For an industry that is generally depicted as slow to accept newtechnologies, insurance agents are embracing online learning at anaccelerating pace because Web courses offer more convenience andaccessibility in fulfilling continuing education requirements,while avoiding costly and time-consuming trips out of the office,leading educators in the field contend.

Growth has been “spectacular, to say the least,” according toBruce McMillan, president and chief executive officer of CEU.com.He estimated his number of users has just about doubled annuallysince the company was founded in 1999 to provide online educationresources for insurance agents and adjusters.

Madelyn H. Flannagan, vice president of education and researchfor the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America, saidthat being online has given IIABA the opportunity to reach out to a“very different audience” of agents.

Through its Big “I” Virtual University, Ms. Flannagan said thatagents can fulfill their continuing education requirements, andalso obtain their Accredited Customer Service Representativedesignation for personal, commercial, or life and health lines.Echoing Mr. McMillan, she said the number of “virtual” Big Istudents has almost doubled every month since the school cameonline.

The agents who prefer the Web to do their continuing education,she observed, are the younger, busier types who “don't have thetime” to attend traditional off-site classes and prefer the“anytime, anywhere” availability that online learning offers.

She added that online learning appeals to anotherdemographic–procrastinators. There are those, she said, who come tothe Big I Virtual University with a very specific need that shesummarized as “my license is getting close to renewal, and I needthe CE credit.”

Cynthia Davidson, vice president of insurance product managementfor Kaplan Financial, echoed that sentiment, noting that onlinelearning is “a procrastinator's dream.”

There are other trends among users of Kaplan's online offerings,which includes 160 Web courses available for continuing educationrecognized in every state and the District of Colombia, shenoted.

The use of online courses, Ms. Davidson said, “is very muchsplit between business-to-business agents and business-to-customeragents,” with online learning being embraced more heavily amongthose dealing with commercial buyers.

Companies involved in solely commercial lines transactions feelmore comfortable with online learning, she said, because it makesit easier for them to keep tabs on their agents' training andeducation. “They want it online because it's easier to track” anagent's progress and course history, she explained.

For those agents who deal more directly with individual personallines consumers, online learning has “not so much” been accepted,although Ms. Davidson noted that usage among that group is growingthrough a clearly defined average user.

“It's very much a demographic,” she said, noting that thetypical online learner is a younger agent who is more comfortablewith online technology. However, older users are catching on, sheadded, saying that often the acclimation to online learning usuallyonly involves a single course.

“Once they complete their first online course, the experience isvery positive,” Ms. Davidson said.

Overall, online learning accounts for roughly 60 percent ofKaplan's insurance sales, she said–although the shift from amajority of more traditional education sales only occurred “veryrecently,” and 2006 would be the first year in which online coursesmade up the majority of sales.

Like CEU.com, Kaplan began offering its courses online in 1999when the National Association of Insurance Commissioners firstallowed the practice. Kaplan had offered printed courses forinsurance agents for years prior to that, and those courses “becamethe first generation” of online learning, in which userseffectively read the courses as a scrolling .html text Webpage.

Similarly, the Big I Virtual University began as a directreference for agents in 2000, with its initial course offeringbeing made in late 2001, according to Ms. Flannagan. “We were justtrying our hand,” to see if the online channel for education andother training would be viable.

More recently, the National Association of ProfessionalInsurance Agents began offering its own online education program inconjunction with Learn.net.

PIA's program offers agents the opportunity to learn not onlyabout the insurance industry, but also how to better manage theirbusiness, according to Alexi Papandon, assistant vice president ofcommunications, who estimates that the number of users hasincreased “20 or 30 fold” in the 18 months since the programbegan.

PIA's program has its origins with some of its state affiliates,which raised the subject with the national association. “It was anopportunity we couldn't pass up,” he said.

The growth in online learning for insurance agents has beenaided by the fact that those offering courses recognized the needto keep the technical requirements of their classes relatively low,ensuring that virtually any agency would have the capacity to takeadvantage of the opportunity. “If you've got a Web browser, you'rein,” said IIABA's Ms. Flannagan, adding that the Virtual Universityhas not had any significant problems.

Ms. Davidson said Kaplan has similar requirements. “It's a verylow threshold,” she said. “All you need is a decent modem anddecent connection speed.”

Just as agents must keep abreast of current issues in theindustry, those offering training also have to keep an eye onwhat's happening, and what could become important.

Ms. Flannagan said IIABA works with its state affiliates and theNAIC to keep up with their needs. As an example, she said that newflood insurance requirements have been enacted by the FederalEmergency Management Agency, which are addressed in a Big I onlinecourse.

Ms. Davidson also talked about the new flood insurancerequirements, but said Kaplan had decided not to create a course onthem because they felt–as turned out to be the case–that FEMA wouldput out its own training materials for free.

The PIA, as part of its program, has also targeted issues thatrelate more directly to an agent's business needs, Mr. Papandonnoted–specifically citing succession planning and agencytransition.

As part of that effort, he said that PIA has started a Web sitein partnership with 10 major insurance companies that helps guideagents through the business succession planning process.

“We took this on because it's important to everyone,” he said,noting that a “relatively high percentage” of agency owners are intheir 50s and 60s.

Additionally, Ms. Davidson noted that, as with insuranceregulation, serious efforts are ongoing to bring uniformity to therequirements for agent education.

The differences among the states can be a problem for companiessuch as Kaplan, she said, because not only does the company have toensure its courses meet all of a particular state's requirements,but it also has to worry about what kind of credit the student willearn for taking them. For example, she said the same class couldearn a student 25 hours credit in Utah, while only meriting sixcredit hours in nearby California.

What continues to be an issue, she said, is how online coursescan be assessed. While some have suggested evaluating them byscreen count–literally the number of different screens the studentwould view–Ms. Davidson argued that a word count anddegree-of-difficulty evaluation would provide a more accuratedepiction of the course.

Aside from the CE requirements in the NAIC's model law, Ms.Davidson said the ethic education requirement mandating three hoursof ethics training in addition to the 24 hours of standard CE inthe NAIC model law is also forcing Kaplan to stay on its toes.

Seventeen states have a classroom requirement forethics–although seven of those have been lifted this year as stateshave approved the use of a “virtual classroom.” The thinking behindthose decisions, she said, was largely that other educationalopportunities can be done online, such as college classes.

The problem for those offering the “virtual classroom,” Ms.Davidson noted, is that “the states are all over the place” indefining what exactly a “virtual classroom” is. Kaplan, she said,is “still sizing up the market and figuring out what we can do,”but she said that among the proposals likely to end up winningapproval would be a sort of conference call in which coursestudents would use headsets to communicate with each other and theinstructor.

“We already have it for securities,” she said, adding thatKaplan would want to “leverage already existing resources.”

Overall, Ms. Davidson said that while working toward uniformity,Kaplan and others involved in agent training work with individualstate regulators to ensure that their products can and will beacceptable and effective. “We're trying to protect ourselves,” shesaid, “because sometimes the rules can be impossible tofollow.”