I’m a big advocate of flip learning and online training and your site licenses are very compatible to that. Someone can watch and then they can go practice and go over the practice with a consultant or a partner or somebody. Is that something you do with Gemba? Is that constructed somehow? – Joe Dager
An excerpt from next week’s Business901 podcast:
Ron Pereira: Oh yes, definitely. I mean all of our videos are short. We did a lot of research in the beginning on just adults and how we learn and our attention span as you know is worse than children. The longest video you’ll find that’s like a teaching lesson is going to be say 10 to 12 minutes. Most of them are like 8 to 9 minutes, which is really the sweet spot for what adults will commit to. But what we try to make all of our videos is extremely actionable. At the end of our courses, we have something called an action guide which is like, okay you just learned about this topic, whatever it might be. Now, here are some things that you can immediately to go practice.
What we don’t want to be known as and we kind of cringe when people say, oh you’re eLearning. No, not really. We’re not really eLearning because eLearning kind of sounds like that safety training everybody has to go through and if you don’t, you’re going to get in trouble or something. We would rather see people use our content again and again and again. Some of our best customers… I remember one gentleman told me, he said, I’ve watched your 5S Course like 200 times this past year; did you have a cold during video number 4? Because he has heard it so many times and that’s what we love, because they’re running different people through and so they use it again and again. That’s how we designed the content. 
We really do promote the flip learning. The Khan Academy approach, you know the Khan academy with teaching kids Math, now what teachers are doing is they’ll have the student go home, watch videos to learn how to multiply or do Calculus or whatever it is and then when they come back to class, they practice. They do homework. Who better to help the student through the questions than the teacher, right? So they do their learning at home, and then they come back to the school and get their questions answered. Otherwise, you and I are going to be like, oh my gosh, I don’t remember calculus. Let me see. That’s been a very popular aspect. A lot of times, you’ll get consultants or even internal Lean or Six Sigma kind of trainers if you will, initially a little bit nervous about Gemba Academy. They’re like, oh wait a minute, are they going to take my job? That’s what I do. I teach people. What am I going to do now?
What we’ve seen, the evolution is that now, instead of a consultant going in and charging 2000 to $3000 a day to teach someone about 5S, they’ll say watch these Gemba Academy videos and then bring me in, and we’re actually going to go out and facilitate change. What do you think someone would rather do? Pay a consultant to actually lead an event and get something done or just come in and teach people. It’s a no-brainer, right? That’s been a really powerful aspect where many, many consulting companies around the world now leverage Gemba Academy. Let us take care of some of the basic knowledge. Watch it at home if you will and then when you come back to work, we’re going to be there, and we’re going to get after it, and we’re going to invoke change.
About the Gemba Academy: The Gemba Academy provides high quality online and DVD-based lean manufacturing training for individuals and groups. They can be found at http://www.gembaacademy.com/.