Learning Management System: eLeaP eLearning, Training Platform for Easy ELearning,Training Tool

a learning management system web 2.0 elearning platform, learning & content management system, LMS/LCMS

The domain of e-learning, virtual classrooms and remote training has advanced more than anyone could have imagined, just over the past decade. Remember the first experiments in “e-learning”? The very first remote training courses were little more than text on a screen that could be accessed from an FTP site or an intranet, offering the benefit of a remotely-accessed text, but not much more than that.

Today, e-learning has taken a whole new direction, creating a virtual environment that can be the functional equivalent of a live classroom, complete with multimedia, interactive environments, classroom forums, student tracking, and even electronic quizzes and tests. It is possible to provide just about any type of corporate training through an e-learning environment. In the academic world, if you’re ambitious, you can get an entire fully legitimate college degree online without ever setting foot inside a classroom. What’s next? Let’s take a look at what we can expect in the coming years in the world of online learning.

1. More learning on-the-go. Ever since Apple came out with their SDK, there has been an explosion of mobile apps, and today everybody’s a wannabe mobile app developer. The ease with which mobile apps are developed means there are not only more apps, there is more demand for them—and mobile learning will be no exception. The smartphone is becoming more like a second computer, and people who are constantly out of the office will rely more on these devices to keep up to date through on-demand mobile training.
2. E-learning gives businesses a closer connection to their remote workers. Remote working, teleworking, telecommuting an outsourcing are here to stay, and companies are relying on it more and more as the telecommunications and collaboration technologies that make it happen continue to mature. It is often speculated however, that remote workers are at a disadvantage when it comes to keeping up with office policies and new procedures, and as a result, are also at a disadvantage for upward mobility. Remote e-learning will take on a greater role in closing this gap, bringing remote workers into a level of parity with in-house staff.
3. E-learning won’t diminish despite shrinking corporate budgets. It will however, continue to change. Rather than large, all-encompassing, hours-long training courses, companies will focus more on shorter, modular learning units that can be delivered on-demand.
4. More employees will benefit from the e-learning model. In the past, corporate training was often geared towards certain sub-sections of staff, especially middle management and sales. The ease with which e-learning can be deployed (not to mention the low cost) will bring more employees into the e-learning fold—resulting in a better educated staff and better employee retention.
5. E-learning facilitates outsourcing. The outsourcing trend, long ago acknowledged as an inevitability—as well as key to a modern corporation’s fiscal success—will get a boost from e-learning. Third-party service providers will take greater advantage of their partnerships with their clients, to take advantage of remote, modular learning units that are provided. This will give the outsourcing agency’s employees an opportunity to better understand their customers’ product lines and special requirements, and as a result, the lines between the outsourcing agency and the client will become a little less rigid.

“Find something that works and stick with it?” That’s a business model that sounds like it should be a good idea, but it’s not. Successful businesses thrive on change. What worked two years ago isn’t likely to work as well today—and even if it still works for you, what your competitors are doing is probably working better. That means it’s essential to adapt an environment of continuous change.

That’s especially true in the day of lightning-fast technological changes, where software updates are issued every six months, and computers that are just a year old are hopelessly obsolete.  Newer innovations put in place greater levels of automation, transform business processes, and improve workflow.

But all of these wonderful innovations don’t get implemented by themselves. Change means that people need to learn new processes and adopt new ways of doing things, and that means your organization must embrace an active training program to make sure everybody is on the same page, and making full use of those new tools. What happens when you put a new system in place, and don’t train? One of two things:

1. Staff ignores the new system and uses the old one.
2. Staff uses only a small percentage of the new system, failing to take full advantage of its most powerful features.

Either way, it’s a poor outcome, your staff resents the change, and resists it, either mistakenly thinking the old system was “good enough,” or that the new system poses a threat to their job security.

Change isn’t just software and systems. The real heart of change comes from getting buy-in at all levels, and creating an environment where all staff members understand not only how to use the new systems, but why the change is necessary.

People do tend to resist having change thrust upon them—but a training program will have the effect of creating more understanding of the benefits, and making people feel more like they are a part of the change. The training environment encourages your staff to feel more like they are a part of the decision to change (even if they weren’t), makes them feel like they are a part of the process of transitioning to a new system, and will ultimately result in that staff making better use of those expensive new systems.

