Due to recent external challenges, many organizations have been hastily forced into eLearning. Virtual teleconferencing software like Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams have been lifesavers as organizations struggle to maintain training and development initiatives in an environment where physical distance has become a necessity. As a result, a general comfort level with eLearning has been established, and its benefits for businesses have been brought to the forefront.
There is so much more to eLearning than virtual conferencing. But you already know that, or you wouldn’t be here.
At Avise Learning, we look at virtual conferencing as a bridge towards even more beneficial forms of eLearning. In general, once a comfort level is established with virtual learning, the transition to asynchronous eLearning is not far behind. A transition that, if done well, can lead to greater learning outcomes and massive ROI.
Whether your organization is new to eLearning or has been reaping its benefits for years, few have taken the time to put together a formal eLearning strategy. This post will guide you as you formalize your approach to eLearning by highlighting our Six Strategic Pillars of eLearning. The pillars are interconnected and interrelated and form the basis of any successful eLearning portfolio. Ignore one, and you may find cracks in your foundation, leading to expensive pitfalls down the road.
We will take you through the Six Strategic Pillars of eLearning, where you’ll be presented with a roadmap and series of questions for your organization to consider as you begin to embrace or enhance eLearning, and set out on your digital learning journey.
1. Organizational Buy-in
Senior Leadership
Like any new or expanding organizational initiative, leadership buy-in should always be secured early. After all, it’s this group that’s going to be investing in what you’re moving forward, so make sure they’re informed and confident in what you’re proposing. With that being said, and while recognizing the importance of leadership buy-in, we challenge organizations to move past leadership buy-in towards more holistic organizational buy-in. Organizational buy-in considers the perspectives and needs of a variety of stakeholder groups that will interact with eLearning in several different ways.
Management
Managers are a key stakeholder group in a successful eLearning portfolio. Not only will they be participating in eLearning programs themselves, but they will be responsible for promoting eLearning initiatives within their teams. They may also be responsible for overseeing eLearning compliance within their teams. For example, you might have mandatory training that staff are required to complete at a certain time of year, or by a particular date. Perhaps new staff need to complete orientation training via eLearning within their first week of employment. It may (and probably should) be a manager’s responsibility to follow up with staff to ensure they have completed all eLearning training requirements. A management team that’s familiar with eLearning and enthusiastic about the learning and business outcomes that it can bring to their department – all knowledge that you can provide – is much more likely to be empowered and motivated to perform meaningful oversight and follow-up with their teams.
Learners
You also want to make sure that your learner audience – whether they be staff, the public or anyone else that you intend to train via eLearning – is also on board. Like your managers, your learners should be educated on eLearning and the benefits that it can provide. You don’t want your learners to be in a sour mood each time they log on to an eLearning course. Instead, you want them to be excited about the fulfilling learning experience they’re about to embark on. To achieve this, make sure they are trained on the platform (so they can get to the learning offering without any tech issues) and by clearly communicating their WIIFM.
As you move towards more holistic organizational buy-in for your eLearning strategy, always keep in mind that the initial investment is just the first step. Take some time to consider the other stakeholders that, once the cheque is signed, will determine the initiative’s ongoing success.
Questions to ask:
Who are the stakeholder groups for this learning project?
What are each of their roles or expectations when it comes to this project?
What information do we need to provide these groups to gain their support?
Do we have feedback from everyone we need to ensure success?
What is each group’s WIIFM?
2. Course Development
Now that you’ve secured organizational buy-in, you’re ready to start developing eLearning courses. Nowadays, a “course” can be anything from a week-long training curriculum to a 30-minute Zoom session, or even a two-minute video. It might be an hour-long asynchronous eLearning module with quizzes, interactions, and activities that a learner completes on their own time, independently. A course can even be made up of discussion forums, podcasts, virtual reality sessions, or a combination of them all.
No matter what your course entails, it must be developed, and there are a couple of things that should be considered before your creative juices start flowing. An important factor when considering what types of eLearning courses you’re going to develop is something we like to call technology tolerance.
