Text is a very interesting medium. But I don't think we give it enough credit. Text is the starting point of every project. A simple .txt file can be read/imported into just about every software system and application that exists. HTML is the foundation of the internet we know today. And writing those .html files can be done in a simple text editor. Text a digital medium is a powerhouse. The many uses of text are obvious but let's review a few. We write down our thoughts using text in journals. We blog our ideas using text. Movies begin as scripts using text. Products are described and sold to us using text. It's the fastest way to express ideas and have those ideas consumed and potentially understood. Because everyone knows how to read and write text. Some better than others, but quality aside for now. I have no data but I would argue that text is the most used medium. A recent conversation on blab.im got me thinking about text because Anthony Altieri mentioned a few text editors as his favorite tools for creating learning content. This was intriguing to hear. I understood where he was coming from, but also know that so many eLearning developers lack the basic understanding of text.†Or maybe it's the intermediate level of understanding that is required? I'm not sure. But I do know that most don't remember a time before WYSIWYG. And definitely not a time before browser based text editors with formatting capabilities. †Let's start with the basics and I'll look to this blog's audience to continue the conversation and discover how important text may or may not be.   The Simple Text File .txt In the digital world the most common text file format is not .doc. Text in its purest form is saved in the simple, yet handy, .txt format. You may have heard your geeky programmer friends refer to it as a "flatfile". And at this point I'll confess that it can get much more complicated than our purposes require. If you want to deep dive into the nuances of text files, text formats, and plain text, I'll direct you to the wikipedia entry here. In our work text files come in handy for transferring data from one system to the next, or storing scoring, and other user data on their drives or other external system. Text files hold no formatting. These days imported text files are always treated to some sort of formatting or other conversion process. You may never see plain text in all of yours as an elearning developer, but you would be doing yourself a favor to learn more about this powerful and underutilized file format. The Lowly Text Editor Text editors are the very plain uninteresting applications that come preloaded on every computer. You may have used a text editor thinking it could do the things MS Word can do. But shut it down on discovering how few features are available. But those who use text editors on a regular basis love how fast they load, and how responsive they are. †The simplicity is what makes them so powerful if you learn to use them effectively. For a long list of text editors check out this page. You will likely recognize notepad and textedit. I only recognized 3 or 4 others from the list. HTML: Hyper TEXT Markup Language Most non-techie types would probably be shocked to know that the entire internet is built on a simple text based protocol. There is more to understanding HTML than merely understanding how to use text. However, it's a lot more accessible than trying to communicate with ones and zeros. HTML is text based and uses tags to describe how content should be displayed within the browser. But I'm certainly not the expert on all of technical details of HTML. Wikipedia explains HTML elements this way: HTML elements form the building blocks of HTML pages. HTML allows images and other objects to be embedded and it can be used to createinteractive forms. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists,links, quotes and other items. HTML elements are delineated by tags, written using angle brackets. Tags such as <img /> and <input />introduce content into the page directly. Others such as <p>...</p> surround and provide information about document text and may include other tags as sub-elements. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to interpret the content of the page. That may not mean anything to you. But if it does, you'll know if you need to learn more or not. Over the years rapid development tools with wysiwyg editors have mostly removed†the need for understanding web pages at this level. But like anything else, a little extra knowledge can go a long way. As an eLearning professional, should you get familiar with a text editor? I would say absolutely. But how deeply you dive into it is the next question. You can greatly increase your development time even if you use an authoring tool. Most authoring tools now export to an HTML5 format. And knowing how to view that output in a text editor will come in handy some day. I can almost guarantee it.   The post What You Don't Know about Text Limits Your eLearning Development appeared first on Litmos.

Today on L&D Talk we had a great conversation about modular training course design and development. We covered the concern of consistency in modular design as well as wondering if consistency is even important. The issue of a complete course in one package versus a modular design covers a lot of territory. We didn't cover it all in this blab session but it was a fun conversation. Check it out and let us know what you think. If you want to hear more about modular course design I'll be presenting a webinar†titled The Power of Modular Course Design. And if you will be attending ATD 2016 you can dive even deeper with me and your learning colleagues at†my session. Litmos was designed with a modular course structure at its core. Its been a revolutionary approach to instructional design that many organizations are embracing around the world. And don't forget to register for C3 in Las Vegas, May 9-11. Customers and industries professionals will be learning together and building the future of learning on the Litmos platform. You won't want to miss it. Peyton Manning will be the featured special keynote. Register today!† The post VIDEO: L&D Talk - Modular Training Course Design appeared first on Litmos.

