What is Elearning? Why it is important for your business?

Elearning or Electronic Learning is the delivery of learning, training or educational resources through digital devices. Elearning offers numerous benefits to both learners and enterprises. Whether it is a short correspondence course or complete digital training, eLearning has skyrocketed in the last ten years. For employers, it offers productive and efficient ways to deliver training to employees. Consequently, employees also get benefitted from convenient training by enhancing their skills and knowledge.

Enterprises invest in eLearning to educate their employees and customers to increase their credibility, retention, and revenue. According to Ambient Sight Analytics, the global e-learning market will continue to grow by 5% every year and reach $272 billion by the end of 2022. But what exactly is eLearning? Let’s take a closer look at different learning types and the ways it can benefit your business.

So what exactly is Elearning?

Elearning is defined as learning that is facilitated electronically. Whether you are watching an educational video, reading an ebook or taking an assessment- all is eLearning. Elearning is a standardised form of learning delivered through the internet to provide learners access anytime and anywhere. Nowadays, most of the businesses prefer eLearning to train their employees and help them with internal processes. Interestingly, you can even customise your learning experience using technologies like augmented reality and artificial intelligence. In the coming time, the online learning will replace offline formats. But why has eLearning become so popular? For better understanding, let’s dig into its history.

History of Elearning

The term eLearning was first used in 1999 by a US researcher and Educator, Elliott Masie, in a TechLearn Conference. In 2000, businesses started using eLearning to train their employees for improving their skills. In the same year, eLearning was revolutionalised with the release of OLAT, a SCORM compliant Learning Management System.

Over the years, eLearning has skyrocketed its reputation by becoming the most effective ways of delivering training or learning resources. But many factors like the internet, mobile phones, learning management systems or multimedia contents have even more solidified learning. Let’s know-how?

• Internet: People in the 90’s used to rely on CDs and manuals for training. But the evolution of the internet made the businesses withdraw the traditional forms of learning and utilise online learning’s versatility.
• Digital Devices: The popularity of online learning hiked as digital devices like computers, and mobile phones became more affordable and prevalent. Today, mobile phones are the most convenient ways of accessing online education. Mobile learning has become one of the essential parts of eLearning.
• Multimedia Content: As technology evolved, the use of multimedia elements like videos, pictures demonstrated a reliable way of keeping the users engaged and interested. Today, you even have the power to customise the learning experience according to your learners with virtual reality.
• Learning Management Systems: With LMSs, it has become easier for learners to access learning resources. Today, LMS’s have become even more sophisticated and technology-oriented. Enterprises today have started using cloud-based systems to execute their training to meet their learners’ objectives.

How to deliver E-learning effectively?

Whether you want to train your employees or give your customers a better understanding of your products, there are several e-learning techniques that we can use.

A Learning Management System is a software application designed to deliver educational courses or training programs. A great LMS will provide features like tracking, reporting and automation that you require for executing your training program strategically. LMSs are the crucial tools in eLearning where every online training is dependent on. LMS gives you an organised approach to create your eLearning course and manage all the content at one place without the risk of losing important information. Today, you can choose a diverse range of LMSs like Open Source, Cloud-Based, On-Premise and Commercial LMSs.

A Cloud-Based LMS is one of the most popular LMS as it allows you to access the information and content without having to install any software on your digital device. An excellent cloud-based LMS will allow you to create courses quickly, enrol the learners and accurately track their performance. A cloud-based LMS automates your training program including course delivery, assignments, assessments and real-time reporting.

SCORM refers to the Sharable Content Object Reference Model. SCORM is referred to as the gold standard in online learning. With SCORM, you can create your content one time and use it across multiple platforms without any kind of modification. In simple terms, SCORM allows you to create units of your training content that can be used across different platforms.SCORM lets you provide a more interactive and engaging learning experience with greater control over your content. It is a set of technical standards that tell us how to design a course content that will work on any platform. It gives us a detailed description of the eLearning course structure and its connectivity with the Learning Management System.

SCORM uses three components for the effective delivery of e-content. The components are:

1. Content Packaging: All the course content is placed into a SCORM package that contains all the information that an LMS needs to deliver the content effectively.
2. Run-Time Communication: This component of SCORM is responsible for exchanging the data between an LMS and content for delivering the program and tracking the performance.
3. Sequencing: This component highlights the learner’s navigation and exploration throughout the training program.

