If you ever felt you wanted to incorporate or test-drive eLearning in your training organisation but held back through concerns over its applicability in a face-to-face environment then this article is for you.
We'll examine 7 simple, practical and low cost ideas to test drive eLearning. This articles will take you through the principles, tools and 7 useful content examples to guide you through practical and useful eLearning. When combined with face-to-face training and assessment you can have a powerful set of blended learning options that will:
To start off we need an Learning Management System (LMS) + Student management System (SMS) + a Content Authoring Tool (CAT)
If you can get access to a Training Management System (TMS) that combines LMS and SMS so much the better. Not simply because it offers both in the one package, though that is useful, but more importantly you wont have to enter data into 2 separate systems.
Its outside the scope of this article to provide how-to information for either product but essentially the steps are similar for each of the 7 examples:
The Bluegem Trial can help you in several ways. Here are just few:
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If a 120 minute movie can have a trailer to promote it and give movie goers a sense of what the the movie is about, then so too can your course. The benefits to your organisations and your students are significant. The likelihood of the student making a mistake and booking into the wrong course is much lower, and in the process you've developed a powerful sales and marketing tool that can work for your 24/7.
Steps to Accomplish:
During training, many of your students may not yet have experienced what it would be like to work in the job they are training for. What could be more convenient than giving them that initial sense of a real work place than getting them to go online in their own time and experience what it's like to be inducted into a typical company. They can take the induction course at their own convenient location and in their own time. Again that silent 24/7 ally is working for you and making life easy and convenient for your students.
The steps are the same as above, except this time you'll want to think about making the experience as real for them as possible. Video snippets of staff leading inductions and asking questions would be useful. If you didn't do it in the last example, try adding a Quiz here for the student.
Often, you require students to undertake pre-course learning or assessment that you might send to them via email. Emails can be notoriously difficult to track; then the student has to download and generally print the document, complete it hopefully in an electronic format and email it back. In the case of reading material. Often there's no feedback mechanism to tell you if and when they read the pre course work.
With an eLearning course, not only can you provide the content to the student with minimal effort and inconvenience for both parties, but your can also track whether the student has opened and engaged with the material for any length of time. You have the ability to add an online quiz to further assess things like comprehension and understanding of the material. This is doing more with less effort and achieving better outcomes.
If you don't already offer PD courses in your organisation then this avenue instantly provides an additional and profitable income stream to your business. If you already offer PD courses the traditional way this could significantly reduce your delivery costs. The TMS allows all your past students to remain connected to your organisation as Alumni. In many regulated industries Professional Development (PD) courses and activities are mandatory in order to maintain registration. In others it jut makes good sense to have a policy of continuous improvement and learning.
Bluegem allows you to set up a Category of learning, call it Professional Development, create a mix of face-to-face or online courses / workshops / activities that reward students with PD points.
The steps and methodology are the same as for other activities but the difference is the type of online training and the fact that for many organisations this offers a new and very cost effective income stream to the business. For others it streamlines and improves the bottom line for a service you may already be offering.
Many learners first consideration on completion of training is to find a job, or to improve their position in their existing job. Your organisation no doubt has experience and insights that are valuable to students in that position. If you could packages that collective knowledge into an online course that would equip learners with those skills you would be providing a great service which could be chargeable as a optional extra for your course.
The steps and methodology are similar to other examples provided earlier.
One of the biggest problems with maintaining documents and procedures that instruct people on how to efficiently and compliantly run your training organisation is the swamp of either paper or electronic files. Finding information is often difficult as is maintaining it and notifying stakeholders of changes.
But what if you were to treat your in-house documents and procedures as an online course library. When a new Admin comes on board you could have him / her automatically enrolled in a set of courses relevant to their role and career path. In a typical training organisation these could be RTO Administrator, Compliance Officer, Trainer, Assessor, Course Coordinator, Training Manager, Instructional Designer, Scheduler, etc...
So having an organisational course library not only teaches each profession the baseline skills and competencies that your organisation requires, but also integrates your procedures, business rules, industry compliance and career pathways into their in-house training.
Compared to an in-house-online-academy, integrating all of these benefits into static documents is difficult, labor intensive and far more difficult to track and administer.
Fortunately Bluegem allows for your people to have professional training and student roles at the same time. And you can separate these types of courses using categories access rights so they are always available to your staff, but not to your client learners.
eLearning can be combined with free-text assessments and virtual classroom technologies, like Go To Training to implement the best of both worlds, convenience of online learning at disparate locations and collaborative real-time discussion, mentoring and assessment.
The free-text assessment tool in Bluegem includes:
Any or all of these tools together can be used to effect an intervention strategy that is cost-effective, convenient and efficient for all parties.
Contact Bluegem to get a demo, book a trial and find out more.