Your training environment then, is accomplishing more than just training. Of course, it is instructing people on how to use a specific system or undertake a specific process. But beyond that, your training environment has a softer but no less important goal, and that is getting the buy-in and cooperation of your end-users.

Professional trainers have two different schools of thought about incorporating PowerPoint decks into training sessions. Some avoid them like the plague, reasoning that basic, bulleted information and skeletal outlines just can’t hold anybody’s interest. Others use PowerPoint at every opportunity, believing the tool to be very useful in communicating information quickly and efficiently.

In fact, both schools of thought miss the mark. PowerPoint is of course, one of the most useful and widely used presentation tools in corporate America, and it can be a very effective tool to incorporate into your training sessions. But . . . most people miss the mark when they don’t take full advantage of its features. Simply using it to present notes, bullet points and outlines is, in fact, boring, and adds very little to the presentation. All those bullet points and text explanations won’t hold your audience’s interest.

The easiest way to create a training session is to create a PowerPoint with some text, and narrate over it. This is unfortunately, also the worst way to create a training session. What are you doing in this type of session, that you couldn’t do simply by typing up a memo and sending it out in interoffice mail? Not much. If your training isn’t getting good results, it’s time to re-evaluate the presentation technique. Instead of simple narration and bullet points, build your PowerPoint slides to include relevant graphics, photos, or even video clips to help illustrate a point. Here’s an example:

Suppose you’re putting together a training session to prepare your sales staff to sell to the Japanese market. You could create a PowerPoint slide that has a few bullet points, and says something like:

• You must establish a personal relationship with your Japanese prospects.
  Instead of shaking hands, a bow is more appropriate. 
  But if your Japanese counterpart offers to shake hands, do so while bowing slightly at the same time.

All good advice, yes? But is it memorable? Not really. To make it more memorable, make this bullet list into three separate slides. Show each heading with a relevant picture. Under the first caption on establishing personal relationships, show a picture of American and Japanese businessmen at a bar, drinking sake together. Under the second point, make another slide to show the bowing action; and under the third point, show a picture of the handshake-bow combination.

Both strategies communicate the same information. The second strategy takes three slides while the first takes one, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that less is always better. Your main purpose in creating your session is to teach. Teaching involves illustrating a point, and making it memorable. The second strategy accomplishes that, while the first one falls short.

The eLeaP Training Platform and LMS is the best place to start when you want to create a memorable and impactful training session.

Creating an e-learning system can range from writing ad hoc lessons and putting them on your corporate intranet, to deploying a full-featured tool such as the eLeaP Training Platform and LMS. The benefits of e-learning are undeniable—it’s an inexpensive way to provide on-demand or live training to staff, bring new hires up to speed on corporate policies, and to keep your employees informed about product changes so they can effectively communicate that information to your customers.

The key to success however, lies in how that e-learning system is deployed. The right tools, a little planning, and some expert guidance will make an excellent training system that will bring tremendous advantage to any organization. Following are a few tips for making your e-learning system an effective one.

Tracking. Making lessons available is just the first step. How many people are actually accessing those lessons? Tracking metrics is a vital element to success, and you can easily determine which are the most and least popular lessons, what times of the day people are accessing them, and who has or has not completed mandatory training modules.

Assessment. Did your audience retain any of what the e-learning module attempted to deliver? That’s why learning is accompanied by testing. In addition, the addition of a testing unit helps further development of the courses. If a high percentage of students score low in a certain area, it may not be the fault of the audience—they’re just not getting it because of poor content or poor delivery. Armed with scoring information, the module developer can more easily go back to update the training module and specifically target areas that need work.

Collaboration. It is certainly possible for an individual to successfully complete a program completely on their own, but it takes a lot of motivation. A collaborative environment makes the lesson more engaging, and encourages participants to move through the lesson at a faster pace. It’s not necessary to have a live session for it to be collaborative, however. Online training with collaborative tools such as whiteboards, wikis and online communities have been shown to be just as effective as in-person collaboration.