Technology Tolerance
An organization’s technology tolerance is dictated by two key factors: learner readiness (how tech-savvy the potential learners are) and budgetary readiness (how much money an organization can commit to course development).
Learner Readiness
Learner readiness is determined by the tech savviness of your learner population. More specifically, it is the point at which you lose your audience due to a lack of tech savviness. It is extremely important to carefully analyze your learners before you start developing courses to gauge how comfortable they are with various eLearning modalities. Always ensure that your learner population has the skills required to learn via your chosen modality before you head too far down that development path. The last thing you want to do is create a fantastic (and perhaps expensive) eLearning course that no one in your organization has the ability to use. Always keep in mind that some forms of eLearning may have a learning curve for some learners.
Budgetary Readiness
Budgetary readiness is the amount of money that an organization can commit to eLearning development. Naturally, different types of eLearning are more expensive to develop than others, and different organizations will be able to invest more into eLearning development than others. Depending on your organization’s budgetary commitment for eLearning development, you may deem to start small before moving to more advanced eLearning modalities as organizational buy-in increases. For instance, an investment in virtual reality may be out of the question when you’re first transitioning to asynchronous eLearning, but as your eLearning strategy demonstrates success and gains stronger buy-in throughout the years, your budgetary readiness may increase.
It is important to consider learner readiness and budgetary readiness for each eLearning modality to discover your organization’s technology tolerance. Take a Zoom training course for instance. Learner readiness may be high because your organization may already be using Zoom regularly for calls and meetings – your learners are used to the technology so there’s no learning curve. Budgetary readiness may also be high as the cost for virtual conferencing software is relatively low. This high learner readiness and high budgetary readiness is one of the reasons why virtual conferencing software has served as such a great bridge towards eLearning during the pandemic – a favourable technology tolerance has allowed for easy adoption.
On the flip side, consider something like video. Learner readiness is likely extremely high – everybody watches videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, video production is very pricey. So, as you’re transitioning to eLearning you may want to delay video development until your digital learning strategy is more established and you have additional buy-in and budget.
Whatever modality you’re thinking about using, considering your learner and budgetary readiness up front helps to ensure the final product isn’t too technologically complicated for your new online learners, and prevents money, time, and effort from being wasted.
Development ROI
Congratulations, you’ve considered the various modalities of eLearning that are available to you and you’re comfortable with your organization’s learner readiness and budget readiness for a few of them. Perhaps you’ve decided that asynchronous eLearning modules (where the learner works independently through a series of slides, doing an activity here and there, and perhaps taking a quiz at the end) are your best first step beyond Zoom sessions. We couldn’t agree more! They’re user-friendly and inexpensive to develop, if you can find the right vendor. Not to mention they can be accessed 24/7, 7 days a week from any device with internet access. But…now what? There is so much important knowledge that needs to be imparted on your learners. What course topics should you start with? Where do you start?
Let ROI be your guide.
As we’ve already established, eLearning can be expensive to develop. Upfront, it’s typically more expensive to develop an eLearning course than it is to develop the same course for the classroom. Long-term, however, is a different story. Every time a classroom training session runs, it incurs recurring costs. Costs like the instructor’s hourly wage, transportation costs, or even accommodations will count towards your budget. Do you need to rent space for the course? Better add that too. Multiply each of these costs by the number of sessions taught and you’re starting to get a sense of how these recurring costs can add up over time. ELearning modules eliminate the need for an instructor and a physical space for the training to take place, thereby eliminating all recurring costs. So, if topics for eLearning development are chosen wisely, organizations can save a lot of money over time.
But again, you already know that, or you wouldn’t be here.
Courses that thrive in an eLearning format and ensure a great ROI share a few common characteristics. When considering what topics you should prioritize for development as eLearning modules, consider the following factors:
High Usage
With a high number of learners taking an eLearning course, benefits generated by the course quickly increase. In this scenario, the higher upfront investment quickly pays off by eliminating a large number of classroom training sessions. Invest in eLearning development for topics with a large audience to save your organization more money in the long-term.