Video is a hot topic in the eLearning industry. Not because it's an effective learning medium, because most will tell it isn't. And not because user generated videos are so popular, because most will tell they aren't instructionally sound. And not because video cheaper and easier to use than ever before, because many will tell you it isn't. Video is hot because it's disrupting everything we thought we knew about using video as a tool for learning. It's disrupting everything because it's everywhere! It's hard to find any social media site or app that doesn't allow for simple video publishing. YouTube made self publishing video popular 10 years ago, and now, true to form, the elearning industry is finally coming around to embrace it. But what is it about video now that makes it more popular than before? There probably isn't one single element, but more of a perfect storm of technologies combining to improve the video production, publishing, and viewing experience. Mobile Devices for eLearning Cameras on smartphones quickly became popular. Many image sharing apps like Flickr.com began to pop up supporting the sharing of mobile photography. But the original resolutions were low by today's standards. And that meant video did not look good at all. But it didn't take long for resolutions to increase and people began using their mobile devices as their primary picture taking device. Social Media Learning Apps Social media like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, and so many others have quickly taken advantage of video publishing. And the newest social media sensation, Snapchat, is even making it cool to shoot vertical video. I never thought I'd see that day. Cloud Services Driving eLearning Change Cloud technologies have come together to connect the final pieces of this tech ecosystem. It's sort of the glue that holds together and connects Social media platforms with devices. The cloud has disrupted many industries already and it is still in it's infancy. We are only just beginning to use the cloud to connect everyone and everything. Online Streaming Disrupting Everything It's one thing to record a video and upload it to the cloud via your mobile phone. But live streaming video within an app has taken video to a completely new level. Apps like Periscope, YouNow, Facebook Live, and blab.im make streaming live video quick and easy. They even include chat capabilities or even collaborative streaming. The eLearning industry has never had these technologies in the hands of users before. It should be completely disrupting our strategies and plans for the future of our training solutions. But somehow we ignore them or discount their importance to learning. We are so busy building SCORM packages that we forget how a simple modular structure to course creation and delivery can utilize video in so many simple ways. Litmos customers are already taking advantage of video and a modular design structure. But soon training departments will have no choice but to change. I'd like to help make that change less painful. Our industry needs a wake up call. Join me on Fridays 8am PT on blab.im for L&D Talk: Video Friday. Me and my cohost Sam Rogers (@snapsynapse) will be guiding the conversations on how video is being used in Training, Learning and Development. Here's a sample from today's session: The post Videos in Modular Training Course Design appeared first on Litmos.

