Two current trends in technology-enhanced learning systems that are now starting to gain exposure and adoption are Learning Analytics and the SCORM upgrade/replacement, TinCan, also known as xAPI.

Learning Analytics is the application of marketing-style analysis to data generated by learners. It aims to capture what tasks a learner has performed and build profiles of activity and end results in order to try and see what kinds of behaviour and activity lead to learning success. Additionally, it seeks to flag up learners who are perhaps struggling with work, which might offer a teacher or trainer the chance to intervene with more support.

Learning Analytics does have numerous issues around things like capture of data and privacy-protection, and many organisations and leaders are still debating the ethics and policies that should guide its implementation. However, it does seem like an efficient and effective way to capture and analyse more about learners.

TinCan / xAPI is based on and extended from the popular SCORM course specification, breaking free from the confines of a closed delivery system such as an LMS. It allows practically any type of interaction, both on and offline, to be recorded against a user’s learning record. For example, using the simple language-like syntax of “John read a research paper”, or “Mary took test 1 with a score of 10”, TinCan can capture data which can then be analysed using a variety of different models to discover things like content or activity effectiveness. The data retrieved is then stored in a Learning Record Store (or LRS), which can be incorporated into the LMS.

In combination, these two methods of data-capture and analysis offer a new method to gain insight into the way that learners learn and what kinds of activities and events benefit or hinder learning. This means reduced costs for you when developing learning content, as the most effective activities and content types for your audience can be easily discovered. It also brings better outcomes for learners, as those who are struggling with content can be identified and given extra support, while those who are not challenged enough can be presented with more challenging work to do.

Find out more about Learning Analytics and TinCan, or about implementing an LRS within your organisation: contact us today for advice.

The corporate side of supermarkets is something that eludes many people, but as with any business, they place a high emphasis on training their staff to the highest level. Though this may differ from the traditional business training model, supermarket programmes entertain a wide range of approaches. From intensive training to online academies, staff learning varies across the board. However, one thing is clear: the drive for success is almost blinding. Indeed, it’s hard to ignore the prominence of UK supermarket giants; there is a reason why they boast high levels of success year after year, even when the country falls on hard times.

Intensive training – Some of the biggest names in retail have recently invested in more intensive styles of training, placing huge importance on ensuring all members of staff learn at exactly the same level. Up and coming supermarket hero Aldi is known for its rigorous corporate training schemes. These courses range from one year for trainee area managers, to eighteen months for graduate programmes, and promise some of the best training in the business. Their success can be seen in the company’s rise to prominence in the last few years, but more notably in the reviews from workers, who say their plan is very effective, and that while you’re expected to work hard, their generous salary more than makes up for it.

Supermarket academies – Sainsbury’s pioneered the idea of college-based learning in 2014, investing millions of pounds in opening six training colleges. This approach followed on from their success with ‘bakery college’, but broadened its scope to training both store workers and people in corporate roles. Their aim was to make sure all employees received exactly the same level of training, and this consistency is part of what keeps their standards high. Most importantly, though, staff are taught coaching skills to pass onto new or struggling employees, so no one is left behind. In turn, this has left workers feeling more valued and involved with the company.

Growing with technology – Other giants like Tesco have employed similar tactics, opening academies in places all over the world. However, they have taken a step away from the more classic approach of classroom learning to combine other elements within their programme. For example, their Group Management Programme is something the company is very proud of, and is just one of many group training approaches. Yet, it is their shift towards technology that marks them out. Starting with ‘Academy Online’ and culminating in ‘Academy on the Go’, Tesco offers bitesize levels of learning alongside office training to keep workers topped up throughout their time with the company. As the world moves into its technological age, this helps keep staff in touch with its development.

Personalised pathways – A more personal approach is what’s benefitted other competitors, like M&S, who boast a training programme that is molded around every employee’s differing needs. In fact, one employee was particularly impressed with how much engagement there was between staff. M&S state that this type of learning is what helps them achieve perfection, and while it may take up a lot of time, the company was awarded Best Supermarket earlier this year in a survey by Which?, meaning they must be doing something right.

Doing the right thing – This isn’t the only thing they focus on in training. As the news becomes more and more saturated with stories about the environment and other social issues, it isn’t surprising that M&S have taken their learning journey down the path for sustainability. By making their staff aware of topical issues, they are equipped with the tools to carry out business with the outside world in mind. There have even been initiatives carried out that aim to help their communities, all with the aim that the training they deliver helps to build a sustainable future for their company, and the planet.

