Why are so many businesses not yet benefiting from organisational e-learning?
Even though e-Learning has been around for over 20 years, you’d be amazed at how little it is yet being used in organisations for employee training and development.
E-Learning doesn’t always suit every learning and development situation, but in a world where employees expect career progression opportunities and are ever more dependent on technology as their source of information; businesses who are not using it at all are severely falling behind.
I wanted to find out why so many organisations are yet to implement e-Learning as part of their training and development strategy, and discovered the following main reasons.
Does your organisation face any of these e-Learning barriers?
The Unrealised Functionality of e-Learning
The first attempts at organisational e-learning were dreary and dismal, monotone voice over videos. Often accompanied by just as dreadful animations.
For the majority of people who got to try the first attempts at e-learning, the whole experience is likely to have been one that has put them off for good.
But e-learning platforms have come a long way in the past couple of years and are more of an interactive extension of the classroom than ever before.
You can now use e-Learning as an integral part of your overall training and development strategy, blending it with your hands-on training and making your online learning platform the hub for all of your educational content and resources.
You can now directly integrate discussion forums, creating community learning centres into your online learning platforms; embed live webinars and live stream training, embed exams, quizzes, polls; include any type of downloadable or view-only files; you can even embed live external websites from right inside the online courses themselves so that you can provide external resources to guide your training without your users even having to leave your company LMS – and so much more.
Goodbye boring voice-over powerpoint slides and dreary PDF files. Online learning is now an experience.
If your organisation tried it once, but it wasn’t a hit, don’t give up just yet.
The ‘Cheap and Easy’ Perception
E-learning is perceived by some as the ‘cheap and easy’ version of delivering training and development. Although certainly more cost effective than face to face training, and it’s not as complex as people imagine to set up, it comes with unique benefits that in many ways can be more superior to traditional classroom delivery.
Lack of Awareness of The Benefits of e-Learning
The awareness of the benefits of organisational learning are yet to be realized.
Here are just a couple of the many benefits of organisational e-Learning:
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Accessibility – Access to training for geographically spread employees, contractors and customers, without the travel costs, downtime or geographical restrictions. Anyone can login from anywhere, at anytime either entirely self-directed or through a guided synchronistic enrollment
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Standardisation of Training and Development – When training is developed in the form of high quality e-learning, you can be sure that every single employee, in every location, at any point in time is going to receive the exact same training. e-Learning removes the human and environmental variables and biases that can significantly alter the learning experience and content delivered
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Meeting Compliance – Having training and development programs online allows organisations to better manage, track and record the progress of staff training, completed units, assessments and more. Where training is related to compliance requirements, e-learning is a much more reliable and admin-free way of automatically collecting real data on the training activity of employees.
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Automated Career Progression – e-Learning platforms can be used to guide employees through a series of training units, modules and courses based on their specific jobs roles, chosen times and dates, points in their career and even offer them further learning pathways to advance their careers within the organisation. With some simple planning and setup, you can easily pre-set a timeline of specially selected training for each unique job role in your organisation and automate the entire process from induction training, to fundamental job skills training, to compliance training, to refresher training and full career advancement courses – without the administrative headache or any ‘balls being dropped’ in human error.
Lack of e-Content
Too many organisations have made the mistake of assuming that online learning is just making their in-classroom documentation available on a company portal.
Although e-Learning development is made significantly easier when organisations already have face-to-face content to work with, there still needs to be a major re-development phase to create effective and engaging online learning. However, many organisations do not have the capability or capacity to do this in house, or know who to ask for help.
With the support of an e-Learning development provider you can easily re-purpose your classroom resources into excellent e-Content.