One of the recent innovations in the training industry has come through the use of social technologies to support informal learning: organizations have experimented with Twitter, in particular, to increase employee awareness of when and where eLearning content is available for them. Others have tried to bring social networks to their organizations to connect learners to experts and content. However, in most of these projects, the Learning Management System (LMS) where much of the content is located, has remained outside of the social environment, and learners have had to navigate their way to it, leaving behind their social feeds and connections. The two areas exist in isolation and so much benefit is lost as a result. Why Is It Important? Harnessing social learning is important because employees attain useful knowledge about how to do their jobs from other employees and experts in their organization, and much of this is transferred in social learning moments. So delivering this successfully is one of the key goals for organizations in the next few years. eFrontPro For Connections Epignosis, the makers of eFrontPro, have recently developed an integration to the world’s leading Enterprise Social Network (ESN), called eFrontPro For IBM Connections, that now delivers truly connected social learning. Learners can see their training catalog and subscribe for courses and training events without leaving their social workplace. They can create and share content with their colleagues in communities around specific areas of interest, and managers can assign content they consider relevant to their team members. The learner will also receive notifications about their training directly in the IBM Connections social feed, for example, notifying them that a training certificate is about to expire, or that they have been registered in a training course by their manager. Tests, assessments and surveys can be conducted and results are tracked and monitored for performance improvement discussions in the Learner Record Store. Baseline testing can be used to identify gaps in the employee’s knowledge and then the appropriate course or content can be served up automatically for the employee to take. Self-service learning is one of the principles behind the development and with this integration employees can manage their training needs in the same place they have email, calendar and social connections. Why Integrate? The reason behind this integration is to empower the employee to take control of their training needs from within their social workplace and to deliver a richer training experience. The employee can collaborate with other employees in learning communities, where they can see training course and content recommendations and decide to register themselves based on their colleagues’ comments. But, managers can also take part by assigning online courses and content, or classroom-based training, or perhaps schedule an online training session. There are many things the employee can now do to enrich their training and the best part is that they can do it without having to leave their social workplace. Status and Gamification EfrontPro delivers a dashboard within IBM Connections so that employees can see the status of each of their courses. At a glance, employees can see which courses are left to be completed, which ones are done, and if Gamification is enabled, they can see how they compare to other employees in the organization. This fosters competition and leads to better performance, in most cases. On The Go? Many employees now travel extensively to do their jobs. Whether it is on a commute, or to another part of the country, or internationally, most employees now work on their mobile device more than on a PC. EfrontPro delivers courses and content to the learner on any device wherever they are, and whether they are connected to the internet, or not. Online and Offline mobile training is a reality with the responsive design capability that ensures the learner sees the course or content exactly as it should be, and with the download option that allows a course or content to be downloaded directly to the learner’s mobile device for when they are offline. And because the learner is using their browser, all the functionality of eFrontPro for IBM Connections is available while they are online. Don’t Have IBM Connections? Don’t worry. If you aren’t using a social network at your organization this can be provided for you as part of the overall solution. We have many IBM Partners who work with us to deliver eFrontPro For IBM Connections. If you use a different social network there is still no need to worry. EfrontPro can probably be integrated to your social network directly to ensure you receive all the benefits of social learning. This is one of the strengths of the product. Contact us for a discussion about how we could help. Summary eFrontPro For IBM Connections makes social learning a reality for organizations today. Further development will continue to ensure greater enhancements to this exciting new solution. This is one of the great futures for our industry being delivered today and bringing the benefits of leveraging the expertise and knowledge in your organization for the improvement of other employees’ performance. If you’d like to see how this could help your organization why not schedule a demonstration or appointment with one of our Value Added Resellers in your country? For further information just contact us. The post eFrontPro For IBM Connections appeared first on eFront Blog.

You’d be amazed by how much a calm, harmonious, and balanced mindset can change your life. The same rule applies to your online training. In this article, I’ll share 7 Zen principles that every eLearning professional should know about. Zen is all about centering, mindfulness, and inner tranquility, which just about sums up the online training experience we all dream about. Every eLearning professional hopes that their employees will walk away from the eLearning experience with a renewed sense of purpose and clear mental focus. Thankfully, there are ways to achieve this by relying on a few key Zen principles and practices that can be applied in online training. Best of all, you don’t have to be a Zen master to bring harmony and productivity to your workplace. Simplicity is of the essence Some people may mistake being simple for being boring or dull. However, this could not be further from the truth. Simplicity is all about knowing when enough is enough and not overwhelming the online learner with flashy graphics or distracting color schemes. In certain instances, less is more and opting for a simple visual design is the way to go. This also allows you to focus