A helping hand – There is a misconception that training has to be rigid, intimidating and intensive. Yet, although Lidl do incorporate this style of learning into their schemes, it’s their mentor system that really makes them stand out from the crowd. It’s a more pastoral approach, tackling retention issues by having refresher sessions and a friendly face around the office. It’s no surprise that workers are calling their training structure nothing short of brilliant.

People are often naturally opposed to change and new ideas until they get used to them. Implementing a new learning management system in the workplace is no different. However, if you present your learning management system in the right way, you can expect high levels of excitement and engagement from your learners.

Here are some ideas for getting your employees excited about using an LMS from the beginning.

Highlight the benefits

Concentrate on highlighting the benefits of using an LMS, including its flexibility and accessibility. Your learners should be happy to hear that they will be able to access the learning materials at their own pace instead of attending time-consuming traditional training sessions. Get them excited about improving their skills and mastering new tasks.

Make it responsive

Modern learners expect their learning materials to be accessible on any device. Having an LMS that only operates on a computer might discourage people from using it and engaging in learning at their own time. Do not forget that mobile learning is one of the biggest trends when talking about elearning!

Provide personalised learning experience

Considering individual learning needs and providing your employees with personalised learning materials might be another great tool for increasing an excitement about using an LMS. Personalised training can make employees feel more appreciated because their personal skills and career goals have been considered. Not to mention that personalised learning is also expected to close the gaps in their skill sets and to improve knowledge retention.

Market your LMS

Think about different ways to ‘sell’ an LMS to your employees. For instance, you might consider doing a presentation, creating a video or sending out an email to let everyone know about it. If you have an internal marketing team, speak to them about how your LMS could be promoted and communicated with the rest of your employees. Keep promoting your LMS to reinforce your employees to visit it regularly.

Reward your employees

This is one of the most effective ways to make your learners excited about using an LMS. Rewarding your employees for completing a course might be the thing that engages them into starting the course and into staying motivated throughout it. A great way to reward your employees is gamification. For instance, you can gamify your LMS with levels that learners can go through as they finish a task.

If your company is getting a new LMS, start promoting it to your employees few months before the launch and keep promoting it regularly to make sure everyone is engaged with it. You can also use the tips discussed above to update and improve your existing LMS.

Here are a few advantages that elearning tools can bring to corporate training. I believe these benefits should be considered by learning professionals aiming to implement successful learning strategies in the business.

 

Scalable, efficient and fast

Elearning is flexible enough to quickly create and communicate new training materials to all employees throughout the company. Most Learning Management Systems are scalable in terms of the ability to handle a growing amount of work in an efficient manner as well as in terms of meeting the different needs of employees working in different countries.

Higher engagement

The variety of elearning techniques can make learning more engaging. For example, social learning can improve collaboration. Another great ways to use elearning for employee engagement are through gamification or personalised learning.

Higher learning retention

All different elearning tools used for employee engagement are expected to increase the knowledge retention.

Saves time and money

Elearning helps to reduce the time away from workplace as well as to save the money spent on trainer and employee commutation, trainer costs and infrastructure rentals.

Capacity and consistency

It is very important to make sure that all employees throughout the company get the same quality training. Elearning offers the opportunity to engage all employees in consistent training and it can help to achieve high levels of coverage amongst your target audience.

Lower environmental impacts

By delivering training online and testing your employees using online quizzes and tests, you are significantly reducing the paper consumption as well as reducing other waste caused by travelling for training.

Easier to measure learning activities and impact

Using a Learning Management System (LMS) makes it very easy to track the activity and progress of learners as well as to build reports.

Flexible

Elearning is very flexible in terms of providing learners with the freedom to learn at their own pace, when they want and where they want.

Accessible

Elearning materials can be made accessible on any device (laptop, tablet, mobile phone) and at any time. This can be very useful for providing same learning materials to learners throughout the business in different locations, this is great for international companies. The accessibility factor is very important in terms of learning provided to remote workers.

Appealing to millennials

As the number of technology savvy millennials rises in the workforce, it is clear that any modern organisation should provide some elements of elearning to the employees. It is beneficial for the learners in terms of meeting their needs, increasing engagement and ensuring their knowledge retention.

If you want to learn more about different corporate elearning solutions available, visit the Webanywhere website.

