Compliance training. It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it. And that somebody is you, if you are a business owner that wants to enter certain markets for which the law mandates it. So how to encourage your employees to comply with compliance training requirements? Yelling at them would help, but if you want some more sophisticated ideas you could try, read on. Make it lighter Just because it’s compliance training doesn’t mean it also has to be boring. An eLearning platform allows you to spice up a bland compliance training material with presentations, audio, video and even interactive exercises and quizzes. It might also allow for discussions and comments exchange from the learners, in some kind of forum or chat system, which can live up an otherwise dry lesson. Take advantage of the multimedia and interaction facilities an LMS offers to take your presentations as far away as you can from merely citing rule after rule and guideline after guideline. Make it heavier The different aspects of doing business that compliance training covers (legal, ethical, environmental, etc) can have quite heavy repercussions if the rules are not followed properly and the case is taken to court. And that’s not just for your company, but also for the individual employee. Making your employees understand that paying attention to their compliance training will help them avoid getting sued or fined, can be quite motivational. Use concrete examples Compliance training content might seem as something abstract and outside your employees’ regular duties, especially if it’s presented in a dry and formalistic manner. To make them understand how it connects to them, use concrete, real world, examples of situations in which they’ll get to use the knowledge they gained from their compliance training. Examples of how someone’s failure to comply with a rule led to a whole production run being discarded (a common issue in factories), or past employees getting in the hot seat for disobeying an ethical rule (e.g. against racial discrimination), will help them understand the day-to-day importance of their training. Accommodate them Sometimes the reason employees have issues with compliance training is that it obstructs their daily workflow. People do not like it when their daily routine is disrupted, especially if this means they might get behind on their workload. Even worse is when compliance training demands some of their free time (e.g. by asking them to stay after work or to study at home). eLearning helps alleviate this situation, by enabling employees to study from everywhere, and at their own pace Take advantage of this, and give them the choice of how and when they’ll study. This includes giving them the option to study on their commute, e.g. by also providing your compliance course in a mobile friendlyversion (most LMS nowadays support mobile/tablets). If the compliance training course is too demanding (which can happen depending on the industry), you slightly reduce your employees’ workload for that period so that they can manage better, or even allow them some time off from work for studying. Compensate them Employees like to be compensated for their time. This includes their time spent studying for their compliance training. That doesn’t mean you have to take out your checkbook ― there are several other ways to reward them for their successful completion of their training and motivate them to try harder. Giving them some time off of work is an obvious reward, and it’s quite fair too, especially if they had to put on longer hours or study from home for their compliance training. Another approach would be to give them some kind of "points" upon the successful completion of their training, which could be tied to a future bonus or promotion. Taking advantage of the reporting facilities of modern LMS systems, you could even tie those points to their individual performance. Last, but not least, you could award them some kind of certification upon the completion of their compliance training, something that they could use as an asset in their future career in the industry too. Conclusion Those are just a few ways we’ve found to increase participation and minimize employee friction and complaints when doing compliance training. If you have any related tips to share with our readers from your experience in applying compliance training to your company, please drop us a comment. And if you’re interested in compliance training and applying eLearning solutions to your enterprise or organization, check out our free online demo or contact our sales department who will answer your every question*. *= eLearning related, but we’re good at computer and math questions too The post The complete guide for making complying with compliance training easier appeared first on eFront Blog.

They say that nobody likes lawyers until they need one. I don’t know, I always liked the profession. Heck, I’m somewhat of a certified lawyer myself, in the sense that, while I have not actually studied the thing, I’ve seen all episodes of Law & Order, The Practice, Boston Legal, Shark, The Defenders and lots of others. That should count for something, right? In this post we’ll show how legal professionals can benefit from eLearning, and why it is a great fit for law firms and the legal profession in general, an industry where training and re-training is a constant and available time is limited. It saves time When you’re trying to save your clients from "doing time", you usually don’t have that much time yourself. Lawyers and legal professionals are notoriously overworked, and long hours are the norm, whichever branch of law they practice. eLearning based training doesn’t have the time and location requirements that classroom based training has. Studying can happen at home, during office downtime, etc. at the employees’ own pace. Since training happens on-demand and can be served through web interfaces, it can be used on any kind of device: desktop, laptop, tablet or even a smartphone. A lawyer can study while at court waiting for the judge to arrive or the jury to come back with their decision, or even while commuting or waiting at the airport to catch a flight. This makes eLearning a convenient and effective method for lawyers to study for their continuing legal education (CLE), something which is required by law in most countries. It’s location independent Lawyers often have to be in different cities, to follow up on a court case or represent a client. That’s especially true for larger law firms that maintain offices in different cities or even in several countries. Scheduling seminars in all those places, besides being costly and a huge time-sink to manage, leaves lawyers and staff in each office learning something different, as instructor skills can vary widely, and even the same instructor might skip some important points or change his delivery. eLearning ensures that the exact same content is presented in the same way across all of your branches and offices. And, what’s even better, you have a centralized way to schedule, monitor and manage courses and employee progress. It’s easy to deploy Modern LMS platforms are easy to install and deploy. If you have an IT department, installing an LMS like eFrontPro would be a piece of cake for them. And even if you don’t, there are hosted options that give you a turn-key solution, ready for you to start developing your courses. It’s easy to update The things lawyers and legal staff have to study change all the time (as do laws, especially in areas like business or when dealing with international cases), making it difficult to keep up via seminars and printed textbooks. eLearning material is just bytes on a hard disk, so it’s as easy to update and change, as it is writing a document on Word (or WordPerfect — I’m told a lot of legal professionals, especially in the US, still swear by it). A modern learning management system (LMS) like our eFrontPro, also allows you to incorporate existing material, from presentations to pdf documents, and from web pages to videos in your courses. You can even buy and include off-the-shelf prepackaged courses made available by third parties into your training material. It’s easy to track As a legal professional you’re surely familiar with the "chain of evidence" and the need for careful tracking of everything. eLearning gives you an easy way to track course completion, employee progress, time spend, skills acquired, and numerous other events and data associated with your training program. eFrontPro’s reporting capabilities for example, ensure that you’re always ahead of what’s happening during your employee training programs, with up to the moment information of individual and group attendance, performance and grades, and pretty graphs to show to your boss (or get insight