Repeatable
ELearning has the best return when the content is in constant demand and the course sticks around for a while. For example, orientation topics are a logical place to start because all new staff must take them. ELearning makes it easier to execute an ongoing training calendar while maintaining consistency in the delivery. Topics that are strategically repeatable go hand-in-hand with a high-usage audience.
Durable
When considering topics for eLearning development, prioritize content that will not require frequent updates or changes. As discussed, cost-savings for eLearning development stem from the fact that once initial development is done, there are no ongoing costs. Maximize your ROI by prioritizing content for development that will remain current for as long as possible to minimize costs associated with course maintenance.
Questions to ask:
What is our organization’s learner readiness?
What is our organization’s budgetary readiness?
What is our organization’s technology tolerance?
What training topics have the potential for high usage?
Is the topic or eLearning course repeatable and durable?
3. Learning Management
Learning management is all about data and the information and details you need to capture or keep track of when it comes to your eLearning courses. Do you need to know who completed an eLearning course? Do you need to know additional learner details, like their email address, job title or direct manager? Do you need to know how long it takes learners to complete the courses? Are you looking to sell courses and need to collect payment details? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you may need something called a learning management system.
A learning management system (LMS) is a software application used by organizations to administer, track, report and deliver training courses. Think of it as the environment where your eLearning offerings live. The software gathers information and tracks things like learner information, course completions, average time to completion, certificate generation and payment details. An LMS is an extremely useful piece of software. If you’re in need of the various types of data or functionality mentioned above, an LMS could be beneficial.
If, however, this data and information isn’t required, do not default to an LMS. It is extremely important to note that learning management systems are expensive. They are powerful pieces of software that do a lot for you, and you pay for that functionality. At Avise Learning, we have seen too many clients go forward with an LMS when they didn’t necessarily need it.
Let’s say you’re a research organization and, as part of your funding, you need to report back on how many people took an eLearning module that came out of the research project. Instead of using an LMS, you can handle something like this through a website by creating a great landing page to access the eLearning module. By simply adding a web form to this landing page that grants access the module, you could obtain your learner’s contact information and keep track of how many people launched it.
By looking at your data requirements closely you may find that you don’t necessarily need all the functionality of an LMS. This doesn’t mean that in a year from now, after your eLearning initiative has gained more momentum and users, that you can’t migrate to an LMS. Your needs will change over time, and it is wise to adapt, but the decision to invest in an LMS shouldn’t be a default from the get-go.
Questions to ask:
What kind of data/information do you need to capture?
Do you need to issue certificates as part of the eLearning course?
Do you have the resources to manage an LMS?
4. Resourcing
If you’re serious about strengthening digital learning within your organization, you’re going to have to ensure you’re set up for success with the right skills, talents and capabilities. Appropriate resourcing will depend on where you are in your journey and the level of complexity. Some common roles that come about after eLearning is established within an organization are that of the eLearning developer and the LMS administrator. Additional web support may also be required.
ELearning Developer
An eLearning developer will be someone who creates your learning modules, courses, animations, videos, etc. They might have a background in eLearning authorware, like Articulate Storyline or Lectora, that enables the creation of modules with quizzes, interactions, activities, audio, and more. This role or function is often outsourced to eLearning design and development firms (like Avise Learning…shameless plug). Sometimes however, if an organization’s digital learning portfolio is large enough, dedicated in-house eLearning developers may be hired internally.
LMS Administrator
If you have an LMS, your audience size is quite large, and you likely have a growing eLearning catalogue. As a result, there may be more demand for learner support as well as data tracking and performance reporting. An LMS administrator would manage these processes as well as the overall LMS software application.
Web Support
Further, as some LMSs integrate within website environments or HR systems, you may need additional resources within your web environment. LMS implementation is not plug-and-play, and you may need web support to take an active role in implementation and/or maintenance for everything to work correctly.
