Congratulations, you’re in charge of the e-Learning program at your company! What will you do now? Implementing e-Learning in an organization can be a complex and political process.
To ensure success, I suggest considering five basic questions before you begin: What does e-Learning success look like at your company? Where does e-Learning fit in your company’s overall training program? Which course should you start with? How can you engage learners? And how can you measure the success of your program?
I’ll explore each question in turn, along with tools and techniques that will make your e-Learning program successful.
What does e-Learning success look like at your company?
Imagine it’s five years in the future. The president of your company has called you in for a party to celebrate the wild success of your e-Learning program. Everybody involved keeps talking about how the program has exceeded their expectations. As you enter the room, you realize that everyone who cares about any aspect of the e-Learning program at your company is indeed there. Look around. Who do you see?
The first step in developing a successful e-Learning program is to define what success looks like for your company — and that begins with understanding all the stakeholders. Make a list of everyone who cares about the results of your e-Learning program, and what each one values with regard to the program.
- For subject matter experts, the program is successful if the information in the courses is accurate and complete. They want the program to present their content expertise in the best possible way, and they want learners to understand it in its entirety.
- The Information Technology (IT) executive, on the other hand, is typically most concerned with how well the program works from the technology point of view. Do the courses run on every computer without problems, or does the program increase the number of calls to the Help desk?
- To the Marketing executive, it is important that use of the company logo follows corporate standards, and that the words and phrases used to present product information are consistent with the company's marketing guidelines.
- The Human Resources executive wants to be able to easily track who has taken which courses, and the test scores and completion dates.
- Managers want a program from which their employees really learn, and a program that effects positive change in behavior, preferably without taking employees away from their work for too long. And learners want relevant, interesting, up-to-date courses that teach them exactly what they need to know in order to achieve their goals.
Create your unique list. Be specific, and as complete as possible. This list will provide you with valuable insight into the various stakeholders, and guide your conversations as you solicit their support.
Where does e-Learning fit in your company’s overall training program?
Once you have identified what success will look like, it’s time to turn your attention to the program itself. How can e-Learning enhance your overall training program?
Create a chart that lists every topic you currently address with training of any kind. Identify the current training method, evaluate the importance of the training to company success, and assess the level of satisfaction with the current method or course. This will help you to determine which training areas are ripe for e-Learning.
For example, if new-product sales training is critical to your company’s success, but the current method of training in a classroom setting is unsatisfactory because 40% of your sales agents travel to the main office only twice each year, you might consider developing this course early in your program. A course on employee benefits, currently communicated adequately through an annual e-mail and a page on your corporate intranet, may be a lower priority.
The chart will also indicate the gaps in your current training program. What kinds of training could you provide if you had the time and resources? Add these topics to your chart, making sure to note the importance of each to the company and the stakeholders you associate with them.
Once you have a complete list, identify the needs you can meet through documentation. Do you really need a course on the phone system, or would a printed page posted next to each handset suffice? Is it vital that employees be able to recite product specs from memory, or could you post such reference material on an intranet, Google Docs, or a shared drive, where employees can view them as needed? Managers often request training when documentation or signage would serve the purpose just as well, and with less effort and expense.
Most organizations opt to retain some classroom training. Perhaps e-Learning covers the basics of each topic, and let instructors deliver the advanced or specialized courses in person, or in courses with relatively few learners. Sometimes the subject matter is the deciding factor. I wouldn’t want to be a passenger in an airplane flown by a pilot whose only prior flight experience was online training (no matter how realistic the virtual reality simulator). The key is to blend your e-Learning, classroom, and other formal training methods in ways that work for your situation. Identify the courses for which face-to-face training is really the best method, and then consider whether you might teach pieces of those courses online.
Even within e-Learning, you have options. Good, ready-made courses on many general topics are available at a low per-user price. Look for courses on popular office software products, office skills development, and health and wellness. Some vendors provide customization of generic courses to make them specific to your organization. In some industries, professional organizations have online courses available on topics of interest to members.
Which course should you start with?
After answering the first two questions, you should have a list of the courses that really belong in your e-Learning curriculum. If you are like most of my clients, your list includes many courses that are mission critical, and for which the current training is unsatisfactory or missing. You can’t develop all these courses at the same time. How do you prioritize them?
First, go through your list and mark the courses that address your (or your company’s) pain. Which topics are the most difficult, expensive, or cumbersome to teach by the current method? Which topics generate the most calls for help or the most complaints? By addressing pain, you solve a problem.
