offer training through email, first we had to invent it...

From 1999 to 2001, ABC conducted a thorough Research and Development Project involving 19 leading international companies across 34 countries. To our knowledge, this is the most advanced research to date into professional interaction by email.

Throughout this 2-year project, we ran a series of "ABC Trial Courses" with a wide variety of professionals in participating companies. These enabled us to trial new methodologies and techniques, and to develop training materials specifically for email.