The Evolution of elearning

As a consultant, part of your value is helping your client move to a digital world. Let viaMedia be at the center of your clients transition to digital content through on-line delivery.

1). Traditional	2). Transitional	3). All Digital

1). Traditional learning:

Advantages:

• A classroom environment helps build personal relationships within a company.
• No change in attitude is required, if classroom training is available today.
• No change to training methods may mean no change to the training budget.

Disadvantages:

• Dedicated training group - limited amount of projects.
• Not changing the culture of learning in your company.
• There is almost always separation of content expert and course builder/trainer.
• Since building even a simple course is a considerable investment - most training is not formalized. It may take months or years to train a new person.
• This is likely a much more expensive way to train your employees.

2). Transitional/Digital elearning:

Advantages:

• Employee satisfaction - feeling like the company provides the opportunity to grow. Feeling important and appreciated by being able to share personal experience.
• Effective workforce - staff that actually learns and applies the experience of others to their decisions.
• Employee involvement - employees provide input to the elearning and as a result have a feeling of pride and ownership with a desire to keep the learning information accurate and up to date. Of course this can all be done under the direction and approval of the training department.
• Remain competitive - Effectively sharing knowledge can help a company keep current and competitive.
• If your people are important to you, then show it. Invest in your own staff.
• Help determine where existing training material was not fully understood or where it is lacking.
• Not letting knowledge you've already paid for walk out the door. Capture your employee's knowledge in a formal way so it may be shared.
• Liability - when needed, reports show your people were trained.
• Reuse your existing content. Get better value out of your existing websites, training material etc.
• Accelerate your migration to a digital world, in manageable steps. At least start the migration because moving to digital content is 'when' not 'if'.
• Showing real leadership in a practical tangible way by setting in motion the steps that allow your people to learn.
• ROI can be measured in months (both hard and soft dollars).
• Now content experts can create the modules.
• All lessons are available for immediate use.
• Reuse content from almost anywhere.
• People don't have to 'get trained' on the training software. Its intuitive design is simple and fast.
• Management knows who is being effective, who understands and offers help where it is needed.
• The Internet has made all this very inexpensive.
• Since Blackstone hosts the modules - no technical knowledge or setup is required by the customer.
• Can offer an immediate boost to an existing training team

Disadvantages:

• It often takes the vision of a leader to start down this path in a meaningful way. So progress is slower at the beginning.
• It takes some time to pull information from those who know it.
• Any change requires some effort.
• Part of the ROI is soft costs.
• Training is an easy target for budget cutbacks.
• May be viewed as a threat to an established training team.

3). All Digital elearning:

Advantages: All the advantages of '2). Transitional elearning' - plus...

• Management and staff know exactly what is understood by whom.
• Information is available anytime anywhere.
• Reuse of digital content is quick, easy and extremely efficient.

Disadvantages:

• Can be viewed as too much 'big brother'.
• A fully integrated LMS is an expensive, enterprise wide undertaking.