Next, highlight the courses that will have the biggest impact. Which courses, once you have developed them, will save you the most time, freeing you to develop more? Which ones will result in increased sales, happier customers, improved working conditions? When you create a high-impact course, your stakeholders take notice and you generate publicity and goodwill within the company for your e-Learning program.
Finally, consider the courses that are “low-hanging fruit,” those for which resources are already gathered, research done, and outlines created. These are the courses you can create quickly, which is especially important if you are learning a new authoring tool or breaking in a new courseware development vendor.
The point of convergence of these three factors — pain, impact, and low-hanging fruit — is where you begin.
First course
Once you determine the topic for your first e-Learning course, the instructional design process is very similar to designing a classroom course: gather the materials, write your course objectives, and flesh out your main points. Pay particular attention to scope and audience.
In a classroom, you can respond to questions and add or remove content as you present, changing the scope of the course to fit the needs of your group. With an e-Learning course, this is not possible. You need to decide beforehand what material to include and what to exclude. In the end, this results in more consistent training, because all audiences have access to the same material. The downside, of course, is that you can’t be as responsive to your audience.
Audience(s)
The challenge of designing a course that cannot be adapted on the fly requires you to prepare for your audiences in a more deliberate way. As you write your course objectives and gather materials, make notes about your audience. Who will take this course, and what are the specific needs of each group? Job roles and titles may be important differentiators, as well as experience levels with the topic and the company. Consider also generational differences, levels of computer literacy, and learning styles.
Which concepts in your course would benefit from different treatment for different audiences? In a course announcing a new release of a software product, members of the sales team need different information than do the employees who respond to customer calls in the Help Center. Required content for safety training might be different for an initial course than for renewal certifications, or it might vary from state to state.
Consider how you would make the course different for each audience. Learners with less experience might need more details and examples, and those who prefer a bottom-line approach would benefit from less explanation. In a course designed for new-employee orientation, you might want to present specific information for each employee’s location, such as emergency evacuation routes, building details, and parking regulations. What could you accomplish if you had the luxury of designing the course for each individual learner?
Learning paths
One way to target the course for different audiences is through the use of learning paths. Learning paths allow you to present information to different learners based on some choice that the learner makes. For example, a learning path might present remedial information to the learner who answers a question incorrectly, but present the next question or topic to learners who choose the correct answer.
There are many ways to present the learning paths. You can use a pre-test to determine the learner’s path. Learners who achieve a specified score “test out” of the course and are not required to take the course at all. Or you can hide information in the course that corresponds to the pre-test questions the learner answered correctly, assuming that those correct answers indicate mastery of the material.
Another method for presenting learning paths is to ask the learner questions within the context of the course itself. Ask one question, or a series of questions, at the beginning of a module or section, then direct more experienced users (as indicated by correct answers) through an abbreviated version of the material. Learners who answer fewer questions correctly see a more thorough treatment of the material. Another form of this method is to present the abbreviated material prior to the questions, and allow learners who correctly answer the questions to move on, while learners who answer incorrectly are directed to the rest of the content.
Provide a way for learners who qualify for the “fast path” to see the in-depth material if they prefer. This allows detail-oriented learners, or those who are less confident of their skills, to have full access to the course content.
Learning paths can also be useful when something other than knowledge of the topic differentiates multiple audiences. Accommodate learners who want details and extra examples by providing a “More information” button for complex topics. When course content varies slightly based on job role, location, or some other factor, ask learners to select their circumstance from a list, then present the appropriate information based on their choice. Note that in self-selected learning paths, you have no control over whether the learner selects the path truthfully. Some learners will select different options (or each option in turn) to see what is different.
Learning paths are powerful tools, but they can add significant complexity to the design and development process. Done well, learning paths increase the relevance of a course for all learners, and a relevant course is much more engaging than a one-size-fits-all approach.
How can you engage learners?
Learning paths are not the only way to engage learners. Make appropriate use of multiple forms of media. Audio narration with text, bullet points, and images communicates messages succinctly and in a straightforward manner. Well-chosen and closely edited video can also be effective, but shorter is better. Remember that long stretches of audio, video, or animation allow learners to be distracted by other things going on around them. The key to keeping learners engaged is interactivity.
Authoring tools provide many options for creating learner interaction, each of which is well suited to different learner tasks. To engage learners with concepts, such as rules and regulations, processes, and factual information about products, ask questions and have learners respond by clicking text, buttons, or images. Provide specific feedback based on the learner’s answer. Another option for learner response to questions is to include edit boxes for learners to write freeform answers. For feedback, provide the correct answer or suggested responses in audio or text form.