Questions to ask:
What skills and capabilities do we need to design and develop successful eLearning courses?
Will we be developing eLearning courses in-house or in partnership with an organization that specializes in eLearning design and development?
What resources or support does our LMS require?
5. Support and Communication
Of course, you want to make sure your learners are prepared before you go down the road of eLearning. Depending on the audience’s readiness, learners may need additional technical support. The course isn’t launching properly. How do I log in? I lost my password. How do I download my certificate? You’ll come to understand the common issues and frequently asked questions, so make sure the answers to those questions are easily accessible. Set yourself up for success by imparting the knowledge and skills people need to learn effectively online – in other words, be proactive in increasing your learner readiness. Provide any necessary training or technical tips in advance of launching the eLearning to ensure learners feel comfortable and prepared, and to generate some interest and excitement around your new learning offering. As your audience size, course catalog and demand grows, you may also benefit from having a dedicated resource that takes care of these types of support calls or emails in the beginning stages.
Questions to ask:
What do our learners need to be successful?
What knowledge or skills can be provided to learners proactively?
How will we provide technical support?
6. Community and Collaboration
When first setting out on any eLearning project, it’s important to consider your industry sector and like-minded organizations, and how you might benefit from current relationships or potential partnerships. Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to.
Consider the potential for collaborative forums or working groups where like-minded organizations or associations come together to share lessons learned on their eLearning journeys, and perhaps even pool resources to co-develop relevant learning solutions and tools for wider use and application. Learning from others’ experiences and sharing costs and resources when it comes to subject matter expertise, content, design and development all help in lightening the load while getting started.
Further to this, a number of training organizations already have great eLearning catalogues featuring various off-the-shelf courses which can be used in your own learning environments. In these instances, you don’t have to spend the time and money rebuilding a version of the same thing. If a great eLearning course already exists that suits your needs and comes from a credible source, take advantage!
Questions to ask:
Are there any opportunities to collaborate and partner with like-minded organizations or associations?
Are net-new, custom courses required?
Can we take advantage of any digital learning offerings already developed by others?
Conclusion
Observing our Six Strategic Pillars of eLearning is a proven approach to crafting a comprehensive digital learning strategy. Having applied this framework in client organizations across Canada, we’re confident that by paying careful attention to each pillar – organizational buy-in, course development, learning management, resourcing, support and communication, and community and collaboration – you, too, can set yourself up for success and your organization can begin reaping the rewards.
Ready to get started? Contact us now. Your learners are waiting!
How to Create a Winning eLearning Strategy
Due to recent external challenges, many organizations have been hastily forced into eLearning. Virtual teleconferencing software like Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams have been lifesavers as organizations struggle to maintain training and development initiatives in an environment where physical distance has become a necessity. As a result, a general comfort level with eLearning has been established, and its benefits for businesses have been brought to the forefront.
There is so much more to eLearning than virtual conferencing. But you already know that, or you wouldn’t be here.
At Avise Learning, we look at virtual conferencing as a bridge towards even more beneficial forms of eLearning. In general, once a comfort level is established with virtual learning, the transition to asynchronous eLearning is not far behind. A transition that, if done well, can lead to greater learning outcomes and massive ROI.
Whether your organization is new to eLearning or has been reaping its benefits for years, few have taken the time to put together a formal eLearning strategy. This post will guide you as you formalize your approach to eLearning by highlighting our Six Strategic Pillars of eLearning. The pillars are interconnected and interrelated and form the basis of any successful eLearning portfolio. Ignore one, and you may find cracks in your foundation, leading to expensive pitfalls down the road.
We will take you through the Six Strategic Pillars of eLearning, where you’ll be presented with a roadmap and series of questions for your organization to consider as you begin to embrace or enhance eLearning, and set out on your digital learning journey.
