Many companies struggle with the question of when to take a manual training process online. For most, the internal conflict comes from a belief that the course development costs will be astronomical, making the process cost-prohibitive. This stems from many misconceptions and some very real price gougers in the marketplace. Most likely, if you go to a company like ours that regularly develops courses instead of a Web design firm, you’re not going to end up paying for someone’s learning curve. In most cases, we have out bid large experienced firms from India and Asia. Bottom line, the endeavor needs to make sense (and dollars and cents) and easily can. So, we encourage our clients to consult with us as a first step in the process so we can let them know all the things they can do on their end to keep costs low.
Large or spread out workforce
Development costs aside, there are other factors that can help you determine when an online course is the best way to go. Is there a large number of people to train, a spread out workforce or a need for training in multiple languages? For instance, employment policies and standards are usually given to new hires in a manual, and they are asked to sign off that they have read them. Hmmm, did they read them? Did they understand them? Given the ongoing nature of hiring, especially with a large or spread out workforce, this is something that can be easily put online for employees to go through their first week. It’s a good idea to break it up into segments that they can do first thing with their morning coffee, testing each segment before allowing the employee to go to the next segment the next morning. This can ensure that your employees have not only read the company’s rules, brand philosophies and standards, but know them. These results can then be archived with the employees’ records.
Quality of instructors and consistency of delivery
Other considerations with a large or spread out company is the cost and quality of instructors. If you have to have a trainer in each location to manually administer training, it can be much more costly than developing an online course. But, something that gets forgotten is not quality. When you have multiple locations you have to find an exceptional trainer for each or spend lots of money to fly around a really good one. This scenario begs for an online class because you can control the quality by taking your very best trainer and building a course around their superior presentation of the material. The course can use video clips of his or her actual class and you can even make him or her the online facilitator of the course, so that there is a real person to respond to questions. When the course material is difficult for just anyone to teach or requires having an industry expert for the best results, online is the cost-effective way to go.
Some things are hard to do in a class
Some things are difficult to do or demonstrate in a classroom but can be done online with some creativity. For instance, we’ve done a management course that required that all the students do certain things on the job in teams, after which their team members would go online to do peer reviews. The data collection, logistics and privacy issues are handled much easier online. Another example is an “Emergency Management” course we’ve developed. You can’t very well blow up buildings, have terrorist situations and fires in the classroom. Early on this would have been hard to do online as well. If you wanted to do simulations with streaming video or animation, the costs for actors, stage sets, etc. were staggering. Now, we can do any kind of real-world scenario affordably using Second Life. This allows students to get high quality visual instruction on any type of real-world scenario without breaking the bank.
What about high liability situations?
If you are in the manufacturing or industrial market segments, you currently train employees on a number of security and safety situations before letting them loose on the plant floor by themselves. Needless to say, if someone is not trained well, they can lose a hand, a limb or their life. In these situations, an online course is imperative to avoid tragedy and outrageous litigation. An online course or a combined online/offline class can build in testing of the knowledge of procedures and archive employee results to ensure comprehension and retention of certain procedures, as well as the proof thereof.
Centralization
If you want all your training administered and managed from a central location, online is a great way to go. We’ve developed LMS (Learning Management Systems) that keep up with the courses, who has taken them, what their test scores are, whether or not employees should be ‘passed’ to the next level of training and all these sorts of issues. Manually, these things can be a logistical nightmare in which things naturally fall through the cracks. However, with a well-designed LMS, all scenarios are worked out on the front end so training works like a breeze. Centralization is a strong reason that companies decide to start developing more online courses.
Large or spread out workforce
Development costs aside, there are other factors that can help you determine when an online course is the best way to go. Is there a large number of people to train, a spread out workforce or a need for training in multiple languages? For instance, employment policies and standards are usually given to new hires in a manual, and they are asked to sign off that they have read them. Hmmm, did they read them? Did they understand them? Given the ongoing nature of hiring, especially with a large or spread out workforce, this is something that can be easily put online for employees to go through their first week. It’s a good idea to break it up into segments that they can do first thing with their morning coffee, testing each segment before allowing the employee to go to the next segment the next morning. This can ensure that your employees have not only read the company’s rules, brand philosophies and standards, but know them. These results can then be archived with the employees’ records.
Quality of instructors and consistency of delivery
Other considerations with a large or spread out company is the cost and quality of instructors. If you have to have a trainer in each location to manually administer training, it can be much more costly than developing an online course. But, something that gets forgotten is not quality. When you have multiple locations you have to find an exceptional trainer for each or spend lots of money to fly around a really good one. This scenario begs for an online class because you can control the quality by taking your very best trainer and building a course around their superior presentation of the material. The course can use video clips of his or her actual class and you can even make him or her the online facilitator of the course, so that there is a real person to respond to questions. When the course material is difficult for just anyone to teach or requires having an industry expert for the best results, online is the cost-effective way to go.
Some things are hard to do in a class
Some things are difficult to do or demonstrate in a classroom but can be done online with some creativity. For instance, we’ve done a management course that required that all the students do certain things on the job in teams, after which their team members would go online to do peer reviews. The data collection, logistics and privacy issues are handled much easier online. Another example is an “Emergency Management” course we’ve developed. You can’t very well blow up buildings, have terrorist situations and fires in the classroom. Early on this would have been hard to do online as well. If you wanted to do simulations with streaming video or animation, the costs for actors, stage sets, etc. were staggering. Now, we can do any kind of real-world scenario affordably using Second Life. This allows students to get high quality visual instruction on any type of real-world scenario without breaking the bank.
What about high liability situations?
If you are in the manufacturing or industrial market segments, you currently train employees on a number of security and safety situations before letting them loose on the plant floor by themselves. Needless to say, if someone is not trained well, they can lose a hand, a limb or their life. In these situations, an online course is imperative to avoid tragedy and outrageous litigation. An online course or a combined online/offline class can build in testing of the knowledge of procedures and archive employee results to ensure comprehension and retention of certain procedures, as well as the proof thereof.
Centralization
If you want all your training administered and managed from a central location, online is a great way to go. We’ve developed LMS (Learning Management Systems) that keep up with the courses, who has taken them, what their test scores are, whether or not employees should be ‘passed’ to the next level of training and all these sorts of issues. Manually, these things can be a logistical nightmare in which things naturally fall through the cracks. However, with a well-designed LMS, all scenarios are worked out on the front end so training works like a breeze. Centralization is a strong reason that companies decide to start developing more online courses.