on the subject matter and show it in the best possible light, instead of letting the images, fonts, and layout steal the show. Be aware of your own emotions and those of others Many of us do not automatically associate emotions with online training. It’s a professional pursuit, so we link it to the mind instead of the heart. However, an effective online training program includes a balance of both. Acknowledge your true feelings about the online training course and then use them to create a dynamic and emotionally engaging experience. This also includes empathizing with your online learners to see things from their point of view. Is there a particular belief, opinion, or mindset that might be standing in their way? If so, then you might want to figure out how you can overcome this obstacle and help them to see the benefits of actively participating in the online training course. Reach beyond your comfort zone We experience the most change in our lives when we venture beyond our comfort zone and explore the unfamiliar. Encourage your employees to do something new, and possibly even a bit unnerving, by integrating scenarios into your online training program. Allow them to see how a single choice or action can lead to unexpected outcomes. Let them explore their decision-making process and figure out if they are truly on the right track. You can even achieve this by asking a thought-provoking question or sparking a lively debate where they can share differing viewpoints. Make sure that you don’t push the boundaries too far, however. Respect the cultures and backgrounds of your employees and try to understand that some individuals may be resistant to the process. Have patience Employees must understand that development takes time. In order to grow and advance in their careers they have to commit themselves to the process and actively participate in the online training experience. Modifying behaviors is usually challenging, which is why you need to stress the importance of ongoing training. Employees need to be patient and know that their mistakes are merely opportunities to expand their professional knowledge and experience. If you notice that certain individuals are struggling with the online training program, you may want to offer them additional support resources. Respect differing viewpoints and opinions Everyone has their own opinion and belief system. That is what makes us all individuals who contribute to society. One of the core Zen principles is that we should be aware of our own viewpoints and accept that others have differing viewpoints. We are each entitled to a unique perspective. Encourage your employees to engage in online discussions with their colleagues and actively listen to their thoughts, ideas, and feedback. You may even wish to create collaborative online projects that allow them to work together towards a common goal and share their expertise. Be present in the moment This is one of the quintessential Zen ideologies. We should live in the moment and focus on the task at hand. Though we can plan for the future, we must also be able to devote all of our effort to the present. Simulations are a highly effective tool that prompt employees to live in the moment. They must be fully aware of the virtual environment and interact with it directly. Distractions are no longer an issue, because they are immersed in the world that you’ve created for them. Put your knowledge into practice Thought must always be paired with action for real change to occur. Employees need to be aware that everything they learn ties into a real world application. Be completely up front about how they are going to apply the information and the benefits they can expect to receive. Take it a step further by asking them to apply the knowledge during the online training. For example, encourage them to create a tutorial that centers on a specific task or participate in an online scenario where they are able to try out what they have learned. By doing so they have the chance to explore the consequences of their actions and identify alternative paths that may be more beneficial. They can also discover areas of improvement and performance behaviors that need to be modified. The secret to using Zen in your online training is blending it with the needs and goals of your company. In fact, you may want to take a closer look at the latest online training analysis and figure how these principles can help resolve your performance issues and fill the gaps. Zen in your online training strategy should never overlook the importance of emotions. As humans, we feel before we think, and our hearts tell our heads whether the information is worth learning. Read the article 5 Tips To Use The Plutchik’s Wheel Of Emotions In eLearning to discover 5 tips on how to use emotions in your next eLearning course. The post Applying 7 Zen Principles In Online Training appeared first on eFront Blog.

As with any eLearning program, the final exam or the summative assessment is an expected end. Before learners even register for a course, they are keenly interested in the nature of the final exam. Would it be an online LIVE assessment? Would it be a video submission, or would it be a project? While there are several options available for you to utilize in your course, there are some best practices developed to select the right final assessment format for your course. In this article, we share with you 3 strategies to develop original work activities towards the final assessment. Original work activities, in essence are the ultimate final exams learners are preparing for during the course of the eLearning program. These activities closely follow the course objectives. They require the learner to apply their learning and to demonstrate the degree of understanding of the course. To be honest, this assessment is something your front-line managers look at to judge the "readiness" of their employees to begin work effectively. It is expected that better scores in an eLearning program yields better performance. Sometimes it is not so. This can be very frustrating for managers and training managers. This discrepancy between learning scores and performance can also be very disappointing and discouraging for the learner. Unfortunately, all fingers point at the quality of the eLearning program. In order to protect your credibility as an eLearning program developer, you need to design better final assessments through the submission of the original works done by the learner. Original works, when done authentically, minimize the chances of academic dishonesty. They can also emulate the real-world work setting of the learner. They also reduce the learning and the performance gap. What situations