from, in case you’re the boss). It’s a full blown learning experience eLearning is not just a fancy way to describe webpages with some text and a few automated tests. With a capable LMS platform, eLearning is a full blown learning experience in its own right, one that has been shown to have even better results for corporate training than traditional seminars and classroom based training (which usually end up being a yawn-fest). With eFrontPro for example you can add images, presentations, interactive elements, and multimedia assets (sound and video) into your training courses. This allows you to include things like newspaper clippings and forensic expert reconstructions related to a case, or graphs and supporting material to help get your point across. When you need them, real time instructions and face-to-face meetings are available too, with LMS support for tele-conference sessions and electronic whiteboards. Or the whole class can have a lengthier asynchronous discussion by taking advantage of the chat and forum functionality. Last, but not least, you can combine classroom based education with online courses in a "blended learning" scenario. eFrontPro for example has a special type of course that can be had in the "real" world but be managed (graded, tracked, etc) as an online class, helping you integrate traditional and on-demand learning. It’s cheap This one is kind of obvious. Deploying a fully featured eLearning solution is cheaper than hiring one or more instructors and renting some classrooms, or paying the travel costs for your staff to attend a seminar. This gets even more impressive when you add remote offices into the equation, as the same LMS deployment can serve up to thousands of employees all over the world at the same time. eLearning, being on-demand, is also less disruptive to your normal (hectic) workflow, something that not only will be appreciated by your lawyers or legal staff, but will also save you time by keeping productivity up. Closing arguments eLearning is a perfect fit for the legal industry for several reasons: - It’s cheaper than traditional learning - Lawyers and legal staff can study at their own pace and from wherever they are - It’s on-demand, so it doesn’t disrupt your firm’s busy schedule - It’s great for continuous legal education (CLE) - It’s easy to deploy, manage and update - It’s a full blown learning experience, just as valid and effective as classroom based learning. Have you reached your verdict? If you’re interested in deploying an eLearning solution in your firm, contact us and we’ll be happy to help you and overrule any objections you might have. Or take eFrontPro for a free demo, and you’ll agree with us that… res ipsa loquitur! The post How eLearning can work in the legal industry appeared first on eFront Blog.

There’s a line from the 80’s Kevin Costner flick "Field of Dreams" that has outlived the movie: "If you build it, they will come". Sadly it seldom works that way in real life, and almost never in eLearning. Even before you start your eLearning business you have to think of your target audience. And after you’re done with writing your courses it’s time to market them, that is, if you want people to know about them. In time, you’ll learn that to run a successful eLearning business you’ll have to wear many hats (or hire the right people to do the wearing). Here are a few tips to help you with this. 1. Scratch an itch If you want to create a business, begin by considering what would attract enough customers to sustain it. Your courses should solve a real problem ("scratch an itch") that people have. Learning english, learning the guitar or learning business administration are actual things people pay for. Sure, you might like Latin and want to offer courses for it but there’s a reason it’s called a dead language: not even zombies speak it. It would thus be unwise to start an eLearning business based on selling Latin courses to the masses. Similarly, a subject that millions enjoy but nobody would pay to learn is also a no-no. That doesn’t mean you should stick to what everybody else offers or to a few "safe" options. Just that there has to be a market willing to pay for the kind of courses you want to offer. Which brings us to our next tip: 2. Find a niche There are two ways to succeed in a market. Either offer something everybody wants and many sell, or offer something fewer people want but only a tiny number of business sell it. McDonalds does the first. Ferrari does the second. If you go for this then offering an obscure course might not be a bad idea, as long as there are enough people willing to enroll for it and there’s little competition. Such small and specialized markets are called "niches", and if you decide to cater to one, you’ll need to know it well. Studying such a market is usually easy, because there are fewer competitors you have to check. By the same token, however, those that do exist might be too entrenched and command such a large percentage of the market that you will need to have a really compelling offer (quality or price wise) to break into it. Which brings us to our next tip: 3. Create your courses with your customers in mind Of course you always have to create courses with your students in mind. But if you’re selling courses (as opposed to doing enterprise training for example), you’ll also have to think of your students as customers. Enterprise training is "easier" in this regard, as employees can (and usually are) forced to go through their courses. Your students, on the other hand, are there by choice, and can leave whenever they want. One important rule is to neither bore them nor discourage them with difficult to follow lessons. Bored and discouraged students seldom renew their subscriptions. Try to make your courses fun and rewarding to follow, and try to have the appropriate learning pace for your audience and its age, prior skills and knowledge level, and time availability. Which brings us to our next tip: 4. Be flexible Whether you cater to a mass market or a smaller niche market, you will get the best results by offering a flexible curriculum and multiple training options. After all flexibility and adaptability to particular needs is supposed to be a core advantage of eLearning compared to traditional classroom based training. Since your students might be in different timezones or study at home after work, try to offer several date and time options for any real-time course activity (e.g. teleconferences, due dates for homework, etc), so that everybody can fit their schedule around them. Offer courses in several "packages", allowing your students to pick the one that works for them depending on their skills and prior experience. Listen to your students’ complaints and remarks and adapt your courses accordingly if you see a common pattern. Don’t see their criticism defensively; what they really do is help you market-optimize your business. Which brings us to our next tip: 5. Market the hell out of it Marketing. You can’t avoid it. Heck, Coca Cola has to spend millions every year, and they are the most recognizable brand on earth. Don’t be afraid to be social. Embrace blogging, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc to your advantage. These are the places your potential students are. Be there too. That said, avoid scams like paying "black hat SEO" guys to make your eLearning portal #1 in Google. You might as well wire your money directly to that troubled Nigerian prince. The only way to get your name out and rank high in search engines is to offer quality content regularly. Find out the best places to advertise and market your business depending on your market. If, for example, you sell guitar lessons, ads in magazines like "Guitar World" or "Rolling Stone" will get you more students than one in the New York Times or The Sun, even if more people read the latter. Follow your target audience. Don’t use marketing as a facade to lure people to a poor experience. You have to have a solid presence at all levels and keep your branding consistent throughout. Don’t pay to have great TV ads and then greet people coming to check your eLearning service with a lousy web presence and an ugly logo. Which brings us to our conclusion: Conclusion Running an eLearning portal is not unlike running any other business. You need to find your niche, solve a real problem people have, cater to your customer needs, be flexible, and market the hell out of your product. And if you need an example of a product that solves the very real need of proving a best of breed eLearning platform, is cost effective and a breeze to use, and offers tons of flexibility and customization options, take our own product, eFrontPro, for a free test drive. The post 5 tips to help you sell your eLearning courses appeared first on eFront Blog.

