Implementing Online Training – Some Challenges
With the increasing demand on resources in the organisation I work for there is an growing interest in e-learning amongst staff – both those who as subject matter experts are presenting training in addition to their daily duties, and staff who are keen to access courses more regularly than our face:2:face training calendar currently allows.
My increasing comfort with e-learning is spurring me on to follow this through.
We currently have two online courses available – both have taken 18 months to get off the ground, due to a variety of constraints within the organisation. The increasing demand for online courses means that this timeframe has to change dramatically.
So, my next challenge is three-fold:
- encourage senior management to support online courses
- attempt to resolve some of the policy and procedural issues that slow down the process
- negotiate the release of the subject matter experts to work with our provider to modify the face:2:face courses into an engaging online format
There are so many other organisations that seem to have embraced online learning. I’m wondering what some of the strategies for achieving this have been and how I can modify these to help me in this aspect of my journey?
April 12th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Based on Sealy Brown’s 1999 reading and the Horizon Report of 2008 I suggest that the right direction to go for on line learning is with short bites.
Horizon suggests that mobile broadband, grassroots video and collaboration webs are among the next technologies to be adopted.
These would seem to meet Sealy Brown’s expectations of a quick meeting of technicians with potential knowledge about a problem as described in his 1999 article.
I have used Jing to develop five minute video responses to questions about software use in responses to our class blogs. Each took about thirty minutes to plan, capture voice over and post. I guess that the quality could be doubled in twice that time, but improvement beyond that is unlikely to be justifiable. So five minutes of training can be developed in an hour, once the need has been identified and the subject matter expert found.
Your post says that the demands for on line training are coming from “the subject matter experts and the end users. Both would be expected to find on line training more useful. The experts can focus on critical issues in short bites. The users will get what they need when they need it.
Just transferring classroom training to the computer is no more likely to work than the use of training videos did when that medium became widely available.
On the other hand integrating on line with existing techniques probably will, in much the same way as videos have been integrated.
April 15th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Nice reading your post. More and more companies now a days encouraging their employees for online studies. Every employer want their employees to excel in their own field and use the skills for the best interest of the company that’s why online study has become so much popular as one can study thoroughly without hampering their work