warrant original work activities? Ask the front-line managers and training developers the following questions: Integration of Knowledge at Work: Do the learners need to apply what is being taught in your eLearning course? Synthesis of Knowledge at Work: Do learners need to create new knowledge? Do learners have to have a final exam for grading? If the answer is "yes" to any of these questions, then you need to develop original work activities that will count towards the final exam scores effectively. There are several ways learners can perform original work activities. You can combine some of these approaches quite productively: 1) Decision Activities: These activities require learners to submit decisions made at critical points in a real project. A great way to do this is through recording learner responses in case studies. Provide them with a case that replicates their work and invite them to form decisions based on dilemmas faced in the case. This can be individual work and a discussion forum based work. Demonstrate to the learner the degree of effectiveness of their decisions based on the learning objectives of the course. 2) Work-document Activities: These activities require learners to create a document that would be a part of actual work, such as filling a form, creating a slide presentation or writing a specification. A lot of eLearning programs require the production of word documents or presentations. Think about the work-related activities of the learner. What are the end-products of these activities? Any of these end-products can be a basis of original work activities. Consider these varieties as submission formats from your learners: Writings Plans Procedures Policies Spreadsheets Photographs Reports Designs Sketches Slide presentations 3D Models Storyboard Advertisements Musical compositions Video clips Animation sequences Audition tapes Business letters 3) Journal Activities: These activities provide a way for learners to collect decisions into an ongoing document that they can review and take away at the end of the eLearning. This form of original work activity is ongoing. The journal activities encourage the learner to record their emotions and attitude towards a project they have been working over the course of time. These can be viewed as a collection anytime for grading purposes. These can also be a part of social learning through group collaboration, where the group advice, critique and inspiration for each other is shared with the course facilitator. Learners can create a Wiki or entire libraries of reference materials in order to demonstrate their learning. What have your final assessment experiences in your eLearning programs been like? Do share with us. Do you have a specific strategy for developing the final exam or do you have the same format for all your courses? When designing an eLearning program, ensure that you are conscious of the final assessment activities. Determine the best format by analyzing the work situation of the learner. If possible, discuss the final assessment format with the line managers to minimize false expectations from your course. The post 3 Strategies for Developing Original Work Activities appeared first on eFront Blog.

When it comes to creating audio for eLearning, there are a lot of factors to consider. There is the software to record your audio, the microphone and other hardware to capture your voice. And of course, your audio editing skills. An eLearning programmer has to learn how to create compelling audio for a global audience. Despite acquiring the best hardware and software for your eLearning course audio narration, we still need some helpful pointers to make our audio better. Very few eLearning programs that do not have audio embedded can avoid being labelled as "boring"! A human voice is something that warms us and draws us closer to the content, especially in an online learning environment. However, if the saying "too much of a good thing" holds water and can prove to be fatal sometimes, it certainly applies to audio! Record short audio narrations and make sure they are noise free. What else can you do to make your audio better? Don’t read all the text on the screen This holds true even if you are explicitly requested to do so. The greatest drawback is that this could overwhelm the learner with excessive information. Narrate the concepts when you have a lot of pictures and fewer text. For example, if you have a lot to say, simply write a summary on the screen. Focus on explaining more. Alternatively, if the text is already simple, let the learners read it themselves. Talk to the learner The last sound we want to hear while learning is a robot! Talk in a conversational style that is warm, encouraging and makes you sound like an empathizing human. The right tone of voice will attract your learners and hold their interest longer. Try not to use difficult words in your audio script. Another great idea is to say the phrases ‘that’s great’, ‘oops’, ‘sorry’, ‘wow’, etc. wherever necessary. Let your learner know that no one is perfect. We all make mistakes and we all learn something new everyday. Talking to your learner in a casual tone will help them bond with the course. Narrate a picture When you show diagrams and other complex images, make sure you narrate them in an explanatory tone. Make sure you leave nothing uncovered. In fact, explaining the screen using audio is better than labeling the parts. Your learners want to hear the voice of the expert in complicated areas of the course. This will also make the diagrams and graphics more interesting. Record in a quiet place Often we think that the background noise will be cancelled easily by the audio editing software. Remember, each time the background noise is deleted, you lose a layer of your own recorded voice! Try to minimize the noise by recording in seclusion. You will definitely notice a difference. Apart from these audio improvement tips, we also want to mention the need for recording a complete introduction about yourself. Talk about your qualifications, your work experiences and your current research, if any. Another good idea for voice recording is to to tell a short story that is related to the course. This story can be based on your personal experience and can demonstrate the importance of your course. Lastly, create a rough script about what you will say and practice recording and listening to yourself before the final take. Creating audio can be tricky, but with these helpful tips, you can make you future recordings more effective for your eLearning programs. Do share with us your audio recording experiences. The post 4 Ways to Make Your Audio In Your Courses Better appeared first on eFront Blog.