In IT there’s this notion of a 10x programmer. This legendary creature is someone who is ten times more productive than the average programmer (in other words someone who contributes as much as ten other employees). Admittedly this might be a little on the hyperbolic side, but the truth is that in any industry there are indeed employees that are much more valuable, motivated and productive than their colleagues. Your job, as a manager, is to create an environment and a company culture such that those star employees can be discovered, empowered and allowed to flourish. In this post we’ll examine five ways in which eLearning, with the help of a modern LMS, can help you do just that. 1. Keep an eye on newcomers In Employee Orientation (or "onboarding") you’re introducing new hires to your working environment and giving them the information they need to start being productive. Traditionally done in the form of office tours and welcome seminars given by senior employees, employee orientation is now being automated in the form of online courses that new hires can study at their own pace and refer back to at any time. This is also the perfect moment to separate the wheat from the chaff. Instead of randomly assigning new hires to any available position they have the necessary qualifications for, have them complete one or more aptitude tests as part of their onboarding. Use the results of these tests to determine what would be the best position for each, and who shows the most potential going forward. Keep an eye on those that scored best on such tests — they’re most likely to be your future star employees. 2. Measure training results Employee training is not just about teaching your employees some new skill. It’s also about accessing their performance during this training. Using the built-in capabilities of a modern learning management system (LMS) you can have access to multiple performance indicators: submitted exercises, tests and quizzes, grades, skills and certificates awarded, etc. You can also use the powerful reporting facilities available in an LMS such as eFrontPro to generate detailed reports based on employee performance, or to dive-in and examine the training history of your best students in minute detail. 3. Spot self-motivation Most companies run their eLearning courses for specific subsets of employees and at specific times (e.g. when there are new hires, or when they need some existing employees to pick up some new skill). That doesn’t mean that their LMS platforms are powered down for the rest of the time. Usually they’re kept in operation, waiting to offer courses on demand to anyone interested. In any case, it pays to check your eLearning platform’s access logs. You may find that some of your employees log in to your LMS even at times when they’re not asked to. Some might want to refer back to their old training material. Others want to study more advanced stuff, or learn the skills needed for another position. Whatever the reason, those users are among your potential star employees. They are people that exhibit an intellectual curiosity beyond that of their colleagues, and that are motivated enough to study on their own even when it’s not required of them. 4. Pin a star on them Using your LMS platform to spot your star employees is own thing. Keeping them happy and letting them be productive is another matter. Giving them the appropriate position within your business or organization is the first step. For some this might be the position that their training results tell you they are already good at. For others, this might be the position that they aspire to have and try to learn as much as they can about. You must also signal to your other employees that such training performance and motivation is something that you value. Pay raises, bonuses and promotions to your star employees are great ways to show that. It’s not wise to be stingy in this regard; your competitors might not be. Besides, if your star employees know that they are more talented and productive than their peers (and they *will* know), then your failure to acknowledge and award them will create ill feelings and ultimately a negative environment. That said, sometimes a simple token of appreciation, such as awarding them a certificate or merely expressing your gratitude can be enough (as long as it’s followed by something tangible in the long run). 5. Let them teach others As we showed, eLearning can help you identify your potential star employees. Beyond that, though, it can help you leverage those same star employees to train the rest of your workforce. You see, the secret behind your star employees’ productivity is not just their natural talent or motivation. It’s also the workflow they follow, the skills they’ve picked while on the job and the techniques they came up with. And while raw talent might be in one’s DNA, all of these can be taught. Ask them to create some training classes of their own, in which to teach their productivity tips to their colleagues. Such classes will serve both as an acknowledgment of their "star" status and as a method of knowledge retention within your company. If they are team players they won’t see this negatively (e.g. as others "stealing their secrets") but as a chance to pass down their expertise to others; and if they aren’t team players, then you probably don’t want them in your team in the first place. Conclusion In this post we’ve examined several ways in which you can use your eLearning portal to identify and empower potential star employees: shorting them out during employee orientation, using reporting tools to evaluate their training progress, checking for employees that are motivated enough to learn by themselves, and letting star employees create eLearning courses to pass on their special skills and expertise. If you want to try these techniques on your own enterprise or organization, then take our own eFrontPro LMS platform for a free test drive. It comes with all the tools you’ll need to create and run your courses, organize employee orientation and evaluate your employees’ training progress. If you have any questions regarding eLearning or our eFrontPro LMS, contact us and our own star employees will be glad to assist you. The post 5 ways to identify your star employees through eLearning appeared first on eFront Blog.

