Step 4: Effective use of eLearning

eLearning - Published April 14, 2022

Content

  1. What does the go-live look like?
  2. How does participant onboarding work?
  3. Sustainable platform management
  4. What’s up and running, is up and running
  5. Success stories

 

effective elearning

 

The platform is set up, the courses are ready and now only the participants are missing now. We also guide you step by step through the final steps to an effective and sustainable eLearning project.

 

1. What does the go-live look like?

A new tool in the company first has to establish itself among the employees before it becomes a sure-fire success. This is also the case with the new Learning Management System. Design an internal campaign to launch eLearning with the new LMS.

For example, you can advertise specific courses or the LMS in general on the bulletin board and intranet. Arouse your employees’ curiosity, point out the benefits and awake their appetite for more.

Tip: A nice idea is to distribute small gadgets that match the name of your platform. These little things are fun for the employees and increase the excitement for the launch of the platform. Of course, you can also send such gadgets to employees in the home office so that everyone is equally involved.

 

2. How does participant onboarding work?

Once the platform is in place, all settings have been set up and checked and the content is in place, the only thing missing are the participants. As already mentioned when the strategy was created, these can be not only be employees from the internal company environment, but also external business partners and customers with their own learning elements.

This inevitably raises the question of how participants get onto the platform in the first place. For the Coursepath LMS, there are various ways of course enrollment. The simplest variant is certainly to unlock employees academy-wide, so that any available courses can be attended if interested and needed. Externals are usually invited rather by course.

Make sure you don’t invite participants to the platform until “everything” is ready. We deliberately put everything here in quotation marks. Of course, your eLearning strategy can also include a pilot project, so the complete package doesn’t have to already be in place. What is important is that the setup is ready and the first content with added value for the participants is available. This allows them to experience the benefits of the new LMS right from the start.

In the best case, use a platform with an intuitive user interface. This makes training of the participants almost unnecessary. The high usability ensures that all participants quickly find their way around the platform and that no questions remain unanswered about its use. If they do, provide a contact person, for example the trainer of a course.

Adding more authors, trainers, and managers to your platform can be a bit more time-consuming. Either you proceed according to the train-the-trainer principle, in which the people already active in these roles take over the onboarding of new colleagues. Or you can take advantage of a key user workshop offered by the provider to have experienced experts guide new employees who are actively involved in course creation and management.

 

3. Sustainable platform management

For people with the trainer and manager role, it is especially important that the learning management system is well received. And that the courses achieve the desired increase in knowledge on the participant side, for a demand-oriented qualification. To evaluate these points, your LMS has reports ready.

With the detailed evaluation, all doors are open to you for the continuous optimization of the courses and platform. Use filters and compare user groups and course performance, or have custom-filtered reports sent to you automatically at regular intervals to define action items.

Speaking of automation: you can control many points in your academy management sustainably through automations. For example, when it comes to regular training sessions that need to be repeated annually to certify your employees – simply let the LMS take care of reminders and re-invitations. Once set, it is up and running.

 

4. What’s up and running, is up and running

Once everything is set and up and running, eLearning quickly becomes a no-brainer. So, it’s good to know that with a web-based SaaS solution, you can add more users or additional content distribution functions quickly and with little administrative effort if necessary.

For example, have you thought about connecting other in-house systems to the LMS? This is easily possible via API interfaces. Contact a point of contact for your chosen eLearning platform to find out more – usually, this is the account manager.

To monitor whether you are using your eLearning as profitably as originally planned, it is advisable to define key performance indicators (KPI) in advance and check them at regular intervals. Here are a few examples of what such KPIs might look like for internal training:

  • Motivated employees (all employees have participated in x courses in period y – varied content and time saved)
  • All employees are up to date (have successfully passed the product update course – high content quality due to practical relevance)
  • Cost-effective on-site and distributed training, e.g., in home office, field service or even externally (x% savings compared to previous solution – saved trainer fees, materials, travel expenses, travel and work time)
  • Standardized process (all new employees have successfully participated in the onboarding course – uniform prerequisites and consistent training quality, automated delivery)
  • Verification (security trainings have been successfully completed by all employees – documented education status and progress)

In practice, i.e., on the eLearning platform, automatic evaluations, reports, and reporting functions help you to do this. You can compare different target groups very precisely. To do this, select the desired report, e.g., “Participant Performance”. Reporting here allows you to view learning progress in detail using various filters, such as steps completed (pass/fail), average results, and the number of attempts. Additional reports can be displayed on Course Performance, Course Attendance, or Learning Step Performance and downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet and evaluated against your KPIs.

 

5. Success stories

Different needs, different solutions. The use of learning management systems is versatile. We have asked our customers and show you successful examples of the use of Coursepath here. Let yourself be inspired by the application examples from a wide range of industries and training areas, from practical product training to mandatory training such as data security and compliance.

 

 

Visit our eLearning platform to get started and train your employees effectively and sustainably.

Go to Coursepath LMS


Corinna König-Wildförster

14 Apr 2022