To utilise SCORM in eLearning, you need to have a SCORM Compliant LMS. It is the most popular technology standard in online learning. With SCORM Compliant LMSs, all you have to do is upload the content into the training system. The authoring tools will automatically generate the LMS code and export all the course content to the SCORM package.

3. xAPI:

xAPI or the Experience API is another popular specification of learning technology. xAPI is also called the next evolution of SCORM as it has redefined the learning experience by adding some different specifications into a SCORM package. This API gathers the consistent information of a learner’s activity across other platforms. In simple terms, xAPI can track all the learning experiences within an LMS or outside the LMS. However, xAPI will only track the data across different domains but will not modify your course design. For significant and engaging learning, ensure your courses are well-designed.

What are the different Elearning Training types?

Today, eLearning is used for varied reasons. Whether it is to learn new skills, train your employees or give a better understanding of your products and services to your customers- eLearning is the way. Here, we will explain four different types of eLearning training that KloudLearn helps you deliver effectively.

Today, Employee Training is one of the most frequent training types for which enterprises use an LMS. Organisations leverage employee training for several reasons like improving employee performance, onboarding new hires or teaching a new skill. Delivering training through LMS makes it even more efficient and engaging. Elearning not only enhances the skill set of your employees but also encourages better learning retention. Furthermore, use an LMS that easily allows you to create customised training content, run exams, track and report your employees’ performance.

Compliance Training is the essential training for most of the businesses today. It familiarises your employees with the company’s policies, rules and regulations that apply to their daily job responsibilities. Compliance training is mandatory and covers aspects like:

• Workplace Safety
• Diversity Training
• Anti-Harassment Training
• Workplace Violence
• Data Protection & Privacy.

Having a robust compliance program helps in minimising the risks of workplace violations, conflicts and reputation crisis. Moreover, your employees will be more productive in a safe and healthy work environment.

Customer training has become a necessity today and is one of the popular ways to attract customer goodwill. Customer training programs help your customers to understand your product or service. These training are prevalent in software companies. Customer training offers numerous benefits to organisations. Some of them are:

• Increased customer engagement
• Increased customer satisfaction
• Increased customer retention
• Rise in revenue

Partner training is designed for your partners to give them training on how to sell your product or service. You can use presentations, brochures, or courses to help them understand how your product or service works. The critical components of partner training are as follows:

• Product information
• Marketing guidance
• Sales training
• Customer support training

Partner training offers numerous benefits for businesses like:

• Clear brand standards
• Increased Revenue
• Reduced support costs
• Better Engagement with partners

What are the benefits of eLearning for your business?

Elearning has become the future of Learning and Development. Employers today can meet the expectations of their customers, employees and partners using online learning. Customised learning solutions allow businesses to proactively and effectively equip employees with the expertise to perform their role at best.

Let’s talk about the benefits of eLearning for your business in detail.

• Cost-Effective
• Time-Saving
• Improves Performance & Productivity
• Easy Progress Tracking

Cost-effectiveness is one of the remarkable benefits of eLearning. Offline training, on the other hand, is quite expensive and difficult to maintain. Online learning removes the need for costly printed training manuals. With online learning, all you have to do is create a course and share it with your employees via LMS.

Whether you have to create a new training course or implement changes to the content, eLearning allows you to add those to LMS quickly. This saves you a considerate amount of time. Similarly, learners also save time by accessing the content when needed instead of depending on scheduled training sessions.

Online learning allows your employees to quickly complete their training resulting in better performance, productivity and efficiency. Employees also feel motivated by sharing their achievements with other team members. Online learning provides excellent opportunities for employees to enhance their skills with the flexibility of learning anytime and anywhere.

Most LMSs have inbuilt analytics that track your employees’ performance and show them in the form of graphs and reports. KloudLearn makes it even easier by creating interactive and engaging courses. It gives you a proper track of training progress through inbuilt reports and dashboards.

Conclusion

Slowly but surely, eLearning has become the new norm in education. According to this survey, 72% of the organizations believe that online learning has helped them increase their competitive edge by providing them the opportunities to go along with the changes. Additionally, 42% of companies across the world say that online learning has increased their revenue. Since 2000, the eLearning industry has grown by 900%. Online learning is a convenient approach to employee training, customer training, compliance training as the retention rates are 30% higher than traditional training.

Learn more about Kloudlearn at our website.