As the Internet and computers have grown in prominence, we’ve increasingly found ourselves moving our learning online, but there are still a lot of companies who insist on putting all of their training into the physical space. Naturally, we at Webanywhere are huge advocates of improving training provisions using online methods – though not at the total expense of classroom-based learning! “Blended learning” is very much the way forward at the moment, and when you look at the costs and benefits it’s clear why.

According to The Information Daily¹, 85p from every pound set aside for training is spent on actually delivering it, leaving just 15p for the course content! In addition to preventing people from actually working during the course, this includes the cost of things such as room hire, teaching fees and equipment, and it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t a sensible or a sustainable way to train large numbers of employees. By contrast an e-learning approach using an LMS, despite a higher initial startup cost, ultimately leads to lower costs elsewhere and a more long-term, reusable approach. As we can see from the graphs below1, this applies both to training existing staff and inducting new ones – in both cases a higher initial outlay leads to long-term savings. According to one study, you could save up to 70% over instructor-based methods⁴.

As touched on above, the flexibility and scalability of e-learning is also one of its key advantages – after initial setup, costs are very limited to deploy programmes to either very narrow or very broad focuses – it’s simply a matter of specifying course access to the right people. Where with brick-and-mortar learning this requires the drawing up of guest lists, hiring of event venues and the sorting out of timetables to ensure the maximum number of people can attend. It doesn’t matter with e-learning whether you need to train one person or a thousand, all that’s needed is the initial outlay in creating the course.

This is not to say, though, that the only benefits are material in terms of savings – using a blended learning approach can help your employees to retain information for longer, its wider range of learning styles appealing to different people’s personalities³. Perhaps some work better through video training, some might prefer to read sheets while others could prefer interactive quiz/form-based learning. Additionally, revision of information at intervals has been proven to improve memory and retention – with an LMS you can simply go over the information again rather than holding another costly seminar or training session.

Not only can you help your employees to learn better with an online approach, you can see for yourself the benefits through tracking their progress. Totara, for example allows you to see how much of a course an employee has completed as well as providing data for you to graph and track. This benefits in the area of lifelong learning – a single instructor-based session ends when staff leave, and tracking its progress is difficult to say the least, while online it’s simply a matter of checking profiles.

These are just a few of the many ways your organisation can benefit from embracing e-learning. Get involved with the future of training and teaching, contact us today to find out how we can help your organisation implement a robust, world-standard LMS.

Sources

• 1. eLearning Success – measuring the ROI impact and benefits
• 2. 18 Mind-Blowing eLearning Statistics You Need To Know
• 3. Organisational benefits of e-learning

With Learning Technologies 2015 starting tomorrow we understand that plenty of you will be considering building your own e-learning projects after coming by stand 79. Getting started can be a little overwhelming, so we put together this handy guide to help you get started. It’s just 6 things you need to do when starting your e-learning project.

1. Define Your Scope

Know what you want and you don’t. Don’t feel like just because you’ve got a huge amount of options before you that you have to use them all. Keep in mind areas such as your target audience, what you intended to teach and how appropriate the content is on an e-learning environment. Once you know what it is you want the rest of the process becomes a whole lot clearer.

2. Setup Your Team

To get your e-learning project going you’ll need a decent team. This usually consist of:

• A Human Resources/Capacity Development manager
  Essentially the project leader, their job is to decide what they want from the project, who’s doing what during the projects development and when to move to the next stage at every step.

• An Instructional Designer (ID)
  The person in charge of implementing what goes into the system, evaluating what is and isn’t appropriate as an e-resource. They also design specific activities for the course which are checked over by the…

• The Subject Matter Experts (SME)
  The people who know about what you are teaching. They write the content for the course and look over any content made by the ID.

• Web Developers & Media Editors
  This part of the team assembles the website, adds in any interactive elements and looks after the media content.

• Course Administrators, Facilitators & Tutors
  The people responsible for actually running the course once it’s built, with administrators looking after the site, facilitators providing students with access and tutors guiding students through the elearning course.

• Technical Support
  All the team should be backed up by a support team throughout the development and during the course’s use.

3. Set Deadlines

Staying organised is a key part of keeping your project on track. Set realistic deadlines with your teams, and try not to be unrealistic. Delayed deadlines will throw the next stage off their deadline, so it’s better to plan with a practical mindset. Make sure there’s time for review and feedback once it’s launched, you don’t want to scrape a deadline and still have problems.

4. Define Terms

Misunderstood jargon can lead to disastrous problems later on, so make sure everyone understands the terms at an early stage. Write out a glossary and have a meeting to outline what the goals are. This is great for both preventing miscommunication and keeping everyone informed of what exactly it is you’re building.