Social media have become an indispensable part of modern life. A huge part of our social lives already happens online rather than in the "real world". And while individual social media networks might rise and fall (remember MySpace?), social networking itself is not going anywhere. It makes sense then to want to use those powerful and hugely popular platforms for things besides posting cat videos or catching up with Alex from high school. And indeed, people already use them for things ranging from gaming down to email replacement and even disaster management. But how about using social media as vehicles for eLearning? In this post we’ll go through the six most popular social media networks and evaluate their fitness for the task. Twitter The most appealing thing about Twitter is also its major limitation: you have to fit your content in 140 characters. This limit makes using Twitter for general eLearning problematic. Even if your content could somehow fit, Twitter encourages a rapid-fire consumption of tweets, so it’s not the best place for a deep learning experience. There’s also the fact that Twitter provides few mechanisms for saving, cataloguing and viewing tweets at a later time, besides the rather inflexible hashtags; it’s more a stream-of-messages than a content repository. On the other hand, the 140-character limit makes Twitter a handy platform for micro-learning. Especially combined with the abundance of mobile clients, it enables you to use Twitter as a delivery mechanism for short bursts of eLearning content (think flash-cards or "word of the day" kind of affairs). Besides using Twitter for eLearning delivery, you can also use it as a supplementary tool for your main eLearning platform. It excels in real-time feedback and discussion, but also as a marketing tool for your eLearning offering and as a way to advertise new courses and content. Twitter is also very popular with the younger demographics. If your eLearning content is targeted primarily to them, then this makes Twitter ideal for connecting with your desired audience. YouTube The world’s largest repository of cat videos, is also a bona fide social network of its own right, just one that doesn’t use text but video as its starting point. The main ingredients are all there: your uploaded content is shared with the internet at large, which can then view it, "like" it or "hate" it, add comments, post "video responses", annotate it, share it and subscribe to your channel. Compared to Twitter, using YouTube for eLearning is more straightforward. In fact, there are tons of YouTube channels doing just that, e.g. providing foreign language lessons, cooking lessons, musical lessons, and everything in between. This works great for material that can be taught visually, but YouTube doesn’t make it easy to accompany your videos with textual content, slideshows, quizzes, etc. For this, you’ll need an actual LMS platform. You also shouldn’t depend on YouTube ads to monetize your lessons, as it pays around $1000 per million views, while producing compelling videos that attract as many viewers can require many times that amount. It’s better to use YouTube as a complementary channel to your existing LMS portal, one that provides free or ad-sponsored teasers, free lessons and previews in order to attract people to sign-up for your pay-walled content. If, on the other hand, you’re not selling courses (e.g. you do enterprise eLearning) or you’re not creating your own videos, you can still benefit from YouTube as a huge repository of ready-made content. YouTube contains a large variety of high quality material on every subject, and modern LMS platforms, such as eFrontPro, make it easy to embed its videos in your eLeaning courses. Instagram Instagram is kind of like Twitter, but its limitation is that it’s all about visual content, either pictures or video that’s only up to 15 seconds long. Unlike YouTube, Instagram is not much good as a content repository to get course related material from. It’s also more distracting and limited compared to Twitter (which is saying something). While Instagram might seem like a lost cause, it does have a couple of redeeming qualities. For one, it can re-post your messages across several social media (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others, including China’s hugely popular Weibo). So, you can use it as a convenient way of cross-posting your content to different audiences. Second, it’s popular with the younger demographic, and being based on photography and video, quite fun to use. You can leverage this by incorporating it in your assignments as a light research tool (asking your learners to gather images related to what they’re studying, e.g. examples of buildings in various styles for an architectural course, etc.). Facebook Facebook is the Godzilla of social networks. It’s also the more feature complete one: it has text, images, videos, scoring, comments, pages, sharing, and a full web-based embedded app platform. As such, it has a huge potential for eLearning, which, we think it hasn’t really stood up to. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t used already for eLearning purposes, or that you shouldn’t use it for those ends. On the contrary, there’s already a lot you can do with it. For starters, if you’re selling eLearning courses Facebook is your ideal marketing platform. It’s a social network with over a billion people, that keeps detailed statistics for their preferences, hobbies, friends, social status, income and other such data. Besides, eLearning content is something that can benefit from a longer FB post, compared to a smaller AdSense ad in Google’s search results. Facebook is also a handy way to create an online community page based on specific courses you offer or for your whole eLearning business as well. As for course related feedback and collaboration, you can use it for that too, but perhaps it would be better to use your LMS built-in forum functionality (if available), so that this content remains in your control for the long term. Last, but not least, there’s the app platform. This enables you to create web-based applications embedded in Facebook and even monetize them. This can, and has, been used for eLearning, including for some eLearning meta-platforms. As with every proprietary platform though, you have to think if the tradeoff of giving up control (since Facebook dictates the terms around third-party apps) is worth it for the extra convenience (exposure, infrastructure, etc) the platform provides. If you decide to go this route, we’d advise you to not put all of your eggs in one basket. As Zynga discovered, it can get bad if the owner of the basket wants to change the terms of use or increase its share of the profits. Google+ On paper (or monitor), Google+ looks good. Several hundred million accounts, backed by Google, well featured, modern design, etc. In practice it’s the online equivalent of a ghost town. See Google+ never really caught on, and the user count Google gives is based on inflated statistics (trust me, I’m a Greek, I know from doctored statistics). Google is basically counting as a Google+ user anyone with an updated YouTube or Gmail account ― despite the fact that they have never set foot on "Google+ the social network". Don’t get us wrong: Google+’s actual active user base is still substantial, but nowhere as large as that of FB. This scarcity of users makes Google+ unfit as a marketing vehicle to attract eLearning customers. If you’re OK with that, e.g. if you just want to invite your existing students to a Google+ group, then it’s probably just as good as Facebook, features-wise, and with a cleaner and more focused UI to top. There are also the Google+ Hangouts, a popular solution for teleconference that includes video chat and instant messaging. Google+ Hangouts are quite limited compared to some other teleconference platforms (e.g. it only allows up to 10 people at a time, it doesn’t support shared screens or virtual whiteboards, etc), but it can come handy if your LMS doesn’t offer that functionality. LinkedIn Unlike the rest of the bunch, this social network is all about your professional life. After all it started out as a glorified resume site that recruiters and HR teams could use to find potential hires. As such, it might not be great from using as an eLearning tool, but it can be of great benefit for your students. If you’re in the business of offering professional training courses, for example, you’re mostly catering to people that want to further their skills in order to improve their hireability and land a better job. These are exactly the people that will benefit the most from a well crafted LinkedIn profile, but you’d be amazed by how many of them either don’t have one at all or have a neglected, incomplete, profile. Teaching your students how to craft the perfect profile and how to leverage LinkedIn can make a big difference in their professional life after they complete your courses ― which increases the odds