Corporate e-learning is gaining wider traction these days, and, as practice shows, can be highly rewarding. Companies that use e-learning also report higher employee engagement and retention rates. Yet, in some cases, e-learning initiatives fail to deliver on the promise of increasing ROI and efficiency. In this article, we will explore the top common mistakes when launching corporate e-learning programs and talk about how you could avoid them.
Why Corporate E-Learning Is a Rising Trend
On-going digital transformation and successful e-learning use cases are huge incentives for businesses to embrace e-learning. Saving time and money as well as better accessibility, scalability, and efficiency are also solid reasons to start implementing e-learning solutions within your organization.
On top of that, the new generation entering the workforce is expecting employers to offer advanced learning opportunities. Gen Z, the tech-savvy digital natives, currently make up 20% of today’s workers and are forcing organizations to ditch the traditional learning models – or, at the very least, to enhance them with cutting-edge tech.
As of 2020, the hottest concepts that drive the adoption of corporate e-learning are:
Personalized learning – it’s all about respecting differences and proceeding at your own pace.
Human-centered learning – at the workplace, the learning content should help employees reach their goals and achieve maximum efficiency.
Microlearning – Microlearning is delivering learning content in small chunks and exactly when people have time between work tasks.
Then, of course, there’s a broader concept of lifelong learning, which presupposes that employees will be constantly learning new skills and mastering new job roles in order to keep up with fast-developing technologies. Opportunities for constant upskilling and upgrading is what workers expect from responsible employers.
Top Mistakes When Implementing Corporate E-Learning
As much as organizations may strive to embrace a human-centered learning approach, implementing e-learning is often a challenging task. Below is a list of pitfalls to watch out for when implementing e-learning within an organization.
1. Losing sight of your learning goals and objectives
Your goals and objectives – from large-scale to very specific ones, should be your primary focus. Losing sight of them may result in delivering inconsistent, incomplete, or poorly designed learning content. Solution: Outline clear goals and objectives for each e-learning course, as well as for each course segment. Both you and your learners should have a clear idea about what they will achieve upon completing a course. Always keep a broader picture in mind – which objectives do you want e-learning to reach for your organization?
2. Choosing the wrong e-learning platform
An e-learning platform is, ultimately, a medium for delivering your learning courses and other educational content. The wrong choice of an e-learning platform may have a strong negative impact on your corporate learning in general. At the very least, you run the risk of overpaying for unnecessary features.
Solution: Have a very detailed and specific vision for every course or e-learning initiative that you want to implement. See how well the e-learning platform you are considering supports this vision. We strongly recommend that you read our article on Choosing an E-learning Platform for more insights.
3. Trying to deliver a traditional course via e-learning
Because online learners have shorter attention spans, traditional and e-learning courses differ both in structure and in content types. If you make no adjustments to a traditional course, your learners run the risk on cognitive overload and you may quickly lose your audience.
Solution: Focus on the most essential parts of your course and split the content into small 15 minute chunks. Use rich multimedia such as videos, audio files, and graphics to make your learning content engaging and memorable.
4. Failing to provide supporting documents
Human memory has limited capacity, and if your students watch a video and attend a virtual classroom they are likely to remember only the most general info. If you give them no downloadable content they will have nothing to fall back on, and won’t be able to memorize important facts and details.
Solution: Support your courses with downloadable content for each module – transcripts, audio files, videos, graphics, fact sheets, etc. Storing and organizing these materials is often a challenging thing in itself: the content tends to pile up and become a disorganized mess. Use online platforms like VARTEQ’s ReaLMS to effectively store and categorize the content for your online courses.
5. Zero gamification and interactivity
When people learn online, their attention tends to wander. If your e-learning course remains formal and boring, you’re likely to have an increasing number of dropouts. The same is true if your students can neither interact with teachers nor communicate with each other. They’ll miss networking and a sense of belonging to a community that they get from traditional learning.
Solution: Enhance your courses with gamification and interaction features. Introduce messaging and discussion forums, and encourage students to share what they learn. Use VARTEQ’s ReaLMS to encourage gamification through introducing competition between departments and awarding the best players. ReaLMS also has modules that help promote discussions and content sharing.
6. Failing to provide evaluation and knowledge assessment
How well did I perform? Most of your employees attending online courses will want to know the answer to this question. Getting zero feedback feels discouraging and frustrating and results in low retention rates.
Solution: Run tests and quizzes after each learning module, and have a good knowledge assessment system in place. Ideally, use data analytics to identify individual knowledge gaps and develop personalized learning plans for each worker.
Most importantly, focus on building an e-learning system that would help your employees grow and achieve maximum efficiency. As of today, platforms like ReaLMS not only store and organize learning content but also help educators achieve maximum employee engagement by fostering communication and interactivity.
Have questions about building and implementing corporate e-learning solutions? Our expert team will be happy to offer you a helping hand. Contact us now for a free consultation!