1. Organizational Buy-in
Senior Leadership
Like any new or expanding organizational initiative, leadership buy-in should always be secured early. After all, it’s this group that’s going to be investing in what you’re moving forward, so make sure they’re informed and confident in what you’re proposing. With that being said, and while recognizing the importance of leadership buy-in, we challenge organizations to move past leadership buy-in towards more holistic organizational buy-in. Organizational buy-in considers the perspectives and needs of a variety of stakeholder groups that will interact with eLearning in several different ways.
Management
Managers are a key stakeholder group in a successful eLearning portfolio. Not only will they be participating in eLearning programs themselves, but they will be responsible for promoting eLearning initiatives within their teams. They may also be responsible for overseeing eLearning compliance within their teams. For example, you might have mandatory training that staff are required to complete at a certain time of year, or by a particular date. Perhaps new staff need to complete orientation training via eLearning within their first week of employment. It may (and probably should) be a manager’s responsibility to follow up with staff to ensure they have completed all eLearning training requirements. A management team that’s familiar with eLearning and enthusiastic about the learning and business outcomes that it can bring to their department – all knowledge that you can provide – is much more likely to be empowered and motivated to perform meaningful oversight and follow-up with their teams.
Learners
You also want to make sure that your learner audience – whether they be staff, the public or anyone else that you intend to train via eLearning – is also on board. Like your managers, your learners should be educated on eLearning and the benefits that it can provide. You don’t want your learners to be in a sour mood each time they log on to an eLearning course. Instead, you want them to be excited about the fulfilling learning experience they’re about to embark on. To achieve this, make sure they are trained on the platform (so they can get to the learning offering without any tech issues) and by clearly communicating their WIIFM.
As you move towards more holistic organizational buy-in for your eLearning strategy, always keep in mind that the initial investment is just the first step. Take some time to consider the other stakeholders that, once the cheque is signed, will determine the initiative’s ongoing success.
Questions to ask:
2. Course Development
Now that you’ve secured organizational buy-in, you’re ready to start developing eLearning courses. Nowadays, a “course” can be anything from a week-long training curriculum to a 30-minute Zoom session, or even a two-minute video. It might be an hour-long asynchronous eLearning module with quizzes, interactions, and activities that a learner completes on their own time, independently. A course can even be made up of discussion forums, podcasts, virtual reality sessions, or a combination of them all.
No matter what your course entails, it must be developed, and there are a couple of things that should be considered before your creative juices start flowing. An important factor when considering what types of eLearning courses you’re going to develop is something we like to call technology tolerance.
Technology Tolerance
An organization’s technology tolerance is dictated by two key factors: learner readiness (how tech-savvy the potential learners are) and budgetary readiness (how much money an organization can commit to course development).
Learner Readiness
Learner readiness is determined by the tech savviness of your learner population. More specifically, it is the point at which you lose your audience due to a lack of tech savviness. It is extremely important to carefully analyze your learners before you start developing courses to gauge how comfortable they are with various eLearning modalities. Always ensure that your learner population has the skills required to learn via your chosen modality before you head too far down that development path. The last thing you want to do is create a fantastic (and perhaps expensive) eLearning course that no one in your organization has the ability to use. Always keep in mind that some forms of eLearning may have a learning curve for some learners.
Budgetary Readiness
Budgetary readiness is the amount of money that an organization can commit to eLearning development. Naturally, different types of eLearning are more expensive to develop than others, and different organizations will be able to invest more into eLearning development than others. Depending on your organization’s budgetary commitment for eLearning development, you may deem to start small before moving to more advanced eLearning modalities as organizational buy-in increases. For instance, an investment in virtual reality may be out of the question when you’re first transitioning to asynchronous eLearning, but as your eLearning strategy demonstrates success and gains stronger buy-in throughout the years, your budgetary readiness may increase.
It is important to consider learner readiness and budgetary readiness for each eLearning modality to discover your organization’s technology tolerance. Take a Zoom training course for instance. Learner readiness may be high because your organization may already be using Zoom regularly for calls and meetings – your learners are used to the technology so there’s no learning curve. Budgetary readiness may also be high as the cost for virtual conferencing software is relatively low. This high learner readiness and high budgetary readiness is one of the reasons why virtual conferencing software has served as such a great bridge towards eLearning during the pandemic – a favourable technology tolerance has allowed for easy adoption.