Learners can apply concepts to situations through scenarios. Present a situation to which the learner will respond by answering questions. Scenarios require learners to apply what they are learning to a realistic situation, which provides a deeper level of understanding and practice with actual job tasks. Scenarios are a particularly effective way to teach sales and other interpersonal skills.
Features like drag and drop, hot spots, and photos with edit boxes are excellent methods for having learners identify parts or objects, define terms, and label parts of a product. Be creative when designing interactivity into courses, and focus on which forms advance your learning objectives.
How can you measure your success?
Let’s go back to your party. Look around the room and remember how success is defined for each stakeholder. What tools can you use to achieve this success, and what kind of metric can you assign to measure it?
For learners, successful courses are relevant, engaging and up-to-date, and teach them exactly what they need to know to achieve their goals. Learning paths are one way to achieve relevance and target each learner’s needs. Measurement of e-Learning program success for learners parallels traditional measures of learner success: performance improvement, test scores, and formal and informal learner feedback.
Managers are also interested in learner success. One metric for measuring success in the eyes of managers is annual employee reviews. Are employees achieving higher review ratings after completing the e-Learning courses? Managers should also have access to reports of employee performance, either through direct access to the learning management system (LMS) or through regular reports from the LMS administrator.
Human Resources is often in charge of tracking learner progress through the program, and may be particularly interested in employee completion rates of compliance or certification courses. They may already have metrics in mind. For example, perhaps compliance courses must have 100% completion rate with test scores of 95% or higher. A LMS automatically tracks these details and provides reports of all activity.
IT might measure the success of the program by tracking the number of calls to the Help desk that pertain to the e-Learning program. It is unrealistic that the number of calls will be zero, but counting the calls will clearly indicate how much impact the e-Learning program is having on the department. You can achieve a successful program in the eyes of IT by working with a reputable vendor for your LMS and courseware, and by involving IT in decisions about platforms, software, and system requirements.
Subject matter experts define success by the accuracy of the course materials. Involve them in the process by asking them to review the content at multiple stages, such as after you have drafted the script or storyboard, after completion of course development, and then regularly throughout the life of the course as changes occur in the product, process, or subject.
Discuss success factors with stakeholders. They can be great assets to your program. Once you have a clear sense of what e-Learning success looks like in your company, and how you can achieve and measure it, gather the tools that will help you achieve success.
E-Learning tools and services
Selecting the right tools, services, and vendors can increase your probability for success. Research your options with the needs of your stakeholders in mind.
If access to reporting is important, choose a LMS that is easy to use and available to multiple users. Make sure its features meet the needs you really have! It’s easy to be seduced by promises of integration with all company systems, virtual reality interfaces, social networking features, and bells and whistles, but if it doesn’t contribute to success as your stakeholders define it, search further. There are many straightforward, easy-to-use learning management systems that require minimal or no installation. These are perfect for companies that are just venturing into e-Learning, and indeed often successfully serve the needs of organizations for many years. Ask potential vendors for references in a similar industry or of a similar size, then call and see how well the LMS meets their needs.
When you select pre-developed courses, make sure the content is complete, accurate, and at the appropriate level for your learners. Consider whether the tone and presentation matches the culture of your organization. Before you purchase, review the courses yourself, and ask a few people in your organization who are most familiar with the topic to review them as well.
If you will develop courses in-house, select an authoring tool that fits your skill set and desired result, as well as your budget. Ease of use in an authoring tool is relative to the skills and needs of its user. For creative instructional designers, the time spent learning a powerful tool pays off with effective, engaging courses. Many vendors offer free trial periods for their authoring tools. Take the time to develop a small project with each one, using your own content. Call their technical support and see how responsive they are (if they aren’t responsive before you buy, what can you expect after they have your money?).
Working with an outside vendor to create custom courseware often provides the opportunity to create more or better courses than you can create yourself. Make the most of that opportunity by selecting the right custom content vendor. Choose a partner who values pedagogy and learning and who speaks knowledgably about appropriate use of interactivity. Ask to see examples of courses they have created. Call references and ask how well they deliver on time and on budget. Have the vendor sign a non-disclosure agreement, then share some of your content with them and ask them to describe how they would design the course. The right vendor will be an extension of your team, so be as diligent in your selection as if you were hiring an employee.
Conclusion
As you work with each stakeholder in your organization to define success, be aware of the techniques and tools you can use to achieve that success and put in place the metrics for measurement. A successful e-Learning program is within your reach!