of them recommending your eLearning service to others and coming back for more. In fact, if your lessons are targeted at job-seekers, it might be a good idea to not just leave it to LinkedIn, but to offer a class to teach them all about creating a good CV, preparing for an interview, and the like, of which LinkedIn and online reputation management in general should be a core part. Oh, and if you offer business administration and management style courses, LinkedIn user posts have a trove of information from big players and business veterans that you can point your students to and incorporate in your courses. Conclusion We had a look at the 6 most popular social networks, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram. While not all social media platforms are equally fit for eLearning purposes, a successful eLearning business should take a good look in incorporating one or more of the major social media in its offering. Keep in mind though that each social media platform has its own strengths and weaknesses and it’s own peculiar take on the concept of "social" that you should respect and try to work within its bounds. Liked this post? Like us on Facebook, tweet about it on Twitter, snap a picture of it and post it on your Instagram or upload a video response on YouTube showing your appreciation. Until next week, happy eLearning! The post Using social media for eLearning (a look at the top 6 social platforms) appeared first on eFront Blog.

You’ve enjoyed the platform, you’ve dug the features, you’ve appreciated the support and you loved the end product. It’s time to meet the people behind it all. In this series of behind-the-scenes interviews, we’ll be introducing the team that created eFrontPro, is managing your private Clouds and keeps churning all those nice updates. We’ll start with Eleftheria Papatheodorou, an eFront customer service veteran that’s been with the company since its humble beginnings and helped us build a solid support team that gets high praise from our customers. (Oh, and in case you’re wondering about the title: Eleftheria does mean freedom in Greek). Please introduce yourself to our readers. What’s your name, background, and responsibilities inside the company? I am Eleftheria Papatheodorou, or El which is my nickname! After studying Management Science and Technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business I was hired by Epignosis and for the last 8 years I’ve been a member of the team. I am responsible for customer training and support management. eFront customers praise your team’s responsiveness to their support requests. In an industry were support is often an afterthought, what’s your secret? Well, it IS a secret, so we better leave it as it is. We wouldn’t want our competitors to read about it But here’s a small hint: loving your job helps a lot. eFront, and now eFrontPro, have come a long way since the early days. How has the support team kept up with their ever expanding user base? I think that having a great support service is one of the features we use to attract new customers, so expanding our user base and keeping our support top-notch were always interdependent. As a customer oriented company, our support service has been and still is our top priority. We were never afraid of working hard to cope with our ever increasing number of customers. Of course at times this has been very demanding, as the team was small and had to support really big customers, but we kept at it, determined to succeed. That said, supporting a product with such a user friendly interface and built according to actual customer needs and feedback, has certainly made our jobs a lot easier. Is there anything regarding support that you find particularly challenging? I’d say that understanding how the end users actually use the product is a big challenge, as it’s those needs that should guide our product development. Through support we get to have an in depth communication with our customers, and besides helping them solve their problems and teaching them how to work with the software, we must also be capable of "decrypting" any implicit messages. Obviously no one knows what’s lacking or what’s needed in an eLearning product better than its actual users, but they can’t always put it in concrete terms, and what’s important to one customer might not be to the market at large. So, part of our job is to gauge what the market needs based on the support questions and requests we receive, note them down, and use them to plan our roadmap. Many see support as a thankless job for a "silent hero". Do you think support can be rewarding? The most important thing is that you, yourself, feel thankful for your job. In this sense there is really no thankless job. When it comes to support, I find it really rewarding and I can assure you that when the customers are happy they can become really generous with their praise. Often I’ve been touched and flattered by our customer’s comments. The real silent heroes for me are the developers, who are behind the scenes and do all the hard work. Do you study the competition? What you think are other companies’ shortcomings when it comes to their support offerings, and how does eFrontPro differ? To answer this I would ask for our customers help. I would welcome them to post their comments and share their opinions with us. How do you like working for Epignosis? How does it compare to the average Greek company, based on your prior experience, or what your friends in other IT companies tell you? I could not ask for a better workplace environment. The team is great and we are more like friends than colleagues, something which is very important to me. As for comparing it to other employers, I don’t like comparisons in general since they can lead to the wrong conclusion. Everything in life has its pros and cons, nothing is perfect. And there’s always our personal perspective to consider. What’s great for me may be irrelevant to someone else. The challenge is to find what best suits you. You’ve been been with the company for nearly 8 years now. What do you think has changed, if anything, since the early days, regarding your job function, the team, and the product? Many many things have changed, as you probably can imagine. First of all, many new members were added to our team and this requires better organization and more formalized procedures. We are still working on these since we are still growing our team and we often have to reconsider and improve our procedures. As far as the product is concerned, I can assure you that you wouldn’t recognize it as it was 8 years before. The philosophy is still the same but the implementation is much more modern and feature complete. My job function has also changed. When the team had fewer members each of us had to undertake many different tasks, or "wear many hats", as they say, whereas as the company grows our roles get more specialized. What kinds of support methods do you offer (e.g. email, web form, chat, over the phone, etc). Which one do you think works better and why? We offer email based support as well as training sessions via web conferencing tools. When it comes to support I think that email works best. First of all, our market is global and the different timezones don’t allow, at the moment, for a live 24 hours support service (though we plan to expand our support services in the future). Furthermore, having the questions or requests in written form in front of you helps you better understand them and gives you the time to find the best possible answer. Finally, there are several cases where the support request has to be forwarded to the tech/development team. The email is the most secure way to transfer the customer’s message exactly as it is. On the other hand, training requires a direct communication with the customer and this is where the web conference tools excel. Through a virtual "classroom" interface, customers can watch my screen, follow the lecture, and ask questions during their training. After all these years have you developed any general theories or personal ideas about what makes for good end-user support? Not sure if it can be called a theory, but I have developed a kind of motto: be truthful! Customers don’t want to hear "beautiful" lies. They just want to know if what they ask for is possible or not and how. Always try to put yourself in the customer’s shoes to better understand him/her. Of course you must first love listening to others, otherwise this job can be painful. Where do you see eFrontPro in 5 years time? And where do you see yourself? 5 years is enough time for us to build a completely new product, so eFrontPro may not exist anymore! (Ok, just kidding! As you can tell from our nearly 10 years in the industry, we’re committed to our products for the long term). I don’t like making predictions because I don’t want to be proven wrong. Just stay tuned and make sure that you "follow" us! The post Meet the team #1: Eleftheria means freedom appeared first on eFront Blog.