5. Gather Your Content

Perhaps the most important thing of all, find and organise what you’re going to put in! This is obviously something that should start happening once the team’s been assembled, but it’s a crucial early stage. Get hold of any currently existing resources and start to think about how you’ll convert them to the e-learning system.

6. Set Technical, Design and Content Guidelines

Keeping your project consistent will make the user’s life a lot easier later on. Make sure that everyone in your team is aware of what the guidelines are, and if there aren’t any, make them! It’s important not only for ease of use but also for keeping the your own branding consistent across your new platform.

E-learning projects have the potential to make everyone’s lives easier and more productive, so don’t let the early stages of organisation be a concern.

ITV, the largest television network in the UK has chosen Google apps to transform their business, moving away from the legacy of Microsoft Exchange. ITV aims to promote learning, stimulate creativity and foster collaboration in the workplace.  Many individuals have now realised the benefits of free Google tools such as G-chat, G-mail and G-hangout, as this technology has now begun to integrate within the workplace.

 

Many employees are constantly on the move and require technology which can be used on multiple devices. This is something which is also true in regards to learning programmes, as they are now being delivered ‘just-in-time.’

Google apps will provide ITV employees (up to 7,000) flexibility in how they communicate and share information across the business. These tools will provide businesses with many benefits such as:

• Gmail (including the integrated instant messaging tool) will make communication easier
• Google Calendar will boost efficiency by helping to schedule meetings and events with shared calendars
• Google Docs will allow staff to create, edit and share documents, presentations and spreadsheets in real time
• Google Sites and Google Video for Business will also facilitate collaboration

At Webanywhere we have integrated Google apps with Totara LMS which creates a single platform for learning, creativity and collaboration in the workplace.

If you would like to learn more about the ITV transformation programme, you can also learn more about Google apps here.

Most readers will know that there are plenty of web tools and apps which are freely available to download. But while there are ever-increasing numbers of free resources, how many are actually of any use in making our lives easier, more productive or more efficient?

The irony is that while the supply of free resources is accelerating, the demand for these also seems to be growing in response to the need for more flexible, cheaper and on-demand applications. The problem is that even after hours of trawling the internet and reading numerous  blog entries (like this one!),  willing users may be no nearer to finding the right software tool for them.

One such example is the area of business presentation software. After the recent ‘Death by PowerPoint’ uprising, and the advancement of new web 2.0 tools, users are scanning the marketplace for solutions that not only extend their presentation capabilities, but provide real audience engagement and drive the changes in behaviour that are desired outcomes for most business presenters.

This is of particular importance for HR and Training Managers that use Learning Management Systems (LMS) within their organisation. Since an LMS is designed to track and report on individuals’ progress, sometimes it is beneficial to create learning plans that incorporate a variety of tools within the learning environment as opposed to repeatedly force-feeding a SCORM activity with the standard reading followed by a test or quiz.

Having considered this dilemma, I believe I have identified a useful solution option. It’s called Prezi, and is available at www.prezi.com. I’ve seen several free or low cost online presentation tools which enable the user to create Flash animations, but in this writer’s view, very few provide the invigorating presentation experience that Prezi does. Instead of the viewer being subjected to a long series of standard PowerPoint slides (which can sap the willpower of even the most enthused and dedicated audience), the Prezi tool delivers a dynamic interface which is all created in a single page that the PC or laptop screen tracks, in a similar way to a smartphone touchscreen.

Within the Prezi tool, users can also embed other Web 2.0 tools which include YouTube video, images, audio media files and even Screenr files (for on-screen demo recordings). This means your now-fully-interactive presentations can throw off the shackles of static PPT slide shows for good, letting you engage with the audience in previously unknown ways!

Training managers can even embed Prezi presentations using the HTML code within their LMS and link to them directly within individual courses. Although this presentation is not trackable (unlike a SCORM object) within the LMS, it can be used as an introduction to a topic, as a learning object which can be referenced from within a discussion forum or an online quiz.

That’s about all for now!

• If you are a content provider looking for an affordable way to create your own learning content and host it online to provide a new client service, please go to our website at www.traininganywhere.co.uk.

• To learn more about Prezi you can visit this website www.prezi.com

• If you are looking for some inspiration from a best practice example you can view the recent Coca Cola Prezi presentation.

Conor Gilligan, Head of Corporate Operations at Webanywhere Ltd