When is a course not a course?
We're all used to training courses covering specific topics, but with e-learning, the course can be whatever it needs to be.
15 December 2011
Like many training companies, we deliver lots of courses - you only have to browse through our course catalogue. It's a straightforward process - you select what you intend to learn, book on the course and away you go.
Many topics to learn
But what if you want to learn a lot of related topics which aren't covered within one course? Is the only option to attend more than one course?
Well, it depends on what you're learning. If you need to learn those topics in depth, then it may well be - this is what happens when you take a professional certification track, for example.
This is fine when an individual is the learner, but how about when you need to train hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people? All of those additional learning days really can rack up the cost. The issue is actually bigger than that. Standard training courses aim to be relevant to as many people as possible - so teach a broad range of topics. Yet, your learners may not need to know all of those topics - so a percentage of the learning quite literally wastes time.
Just how many features do you actually need to learn?
If we look at Microsoft Office, or Google Apps, many users only routinely perform a fairly limited number of tasks. These can account for perhaps a quarter of what might be usually taught as part of a standard course.
A great way to address this is by creating a bespoke course - something we do all of the time. So, where a large number of people require training, a more efficient approach is to first understand what they need to learn, then only provide training on those topics. For something like our office applications example, this can perhaps take four days' training (on Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) down to a single day. There isn't less training - the training is just more focused.
Apart from the cost saving, there's another significant upside. Because the learning is so focused, learners stay interested - they're learning what's relevant so don't switch off as easily. Therefore the training is not just cheaper, it's more effective.
Training large numbers of people
But then we can hit another barrier. Let's say that those who need to learn are really large in number. Or, spread geographically so there's a significant cost in transport, either taking a trainer to them or getting them to a training centre. Or perhaps the training will take place over several years - a standard induction or refresher programme for employees.
These are some of the reasons why an e-learning course can become a more viable alternative. Once created, there's little additional cost to an e-learning course being delivered - so it can scale to almost any size of workforce, geography or timescale. It just needs to be hosted and perhaps kept up-to-date occasionally.
Plus, it has all of the benefits of a bespoke training course - you get to choose exactly what is taught. What's more, the topics don't have to be restricted to (for example) a product. Let's go back to our office applications example.
Teaching only what needs to be learned
We want users to be able to create and send e-mails; we also want them to create and send documents. So, it's a given that we've to show them how to create files, where to save them, how to edit and format them - and so on. But most organisations will also have guidelines for usage. For e-mails this might be which footers to use, e-mail etiquette and language, who to copy in to specific e-mails and so on. For Word documents, it might also include where templates are stored, which ones to use, use of corporate fonts, printing guidelines (or how to create a PDF). These topics stop clearly outside learning the core product - but can easily be seamlessly incorporated into a bespoke or e-learning course.
The course can be deeper still, though. For PowerPoint, it could be combined with presentation skills training - so there's a marriage of learning the application, learning about templates and standards - and then learning about presenting, body language, questioning skills and so on.
Perhaps for Word, it might be focused on specific documents - it could be that standard legal or contract documents need editing, but there are specific ways in which to do this.
All of these topics - and many, many more - can be easily included. This makes the training far more successful and relevant to the business, and stops it becoming 'monkey see, monkey do' training, where users are simply led through menu options.
Assessing the knowledge gap
The key to success of a bespoke or e-learning course is to accurately assess and understand the topics which need to be learned. We do this via a training-needs analysis, where we work with the client to fully understand exactly how the product is used and exactly what the most common tasks with the product are.
From there, we can plan the learning - working with the client to agree key learning points, developing the structure of the programme in a way that supports the needs of the business.
Although we've focused on computer applications, both bespoke learning and e-learning can be used as tools to train on almost any topic - for example, sales skills combined with product knowledge; presentation skills combined with an overview of the company's products, services and proposition - and so on.
Standard courses do have their place - they're readily available, teach in a broad way and are cost-effective for smaller numbers of people. But when topics become mixed and numbers to be trained become many, then e-learning becomes a very attractive option.