Hiring an online instructor or a facilitator is one of the most significant decisions you may make for your newly launched course. Be wary of face-to-face instructors eager to teach your online courses. Online teaching is not the same as face-to-face instruction. It requires certain personality traits that help an individual succeed in the online medium. Online instruction naturally demands more online contact hours than face-to-face instruction. Candidates should also be able to express themselves better in writing. They should be prepared to provide on-going support beyond the office-hours indicated in their job description. The online learner quickly feels isolated if the facilitator is not able to establish an effective rapport (Lammers & Gillapsy, 2013). Online learning is all about autonomy and independence in learning. An effective instructor should be able to encourage self-directed learning habits and imbibe the value of life-long learning in their learners (Reushle & Mitchell, 2009). When hiring an online instructor, the interviewer should look for certain distinct qualities as outlined in the interview questions below. Describe in detail your online teaching philosophy. An ideal candidate would stress the importance of getting to know the learner on an individual basis. This is possible through short surveys in which the facilitator can uncover personal goals, expectations and weaknesses of learners. On a collective basis, the facilitator can refer to a study conducted by Mezirow (1991) in which he described online learning as a dilemma leading to disorientation and then to learning. Preparing online learners for this process should be your candidate’s priority. In one-on-one communication with his/her learners, the disorientation they would experience upon receiving complex or challenging tasks should be mentioned. If learners are encouraged to tap into their past experiences and connect with current knowledge, they would experience learning at an advanced level. This transformative learning experience will enable learners to apply what they’ve learned to their work context with relative ease. It’s all about effectively guiding them through their cognitive processes with patience and empathy. How will you add to our institute’s learning philosophy? This question checks for institute related knowledge the candidate may have researched in order to prepare for the interview. The candidate should talk about the current mission of the institute and how they can further this. Successful online facilitators will talk about creative and innovative solutions to improve online teaching and learning strategies. They should give the impression that their personal teaching philosophies are similar to those of the institute. Tell us your strengths and areas that could need further development. A favorable candidate can answer this question along these lines: If there is one motivating factor in online learning it is the degree of its relevance to the learner’s personal and professional life. An instructor’s main strength lies in connecting closely with learners. He or she should be able to label the learners’ unique needs and try to create "authentic tasks" for them. Research into their immediate work setting, performance context and work requirements to create scenarios they can relate with is a great strategy. While it is not possible to create authentic tasks for each learner, a general idea of the group’s expectations will lead to projects and assignments that generate application of skills directly to their work contexts. An area in an instructor’s teaching that needs further improvement may be organizing assignment ideas according to the course. They may also need more time to develop evaluation rubrics for their authentic assignment ideas. Tell us about the educational technology utilization experience in your classroom. An instructor should use the features of a learning management system to create online learning communities. This is challenging in the beginning, as learners are reluctant to open up to each other. It’s good to use several ice-breaker assignment techniques that encourage learners to get to know each other and be able to relate to their life experiences. How would you motivate average learners to perform better? Average learners are potential over-achievers. They need to be able to appreciate their efforts in the form of visual cues. Average learners need a "bird’s eye" view of their past accomplishments and a clear roadmap of their future milestones. An eLearning portfolio is an interactive and engaging method of consolidating all efforts of these learners to enable them to appreciate their achievements so far. Average learners in the online learning environment also need more attention than others. Understanding their current setbacks and providing them with meaningful feedback should help them perform at an advanced level. Also highlighting the value of the course in their personal life will help them stay motivated. The best way to motivate all learners is to require them to write a reflections statement in which they demonstrate their attitude and behavior before joining the course and the changes they experienced towards the conclusion of the course. Tell us about your current research interests and future professional development plans. Motivated online facilitators are always looking for ways to improve their teaching and subject matter. Their response to this interview question could contain elements like the following: They are currently working on their graduate/doctorate degree, constantly looking for courses (especially online courses) that teach how to use educational technology and multimedia building tools. They write for blogs and educational technology columns. They are also an active supporter of several online learning communities. They have several publications that talk about their online environment related research. Hiring an online facilitator can be a bit tricky. These interview questions and their responses should help you narrow down your prospects for your new eLearning course. References Conrad, R. & Donaldson, J. (2012) Continuing to Engage the Online Learner. Lammers, W. J., & Gillaspy Jr., J. A. (2013). Brief Measure of Student-Instructor Rapport Predicts Student Success in Online Courses. International Journal For The Scholarship Of Teaching & Learning, 7(2), 1-13. Reushle, S., & Mitchell, M. (2009). Sharing the Journey of Facilitator and Learner: Online Pedagogy in Practice. Journal Of Learning Design, 3(1), 11-20. The post Interviewing Potential Online Facilitators appeared first on eFront Blog.