What are "strong questions"? Strong questions are the test questions that provoke recall and active synthesis of learning objectives. Not all eLearning developers are good writers though. Writing strong questions to test learners’ capability is both a skill and a talent! Rest assured, with regular practice using these 8 elements, writing strong questions will soon be your talent! Before we get into this topic, allow us to share a thing or two about "authentic assessments". Research explains this terminology as the following: Authentic assessment is the measurement of "intellectual accomplishments that are worthwhile, significant, and meaningful", as conmpared to multiple choice standardized tests. Authentic assessment can be devised by the teacher, or in collaboration with the student by engaging student voice. Authentic assessments are measurable with the aid of rubric or evaluation indicators. Have you ever wondered why traditional tests were so confusing and lead to invariable scores? Traditional tests had ambiguous statements that could only be clarified with the help of the explanation from the instructor. In contrast, an authentic assessment will describe what is needed and the grades earned at each level of proficiency or performance. This sets up clear learner expectations and also provides the needed confidence and motivation to complete the assessment. What are authentic assessments made of? Simple - strong questions. Strong test questions determine the degree of learning achievement compared to the attempted learning objectives. Strong questions are directly related to real life or the performance context of the learner. If hypothetical, they describe all assumptions and variables in details to be manipulated in the answer. Strong questions are detailed but not lengthy. The wordings used in strong questions resonate well with the original learning objectives of the course. Learners know what to expect from such tests. They also know that the questions would be based on scenarios from their workplace settings. This encourages them to transfer their learning effectively in the performance context. In short, strong questions could be performance-based or directly related to workplace settings, leading to meaningful tasks. Questions in tests and assessments are effective only if all learners understand them and can answer them the way the instructor intended. Simple questions are easier to understand and to answer as well as to score. Aim for simple and direct questions that hint towards the learning objective they are based on. Integrate these 8 elements for strong questions in a test design and enjoy better teaching and learning satisfaction: 1) Item Number: This is the indication of the place of the question in the test. Also the serial number of the test question. It helps learners know how many more questions they have to attempt to complete the test. 2) Lead-in: This is also known as the background information for a group of questions. This helps you keep your questions simple. 3) Question: This is the specific sentence the learner must respond to. Usually it is phrased simply as a question. 4) Instructions: Instructions inform the learner about the correct procedure for answering the question. It also defines any limitations on how many questions can be selected and which questions are mandatory. 5) Choices: Some common choices include, True/false, pick multiple answers etc. Choices offer freedom and more control over answering test questions. They are generally lighter in terms of cognitive load for memory recollection. 6) Action buttons: eLearning programs use buttons like Submit, Evaluate, Check or Next Question to progress through the test. Other options include, deleting answers, going back to the previous question or exiting the test. Use action buttons to offer a variety of options to answer test questions. 7) Constraints: Time remaining or any other limitations that apply to the test questions. 8) Feedback: This is the most important element of the test. Feedback should be presented for each question after the test has been submitted for evaluation. This enables learners to learn from their mistakes, while the concept is still fresh in their minds. Meaningful feedback is critical to effective online learning. A note of caution on questions: If your learners can’t understand your question, they cannot answer it. A simple word or a punctuation mark could be the only difference between a clear and an unclear sentence. Tests tend to put learners of all ages under stress. Use the simplest language possible. Adding the background information before the question makes your question writing task much easier! We hope we helped shed some light on writing strong and effective questions when developing your assessments. As a rule of thumb, always design your questions around the learning objectives and the sub learning objectives. Good luck. Do share with us your question writing experience. The post 8 Elements of Writing Strong Questions for a Test appeared first on eFront Blog.

