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Thus, to make ELearning succeed beyond your wildest dreams, students or employees must see that they will suffer pain if they do not participate. There are many ways to motivate people to take ELearning courses in this manner – making it a pre-requisite for promotion (the employee knows he will fail to get promoted if he does not take
course) is an effective one, or for graduation/certification (the student knows they will fail to get their degree/certification if they do not take course, and will suffer inability to get a good job, or simply suffer embarrassment as a result) is another.
However, there are some courses which are not ‘required’ in this way, and a good way to motivate students to take such courses is to show them that if they do not they will suffer public humiliation! Publicising results of ELearning courses and ranking participants publicly against one another is a very effective means of ‘encouraging’ people to take ELearning courses – For example, for an employee at Coca Cola, knowing that employees at PepsiCo were scoring far higher on average in Sales/Marketing courses, would be a good incentive to Coca Cola employee to increase his/her score! Also, Coca Cola’s HR department would encourage staff to take courses and to do well in them also.
Brainbench.com is one ELearning provider that has benefited greatly from idea of ranking ELearners. IT ELearners purportedly have large egos, so Brainbench’s facility that enables them to compare their own scores in certification tests with those of others in same city, state or country as themselves means that instead of simply taking certification tests until they pass, Brainbenchers are instead repeatedly taking same certification tests in hope that they can improve on their previous score(s) and push themselves higher in ranking.
Another way in which Brainbench encourages huge numbers of people to take its ELearning courses and certification tests is by getting students ‘hooked’ by offering some courses and certification tests for free. This is a ‘loss leader’ approach that has been employed by a number of successful ELearning organizations – SmartCertify, LearnKeyDirect, Certy.com – but is especially appropriate in IT ELearning.
3.How can you ensure it is good ELearning?
There are a number of different types of ELearning. It is important to use most appropriate type of ELearning for skill/subject area concerned.
Simulations are a good way of teaching students how to carry out a business process or a technical process or to develop a skill for a number of reasons – perhaps because ‘real life’ situation is not an appropriate learning environment, or because it takes a great deal of practice to perfect a required skill.
For example, airline pilots are trained on simulators to ensure that mistakes made during training do not lead to plane crashes and deaths of passengers.
Interactive learning is a great way to teach language skills.
For example, a number of audio-visual interactive language courses now provide student with feedback of how closely student’s pronunciation matches ‘correct pronunciation’ of words by displaying their voice patterns mapped against ‘correct’ voice patterns.
Live online training, webinars or online events (though costly) may be appropriate where specialist participants are dispersed over a wide geographic area and they all need to see same specialist instructor/presentation/seminar to get latest research or thought on a particular subject area.
For example, NetRoadshow , Webex and Gartner employ live online training/seminars/webinars for a wide variety of specialist subjects.
Virtual classrooms are a great way to make a course and its instructor available to a great number of students dispersed over a wide geographic area, and still allow students to interact with instructor, discuss coursework and so on.
For example, virtual classrooms are used by those who use LMS at Blackboard.com as a means to teach subjects as wide in range as ‘Wicca 101’ through to ‘American Literature’ and ‘Molecular Biology’ through to ‘AstroPhysics’.
4.How to show that it is succeeding?
So, once you have good ELearning that is succeeding, how do you show that to management?
Of course, simplest way to show that ELearning is improving knowledge and skill-level within organization is through providing students with a quizzes, a pre-test and a post-test for each ELearning module (such as pre-test below from Apogee Interactive’s Fundamentals of Electricity course in Study-Center.com) and reporting on improvements.
All good ELearning systems such as Blackboard, WebCT and TheLearningManager offer management and reporting facilities that allow flexibility of reporting such improvements.
ELearning audits and surveys can be used to report where organization was before an ELearning course was implemented, how training was rated then, and comparing that to where organization is after it is implemented and how training/skills/knowledge/job satisfaction are rated afterwards.
However, most important part of measuring ELearning Return On Investment is to develop meaningful measurements that are directly linked to strategic business drivers, so that management can see that ELearning leads to dramatic improvements that affect ‘bottom line’.
For example, show success of an ‘Effective Sales Meetings’ course by comparing sales before course went ‘live’ with sales after course went live.
Compare software development times, and bug/defect rates before and after an ‘Effective Software Development’ course went live.
Show success of a Health and Safety course by comparing accident/injury rates prior to course going ‘live’ with those after course went live.
And, most importantly, compare costs of running traditional paper-based, location-based courses to cost of running ELearning replacement course.
5. How do you promote ELearning in Your Organization?
It is important to make ELearning inspirational – make students feel that they can make a big difference to their own future and that of organization by embarking on ELearning.
Everyone knows that a great way to motivate people to take ELearning is to tie it in to their salary and promotion – such that it is not possible to rise to next level of seniority in company without having taken certain ELearning courses. A way of taking this further is to publish ‘job roles’ which list ELearning courses and pass marks required in order to be considered for that particular role within an organization.
Another extra incentive is to provide a certificate (or an ECertificate/EResume – a URL which an employer could visit to see that student is certified) to certify that student has passed course, providing date, score and pass mark.
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Michelle Johnston is an Ebusiness expert. She is currently Ebusiness Director of Apogee Interactive Inc. in Atlanta USA.