So, your new eLearning course is ready to be launched and you are all excited about the prospects of "immensely" pleased stakeholders in your organization. You know you have integrated the complete bells and whistles of an eLearning program: from using branched scenarios to interactive labeled diagrams. You even have a compelling storyline set in the backdrop of your organization. Your CEO is a cool lady who allowed you to use her cartoon version as an avatar to motivate learners. What more could you possibility need to add to your cauldron of successful spells? Reality check: plenty! eLearning is all about iterations and versions. It’s best to revise with a group of experts and instructional developers than with the major stakeholders and learners In this article, we uncover a research-based model for evaluating your eLearning course before that final takeoff from the runway. Sara de Freitas and Martin Oliver proposed a set of four eLearning design and development elements called the Four-dimensional Framework. This framework can be used by: Trainers and training managers to select appropriate training programs for a training situation. Researchers to assess eLearning materials. Training designers to select specific teaching factors. The question is, why use this Four-dimensional framework? The reason is simple: If you have an eLearning program that includes scenario-based interactions akin to serious games (never mind with the scoring), then this is the tool for you. The fact is, any eLearning program that uses game-like features in the form of reinforcement exercises, assessments and simulations is safely classified as a serious game or a training game. Yes, that includes your newly churned out eLearning course ready to fly shortly! Need any more convincing? This is what the creators of this evaluation tool say: "Although a number of frameworks exist that are intended to guide and support the evaluation of educational software, few have been designed that consider explicitly the use of games or simulations in education. Similarly, research in game studies has generally focused upon approaches based upon playing leisure games, and therefore do not take enough account of factors including the context, learning theory and practice and the attributes of the learner and learner group." (de Freitas & Oliver 2006, p.262) On the whole, this structured analysis provides a comprehensive support to the training developers and facilitators who work in teams to create game-like trainings. The use of this framework is two-pronged: First, it enables training managers to demonstrate the appropriateness of the newly developed eLearning program in terms of the training need. Secondly, it also enables them to find the best way to apply the tool within the learning context. Consider a training scenario for improved customer service through the use of the latest CRM software installed within the organization infrastructure. For each aspect of the Four-dimensional Framework, we describe how the training needs fall into the training provisions of the eLearning program. Notice how specific and general these questions are. By the end of this exercise, you will have a complete report ready for your stakeholders! Context which determines the learning environment - it includes the macro level, so historical, political and economic factors (for example, are you developing this eLearning program because it is a mandatory training, a job aid or a professional development program?). Micro level context is defined through the subject matter experts needed, the instruction designer, the facilitator background and experience, and the development costs Consider the example of the new CRM training for improved customer service. This means, you would be developing training for one aspect of the CRM software (the customer service and experience). This will be your eLearning development context. Define the micro and macro components of this context. Learner specification analyzes the learner completely. This includes their preferred learning style, their previous knowledge and identifying the methods that will support their differing needs. Again in the CRM customer service training example, your learners could be bank tellers, IT help desk professionals, product support team or even sales personnel. Define these learners in terms of their current performance, their education level, their computer literacy level and many other factors that will enable you to design an eLearning program that is attractive to these learners. Mode of representation defines the degree or level of interactivity needed in the eLearning program. Think about the immersion level of the learning context. Should the program simulate the work context completely or partially? How will you brief and debrief your learners in terms of explaining them the learning outcomes etc. Going back to the CRM customer service example, how will you design your eLearning course/program? Will it include a storyline to capture the learner? Will they enjoy a video of funny customer service situations? Should the scenarios include simulations? To teach the CRM dashboard features and other specifications, an interactive simulation is definitely needed here. Pedagogic principles require the trainer to integrate learning models and theories in order to design effective eLearning programs. Learning theories that focus on adults are more advisable in corporate training. Touching on learner psychology will enable you to create compelling reinforcement exercises and assessments. Think about your CRM customer service team once again. As adult learners they would prefer meaningful and relevant information. This means separating information from "need to know" to "good to know". Needless to say, many learners will guiltlessly skip the "good to know" information and focus on the needful. This is because adult learners want immediate transfer of newly acquired knowledge to their work environment. Knowledge about learning theories will help align your course’s content with learning objectives. Now that you have completed this final evaluation on your new eLearning program, you are all set, ready to roll! Good luck! References de Freitas, S., 2006. learning in immersive worlds: a review of game based learning, JiSC. Available at: www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearninginnovation/outcomes.aspx de Freitas, S. & Oliver, M., 2006. How can exploratory learning with games and simulations within the curriculum be most effectively evaluated? Computers & education, 46(3), 249-264. The post Evaluating Your eLearning appeared first on eFront Blog.