More than just text on a page. Keeping a learner’s attention is a challenge in any type of classroom, whether it is virtual or live. In an e-learning system, simply delivering plain text on a page doesn’t cut it, and it’s more likely that your audience will lose interest very quickly. Use an e-learning platform that lets you create modules with a rich multimedia experience that incorporates podcasts, Flash video and other file formats.

The eLeap training Platform and LMS answers all of these needs with a software-as-a-service platform that lets you get up and running in minutes.

You’ve created a wonderful e-learning system to get your global workforce up to date on the latest technology, processes and procedures. Your sales staff is using e-learning to attend sales seminars–after all, trying to get a bunch of salespeople in the same room at the same time is a lost cause, as we all know. And your middle management staff is also using e-learning for growth and leadership seminars.

But once implemented, a surprising number of managers rely on anecdotal evidence to track success. And it’s true that in many cases, you can see the results right away, just in terms of a better-educated workforce, lower training costs and less downtime compared to the alternative of having to herd everybody into the conference room (or worse, send them off-site).

With almost any expenditure, managers are expected to measure results, and with good reason. When you buy a piece of business process software, your first question is probably, “what’s my ROI?”. Then after implementing it, you track success statistics, so you can brag to the board about how much money you saved. The same sort of metrics must also apply to training.

Why? Simply because there are endless ways to train. E-learning software such as the eLeaP Training Platform and LMS offers a new approach to e-learning, delivering innovative training on an affordable basis. But how do you deliver that training? Do you use larger seminars, or an incremental approach? Do you combine e-learning with live classroom learning? Every type of learning situation is different, and the same technique may get different results depending on the goals and the group itself.

A recent survey of learning and development decision-makers showed that over half of organizations using training programs, failed to measure the business impact of them. The study showed that the primary reason for the lack of metrics is first, a lack of resources, and second, a lack of personnel qualified to do the tracking. The study also pointed out that there was some confusion among decision makers about what should actually be tracked and assessed.

Those who did track metrics tended to focus on an increase in quality, increase in employee productivity, and an increase in employee engagement. Just under half didn’t use any specific methodology, but most still indicated that they were able to demonstrate that their learning programs were effective.

Quantitative measurement of your e-learning results after the fact, is just as important as the initial decision to deploy. That’s because your results will determine where you take your e-learning program from there. Corporate e-learning programs are very seldom static. They evolve over time, moving on to incorporate more training units, targeting more people, and even using different methods for delivery. Tracking those metrics over time will help give you a better idea of what audience gets the most benefit from different types of learning.

With the economy in flux, its tempting to think you can get away with not training employees or maintaining proper compliance records. This would be a disaster.

But its expensive – I hear you say .. but eLeaP is affordable and it contains all the tools you will need to create, launch, manage and track all your employee training.

From free course creation services to realtime results and tracking to instant certificates of completion, eLeaP LMS and e-Learning solutions provides you an easy pain free way to do employee training.

Don’t believe me? Spend 2 minutes and see for yourself (www.eleapsoftware.com).

Vendor selection is akin to a virtual minefield: One wrong step and you are a goner. Nevertheless, an organized, comprehensive selection process is exactly what is required. You can do this best if you develop a checklist so that you are certain that you have asked each potential vendor the same questions and are comparing oranges to oranges.

Download the e-learning systems vendor selection checklist free at www.eleapsoftware.com.

The use of sound planning techniques is probably the best first step to implementing an e-learning system. Good planning should reflect a strategy that is in line with your organization’s resources so you won’t be caught in the middle of an implementation without funds or personnel to finish.

Get free resources to implement your e-learning system. eLeaP has tremendous free e-learning resources.

Merit Medical selects eLeaP & Google for single sign-on sales training e-learning application – http://tinyurl.com/23fkn9w

Lincoln Cannon, director of Web systems at Merit, which makes and sells medical devices, was brought in 10 months ago to help the company adopt new technologies. When Google and Telania | eLeaP were selected as the first cloud-based applications to try out, there was some pushback from the IT department which raised concerns about how it would be possible to maintain control of applications, Cannon says.

Read the full story at Computerworld.