On the flip side, consider something like video. Learner readiness is likely extremely high – everybody watches videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, video production is very pricey. So, as you’re transitioning to eLearning you may want to delay video development until your digital learning strategy is more established and you have additional buy-in and budget.
Whatever modality you’re thinking about using, considering your learner and budgetary readiness up front helps to ensure the final product isn’t too technologically complicated for your new online learners, and prevents money, time, and effort from being wasted.
Development ROI
Congratulations, you’ve considered the various modalities of eLearning that are available to you and you’re comfortable with your organization’s learner readiness and budget readiness for a few of them. Perhaps you’ve decided that asynchronous eLearning modules (where the learner works independently through a series of slides, doing an activity here and there, and perhaps taking a quiz at the end) are your best first step beyond Zoom sessions. We couldn’t agree more! They’re user-friendly and inexpensive to develop, if you can find the right vendor. Not to mention they can be accessed 24/7, 7 days a week from any device with internet access. But…now what? There is so much important knowledge that needs to be imparted on your learners. What course topics should you start with? Where do you start?
Let ROI be your guide.
As we’ve already established, eLearning can be expensive to develop. Upfront, it’s typically more expensive to develop an eLearning course than it is to develop the same course for the classroom. Long-term, however, is a different story. Every time a classroom training session runs, it incurs recurring costs. Costs like the instructor’s hourly wage, transportation costs, or even accommodations will count towards your budget. Do you need to rent space for the course? Better add that too. Multiply each of these costs by the number of sessions taught and you’re starting to get a sense of how these recurring costs can add up over time. ELearning modules eliminate the need for an instructor and a physical space for the training to take place, thereby eliminating all recurring costs. So, if topics for eLearning development are chosen wisely, organizations can save a lot of money over time.
But again, you already know that, or you wouldn’t be here.
Courses that thrive in an eLearning format and ensure a great ROI share a few common characteristics. When considering what topics you should prioritize for development as eLearning modules, consider the following factors:
High Usage
With a high number of learners taking an eLearning course, benefits generated by the course quickly increase. In this scenario, the higher upfront investment quickly pays off by eliminating a large number of classroom training sessions. Invest in eLearning development for topics with a large audience to save your organization more money in the long-term.
Repeatable
ELearning has the best return when the content is in constant demand and the course sticks around for a while. For example, orientation topics are a logical place to start because all new staff must take them. ELearning makes it easier to execute an ongoing training calendar while maintaining consistency in the delivery. Topics that are strategically repeatable go hand-in-hand with a high-usage audience.
Durable
When considering topics for eLearning development, prioritize content that will not require frequent updates or changes. As discussed, cost-savings for eLearning development stem from the fact that once initial development is done, there are no ongoing costs. Maximize your ROI by prioritizing content for development that will remain current for as long as possible to minimize costs associated with course maintenance.
Questions to ask:
3. Learning Management
Learning management is all about data and the information and details you need to capture or keep track of when it comes to your eLearning courses. Do you need to know who completed an eLearning course? Do you need to know additional learner details, like their email address, job title or direct manager? Do you need to know how long it takes learners to complete the courses? Are you looking to sell courses and need to collect payment details? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you may need something called a learning management system.
A learning management system (LMS) is a software application used by organizations to administer, track, report and deliver training courses. Think of it as the environment where your eLearning offerings live. The software gathers information and tracks things like learner information, course completions, average time to completion, certificate generation and payment details. An LMS is an extremely useful piece of software. If you’re in need of the various types of data or functionality mentioned above, an LMS could be beneficial.
If, however, this data and information isn’t required, do not default to an LMS. It is extremely important to note that learning management systems are expensive. They are powerful pieces of software that do a lot for you, and you pay for that functionality. At Avise Learning, we have seen too many clients go forward with an LMS when they didn’t necessarily need it.