Evaluating your eLearning course by the toughest judges - your learners, is the cornerstone of eLearning development. Receiving feedback from your learners enables you, the instructional designer, to improve your course. Since iteration is a recurring step in the eLearning course design, it follows each time after the evaluation step. There are many advantages of conducting a post-course evaluation. For starters, it helps you understand your weak areas - both in design and delivery of your course. The core of this activity is to upgrade the course information according to the current times and needs of the performance environment. A post-course evaluation usually appears as a comprehensive survey. Most of the time, we see this survey too short or too long, but seldom covering the key areas of an eLearning course’s design and delivery process. Now is the chance to involve your learners in the design process of your next course. This step is highly crucial to determine the desired pathway of future course designs. In this article, we will discuss all elements that need to be present in the post-course evaluation survey. Use this checklist to guide you to create your next survey. There are no shortcuts to this step. You cannot cut corners. You need to make sure nothing is left behind. And trust me, this list is anything but short! A total of 15 criteria need to be included in your course evaluation towards the end of your course. Notice how these criteria comprise of a complete eLearning course design: 1. Accessibility Accessibility issues deal with the aesthetics of your course. Were your learners able to navigate easily? How accessible was the online material? Could your learners find information quickly? Did the buttons and links work? Were the footnotes readable? 2. Content Content is king! It is the main gameplayer of your course. You need to determine if the content was relevant to your learners. Did they get what they signed up for? Was the content complete, current and appropriate? This includes your examples, case studies and scenarios. 3. Goals and objectives Did your learners find the course’s objectives clearly defined? Did the content follow the objectives or was it out of scope? Did your objectives tie closely to the performance context of your learners? Do your learners have extra objectives to include in your course? 4. Structure Was your course’s topics and subtopics logically arranged? Was the table of contents a good guide for your learners? Were the topics arranged in a predictable pattern: topic, reinforcement activity, revision, short quiz? 5. Visual design Ask your learners about the choice of colors, font, and graphics etc. - the overall visual design of your course. Was it appealing? Was it obtrusive? Was it confusing to them? Was the content designed effectively? Is there anything that could have been done better? 6. Text Ask about spelling, grammar, language, tone, style and composition of the text used in your course. What are their comments? What could be done to for the text to be more effective? 7. Timing This is critical to know. Every course has an estimated seat time and activity time. Was the time given by your learners close to what you estimated? What sections took the most time? What sections took the least? 8. eLearning resources eLearning resources are additional aids that help your learners gain a better understanding of your eLearning content. Ask your learners if they used the resources provided. Were the instructions to use them clear and understandable? Were these resources useful to understand the content? Do your learners have extra resources as suggestions for this course? 9. Interactivity Interactivity should be appropriate to the content and context of the course. Find out what your learners think about the interactivity. Did it encourage them to think critically? Did your learners find the technology easy to use? 10. Multimedia Not all learners can use multimedia like video, audio or interactive diagrams easily. Ask your learners about the software and hardware needs of the course. Were the instructions complete or was something missing? Ask them to rank the multimedia in the course from 1 to 10 in terms of effectiveness, quality and relevance. 11. Assessments Did your learners find assessments too hard or too easy? Ask them to rank assessments in terms of quality and relevance. Was the feedback provided constructive and clear? Is there any way that your quizzes and tests could be improved? 12. eLearning professional contribution This is where you rate the mentors, facilitators or instructors hired for your course. Ask your learners if they found the mentors responsive enough and whether their feedback was meaningful. Could the learners contact the mentor? Was the mentor reliable? All these responses help in improving the next session of the course. 13. Social interactions availability If you have a collaborative course in which you used various social learning elements, you need to know their effectiveness. Ask your learners if they could form peer-to-peer interactions. Did the collaborations improve their learning experience? Look for learners who complain of being isolated and alienated. 14. eLearning course expectations Did your learners meet or exceed their personal and professional learning goals through this course? Were there any exceptional topics? Were there any missing topics? Were the assignments and activities reasonable? 15. Overall eLearning experience This is a summing up question. You need to find out the emotional reaction of your learners towards the course. Do they feel empowered or bored after completing the course? What was their overall impression? Did the course fit their schedule easily or did it demand too much of their time? After completing the course, do the learners feel confident of their new skills and capabilities? Finally, ask your learners if there are any ways in which the design and delivery of the course can be improved. The post 15-point Post-Course Evaluation Checklist for eLearning Developers appeared first on eFront Blog.

In his famous "Ballad of East and West", the 19th century english poet Rudyard Kipling writes, rather prematurely: "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet". Little did he know that a little over a century later East and West would not only meet frequently and have plenty of cultural exchanges, but also become very good business partners. Or that Asia would be a much coveted marketplace for western business of all sectors, including eLearning. China, the economic miracle of the 21st century with its rising middle class, is a huge potential market for eLearning services, with its overall training market estimated to be worth around RMB300 billion (a little short of $50 billion dollars). Besides its vast population and huge economic growth, there are three important factors that make China an ideal eLearning market: 1) It has a traditional cultural focus on education, which families invest heavily on, for their children’s studies. 2) It has the necessary internet penetration, with an estimated 650 million internet users as of 2014, the majority on DSL lines. 3) It has a long history of private education. eLearning, with its lower costs and easy accessibility, is perfect for the upwardly mobile Chinese middle class households who can’t afford costly private schools or sending their kids abroad. Furthermore, the vast amount of available training subjects that can be had at the learner’s own pace and location, make it perfect for employees looking to expand their skills and improve their hire-ability. Last, but not least, eLearning fits the needs of Chinese business, enterprises and organisations, that need agile and cost effective solutions to train their personnel to new technologies. It’s no surprise then that the online education market quadrupled in China in the last decade, while still having a vast growth potential (considering that eLearning users are less than 10% of the Chinese population). As for Japan, its advanced internet infrastructure, web-savvy population and large middle class also make it a very important market for eLearning. In fact it is estimated that Japan’s eLearning market has been growing by 100% year over year for the last few years. The same phenomenal growth is seen all over SE Asia, whose internet users now represent over 40% of the world’s users. So, we’re excited to report that our CEO and co-founder Dimitris Tsingos, currently concluding his business trip in the region, signed a partnership agreement with Tokyo based Brastel Telecom for the sale of eLearning services to the Japanese market, and another one with Chinese eLearning consulting agency Shanghai 4INS, for the resale and implementation of eFrontPro based solutions for the Chinese market. While eFrontPro has always been an international product, our greatest adoption has been in USA, Europe and the English speaking parts of the world. We’ve very proud of expanding our reach even further, and we look forward to working with our new partners to help bring the Epignosis family of products and services, with their legendary flexibility and ease-of use and our world-class support, to the Asian market. The post West meets East: eFrontPro enters the Asian eLearning market appeared first on eFront Blog.