Technology has revolutionised business; now it must revolutionize learning.
People have to learn more than ever before. Especially in large businesses and organisations, live classroom-based training is becoming too costly and cumbersome. The need to transform how organisations learn points to a more modern, efficient, and flexible alternative: E-Learning. The mission of E-Learning is to supply the workforce with an up-to-date and cost-effective program that yields motivated, skilled, and loyal knowledge workers.
Learning online – How companies benefit.
Recently we built an online “knowledge” portal for Amey, one of the UK’s most successful public service providers.
www.amey.co.uk
It’s proving to be an incredible success and its a model that can work for many brands and organisations. It is something we understand and can deliver. It brings real benefits to businesses.
Integrated E-learning portals Amey allow instructors to target specific learning initiatives to individuals and make it simple for them to update lessons and materials across the entire network instantly. This keeps content fresh and consistent and gives learners immediate access to the most current data. Information can be retrieved just before it is required, rather than being learned once in a classroom and subsequently forgotten.
Full reporting means Instructors are able to monitor learners progress and learners have instant access to learning support if they need it.
Technology-based training has proven to have a 50–60% better consistency of learning than traditional classroom learning.
The Benefits of E-Learning..
One of the impacts of the credit crunch has been a fresh look at the potential of e-learning. the benefits of e-learning are
Lower costs
Faster delivery
More effective learning
Lower environmental impact.
Lower cost?
There appears to be little argument that e-learning can be more cost effective to deliver than classroom based training, especially for larger organizations. There are a great many case studies including.
Dow Chemical the American Multinational cut their average average spending of $95 per learner / per course on classroom training, to only $11 per learner / per course.
Ernst & Young condensed about 2,900 hours of classroom training into 700 hours of web-based learning with a subsequent 52% cut in training costs.
The single largest cost of training in organisations is the cost of staff attending the training courses, rather than the direct delivery costs in terms of trainers, course materials, travel and accommodation. E-learning can deliver benefits by reducing the time it takes to train people because
Learners can go at their own pace, not at the pace of the slowest member of a group
Time in classrooms can be spent on subjects introduced by delegates that are irrelevant to the needs of the individual learner
There is less social interaction time
It takes less time to start and wind up a learning session
There is less travel time to and from a training event
Learners learn what they need to learn, they can skip elements of a program they don’t need.
Is E-learning faster?
British Telecom delivered e-business training to 23,000 employees in three months, at a cost of £5.9m, compared to previous £17.8 million and a five-year time span for classroom training.
But is E-learning effective?
A nine-year survey published by Fletcher and Tobias in ‘Training and Retraining’, commissioned by the American Psychological Society concluded that:
‘Learners learn more using computer-based instruction than they do with conventional ways of teaching, as measured by higher post-treatment test scores.’
Is it environmentally better?
Online learning is an effective way for organisations to reduce their carbon footprint.
On average, the production and provision of distance learning courses consume nearly 90 percent less energy and produce 85 percent fewer CO2 emissions per student than conventional site-based training days.