Let’s say you’re a research organization and, as part of your funding, you need to report back on how many people took an eLearning module that came out of the research project. Instead of using an LMS, you can handle something like this through a website by creating a great landing page to access the eLearning module. By simply adding a web form to this landing page that grants access the module, you could obtain your learner’s contact information and keep track of how many people launched it.
By looking at your data requirements closely you may find that you don’t necessarily need all the functionality of an LMS. This doesn’t mean that in a year from now, after your eLearning initiative has gained more momentum and users, that you can’t migrate to an LMS. Your needs will change over time, and it is wise to adapt, but the decision to invest in an LMS shouldn’t be a default from the get-go.
Questions to ask:
4. Resourcing
If you’re serious about strengthening digital learning within your organization, you’re going to have to ensure you’re set up for success with the right skills, talents and capabilities. Appropriate resourcing will depend on where you are in your journey and the level of complexity. Some common roles that come about after eLearning is established within an organization are that of the eLearning developer and the LMS administrator. Additional web support may also be required.
ELearning Developer
An eLearning developer will be someone who creates your learning modules, courses, animations, videos, etc. They might have a background in eLearning authorware, like Articulate Storyline or Lectora, that enables the creation of modules with quizzes, interactions, activities, audio, and more. This role or function is often outsourced to eLearning design and development firms (like Avise Learning…shameless plug). Sometimes however, if an organization’s digital learning portfolio is large enough, dedicated in-house eLearning developers may be hired internally.
LMS Administrator
If you have an LMS, your audience size is quite large, and you likely have a growing eLearning catalogue. As a result, there may be more demand for learner support as well as data tracking and performance reporting. An LMS administrator would manage these processes as well as the overall LMS software application.
Web Support
Further, as some LMSs integrate within website environments or HR systems, you may need additional resources within your web environment. LMS implementation is not plug-and-play, and you may need web support to take an active role in implementation and/or maintenance for everything to work correctly.
Questions to ask:
5. Support and Communication
Of course, you want to make sure your learners are prepared before you go down the road of eLearning. Depending on the audience’s readiness, learners may need additional technical support. The course isn’t launching properly. How do I log in? I lost my password. How do I download my certificate? You’ll come to understand the common issues and frequently asked questions, so make sure the answers to those questions are easily accessible. Set yourself up for success by imparting the knowledge and skills people need to learn effectively online – in other words, be proactive in increasing your learner readiness. Provide any necessary training or technical tips in advance of launching the eLearning to ensure learners feel comfortable and prepared, and to generate some interest and excitement around your new learning offering. As your audience size, course catalog and demand grows, you may also benefit from having a dedicated resource that takes care of these types of support calls or emails in the beginning stages.
Questions to ask:
6. Community and Collaboration
When first setting out on any eLearning project, it’s important to consider your industry sector and like-minded organizations, and how you might benefit from current relationships or potential partnerships. Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to.
Consider the potential for collaborative forums or working groups where like-minded organizations or associations come together to share lessons learned on their eLearning journeys, and perhaps even pool resources to co-develop relevant learning solutions and tools for wider use and application. Learning from others’ experiences and sharing costs and resources when it comes to subject matter expertise, content, design and development all help in lightening the load while getting started.
Further to this, a number of training organizations already have great eLearning catalogues featuring various off-the-shelf courses which can be used in your own learning environments. In these instances, you don’t have to spend the time and money rebuilding a version of the same thing. If a great eLearning course already exists that suits your needs and comes from a credible source, take advantage!
Questions to ask:
Conclusion
Observing our Six Strategic Pillars of eLearning is a proven approach to crafting a comprehensive digital learning strategy. Having applied this framework in client organizations across Canada, we’re confident that by paying careful attention to each pillar – organizational buy-in, course development, learning management, resourcing, support and communication, and community and collaboration – you, too, can set yourself up for success and your organization can begin reaping the rewards.
Ready to get started? Contact us now. Your learners are waiting!
Popular Posts
Category
Contact Us