E-Learning In Business: How Your Company Can Benefit From E-Learning Solutions
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Why e-learning and online learning is important for businesses
Ever since our world has been struck with COVID-19, we have had to adapt in new and unique ways to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. This means spending time quarantined and working from home.
This new wave and work culture of working from home has highlighted many benefits of being able to work from the comfort of your home. It has reduced commutes and as a product, our carbon emissions. It has helped families save money by saving on gas or public transit fares. It has also allowed us to establish a healthier work-life balance.
But, as with any change, even one with multiple benefits, there are some negatives that come along with it. One of those difficulties is training and on-boarding new employees.
Luckily, there is a solution. With the adoption of online learning practices and e-learning courses, new employees are able to follow self-guided learning materials that outline business processes, management systems and the core skills they will need to succeed in their role.
Let’s take a further look at the advantages and disadvantages of corporate e-learning solutions in the workplace if you plan to adopt online learning for your company training.
E-Learning Success: Pro Tips for Optimal Learning
We recently had the opportunity to be part of an article specifically referencing tips from numerous professionals in the fiel commenting specifically on e-learning success. This article captures a wide variety of topics and practical tips to help direct strategies for implementing your own e-learning initiatives.
Here's One Of Our Most Recent E-Learning Projects
Advantages & disadvantages of using an online training platform in the workplace
You may be asking yourself why and what are e-learning solutions? Why should I even waste my time developing my own e-learning courses? If you’ve been in the industry long enough, you might not realize that the current workforce is a completely different target audience then the one you remember when you first started off.
In today’s day and age, more prospective employees are looking for new and innovative ways to sharpen their skills. More employees are wanting to work from home and not have to commute into the office to learn a course they can do from the comfort of their own home. This is because e-learning has many benefits. Training has evolved and your company should follow with new education benefits in order to compete with other companies in the corporate world.
There are both advantages and disadvantages you should consider when considering developing an e-learning platform for your workplace. As progressive as it may seem to adopt digital learning modules, you might soon realize blended learning options may serve you and your business best.
Advantages of online courses
Retain Employees: One of the common reasons employees leave businesses is due to the fact that they believe they are not growing or learning. Online training and online learning modules give employees the opportunity to continuously learn new skills. This doesn’t have to be your own internal e-learning platform, it can come in the form of online certificates given by Google or LinkedIn for example. Employees that feel they have room to grow are more likely to stay in their current workplace.
Low Cost: E-learning platforms are often low cost when spread long-term. They might be a large investment to begin with, but the longevity of the content will bring to light the low cost advantages of e-learning platforms. Each dollar spent will pay dividends the longer your training methods are valid.
More Accessible: With accessibility being an increasingly important topic, one of the most significant advantages is that virtual learning is more accessible. Now, students don’t need to attend a traditional classroom. They are able to stay home and still get connected to a library of digital resources to help tackle the company’s biggest challenges and learn about customer training. Virtual corporate training has made training employees more accessible.
Saves Time: Since employees don’t have to commute into a workplace or traditional classroom to complete training, they are able to work from home and go through the learning content. It also saves time for existing and senior co-workers. Instead of having existing staff take time off from their projects during a mutual, suitable time for everyone to then help the new hires, numerous platforms now offer self-guided or self-study options. This means the new hires are able to work and learn at their own pace – saving time for everyone involved.
Disadvantages of online courses
Difficult To Implement: Unfortunately, one challenge many of us will face when learning from e-learning education training solutions is the application of what we learned online and how it applies to the real-world application. This application from virtual to real makes it very difficult for those with different learning styles to properly excel in their line of work. Best practice is to make sure you know the preferred method of how a new hire would like to learn and train.
Little Interaction: Humans are social creatures. It’s in our DNA to want to interact with one another. A disadvantage of electronic learning is the lack of interaction one has with someone else. Although there have been attempts to increase the level of interaction online such as creating a virtual classroom, digital learning still lacks the fundamental connection of face-to-face communication.
Difficult To Monitor Accuracy: Although quizzing at the end of every module might seem like valuable insights and a good indicator of whether or not someone has retained the information they learned, it really is difficult to monitor someone’s true understanding of the topic. Since most electronic education material is used over a long period of time, the answers for these quizzes will eventually get leaked onto the internet. It won’t take long till a new employee goes to Google and searches the question and will be given the answer. Since it’s hard to monitor to track accuracy and honesty, e-learning solutions may not be the best option.
Limited Personalization: Companies invest a lot of money upfront to develop the core content of e-learning materials. Due to this, the modules are often very limited with little to no personalization from one new hire to the next. Since there is little to no personalization, it’s hard to have the information stay relevant with the person undergoing the training. Knowledge is best absorbed when those learning have a personal connection.
How to make an e-learning course for workplace training
Now that we understand the advantages and disadvantages of online training in the workplace, let’s discuss how to actually go about making one. Depending on how in-depth you want to make your e-learning platform, you can get started fairly easy.
To help with the start of your learning management system development, we’ve written a blog post on how to develop e-learning solutions – a beginner’s guide.
First, you want to work backwards from the end goal. Think to yourself, “What do I want the person to leave knowing?”. These will be your learning outcomes. Once you know what your desired learning outcomes are, you can begin crafting material that will help answer these questions.
This is how you build a curriculum. You’ll then begin to realize how certain topics build off one another. For example, you can’t learn BEDMAS or PEDMAS if you don’t know how to add, subtract, multiply or divide first. Same thing applies to the content in your e-learning materials. Not only that, but you will need to understand how to best communicate the information you want your audience to learn.
But, if you want to take your online course to the next level, we would recommend sourcing the help of PresentationGeeks and sourcing custom e-learning solutions.
PresentationGeeks offers custom e-learning solutions which perfectly encapsulate core content and presented in a way which resonates with your target audience. With their knowledge on presentation development and e-learning development solutions, your business will be in good hands to craft new training and education material.
