The eLearning Big Picture: Finding the Best Fit for Your eLearning Lessons

Tonight's presenter, Mark Simon, Mark Simon is the Director of eLearning at Eliassen Group with over 20 years of experience with corporate design, development, and delivery of eLearning trainings, clearly demonstrated and resolved this dilemma we all face with e-learning implementations.

Greater Boston ASTD's Wednesday April 15th meeting, how to organize and make e-learning a perfect fit on your training pegboard, was well attended with slightly over 50 people wanting more on this topic.

Mark Simon started out with the logistical challenges of traditional instructor led trainings, with how to scale training if others are hired at different times of the year. Also, where to schedule and make it most cost effective for those employees traveling to remote or home office sites as well as the instructors travel costs and schedule.

Mark outlined E-learning with 3 major types:

1. Online training either through a vendor sponsored program or internal intranet, learners can take required course
2. Linear- this is step by step trainings each step must be completed as part of a certification program or compliance testing
3. Self paced- as part of an employee's developmental and skill improvement taking classes online

Some of the audience questions throughout the night were how to follow up as part of Kirkpatrick's level 4 Results, with conducting a follow up survey assessment to ensure learners have applied the behavioral learning objective. Other questions where how to review SLA's for outside vendors supporting e-learning projects and randomizing on-line test questions every 6 months.

The second half of the presentation was dedicated to Knowledge Management, how to disseminate your e-learning with 4 different methods:

1. Formal Training, Start to finish instruction, work stops, some examples are instructor led, e-learning and webinars
2. Performance Support, finding the right information in "3 clicks or less" the following examples are SOP's, online help and job aids
3. Research, most comprehensive information for the learner but most time consuming, examples include, newsletters, publications, internet and intranet
4. Collaborative Learning, this is a combination of self paced and collaborative learning
   which include, wikis, blogs, e-mail/chat and on the job training.

Mark's final segment featured some tools discussion of the major e-learning software, Adobe's Captivate, Camtasia and Lectora.

Now that you've established a Knowledge Management system in your organization, what access portal method is best for your LMS and company intranet. Mark spend the final slides on proposed solutions giving us various topics such as technical software training, customer service and which delivery method is best with an interactive demo as well as some examples of one of his biopharma clients currently using e-learning effectively.

Mark's conclusion was clear and simple, choose the right modality for your e-learning implementations, train your employees, ensure critical information is accessible and updated for successful transfer of learning. If you do that, your e-learning will be perfect fit for your training implementations.