Ever since Old McDonald sold his farm and opened a global fast food empire, franchising has proven a great method for business expansion. Franchisors sell the use of their trademark, and supply their products and services along with a system of operation that’s replicated across all their partner locations. In return, the franchisee bears the major part of the investment risk, but gets to avoid the burdens of advertising and inventory. The cornerstone of this marriage of interest is fidelity to the brand, based on the promise that all customers will have the same experience in any franchise location — across a city, a country, or even a continent. Easy to say, but hard to achieve, without attention to detail combined with intensive and repeated training. This is were eLearning comes in, as a way to deliver standardized, flexible and cost-effective training across a scattered workforce without incurring the costs and logistical nightmares of scheduling physical training sessions. First, of course, you’ll need the right eLearning platform (or LMS software, as we call it in the business). For this, you need not look any further than the industry leading eFrontPro LMS, available in self-hosting and private Cloud editions. Why eFrontPro Designed to accommodate thousands of users and able to run on as powerful a server as you wish, either in your data center or in a managed private cloud to which you have direct access, eFrontPro scales with your business. It will crunch on, whether you run it for a local franchisee chain with a few partner locations or some international brand with hundreds of franchisees and thousands of employees to train. Unlike traditional classroom based training, in eLearning there are no time or space limitations, other than the ones you set, that is. Trainees can manage their training schedule as they wish, eliminating the friction that would arise due to conflicting patterns among them and minimizing business disruption (e.g. from having courses scheduled during working hours). Running eFrontPro as a single point deployment not only ensures easier management and backups, but also means that any updates to the training material will be disseminated instantly to every single trainee. This can be of critical importance in a place like the USA where a franchisor has been ruled to be a "joint employer". While this decision might be overturned or your business might operate in a different jurisdiction, keeping your employees informed on the latest changes of the regulatory and safety laws works to your advantage. You also don’t need anything fancy, equipment wise, to start benefiting from eLearning. Any device with access to the web, ranging from a smartphone to a desktop computer (including the employees’ own machine at home), is enough for online training with eFrontPro. After all, nobody expects a retail store or a fast food restaurant to have an IT department. With eLearning you don’t need to wait for some final exam or grading to happen either. With eFrontPro’s reporting capabilities, franchisees can have a clear and accurate image of each employee’s progress, paired with statistics of their group’s performance at any point in time, while franchise operators get the flexibility to focus on the big picture or to zoom-in and examine the training performance of specific franchise locations. eFrontPro’s scalability and flexible mechanism for reusing lessons and course contents, combined with features such as groups and branches, enable a franchise chain to easily deploy the same standardized material across its whole partner network, and manage everything from a simple, web based user interface. With eFrontPro your content creators have access to a range of tools that allow for the fine manipulation of text and the inclusion of images, audio, video, presentations, tests and more, with automatic conversion to web-friendly formats and easy re-use. And when you need to break your training material’s uniformity to handle some region-specific concerns or cultural differences, from adjusting to local business laws to changing your fast food chain’s menu to accommodate Indian’s predominantly non-beef eating population, eFrontPro allows you to edit your base course to create a version that is more suitable for a specific audience. An eLearning platform like eFrontPro couples its training function with that of an archival tool. If your rock star employees leave for greener pastures or maybe transfer to a new branch of your franchise, they won’t take with them all the investment you’ve made on their training. This, which management types will recognize as "knowledge retention", is an important aspect of building a successful and future proof organization. You could of course put the same knowledge in a content management system (CMS), but having it inside your LMS means it is not merely passive content, but always available for training new hires in your company’s workflows. With eFrontPro you can build an always-accessible storage of digital documents, describing best practices, lessons learned and operational patterns. This not only safeguards you against personnel changes, but also enriches the training courses with real life scenarios. Just as franchising has in some way made opening your own business more of a commodity by minimizing risks and costs, eLearning technology has commodified education. Heck, even Stanford and MIT run eLearning programs these days. And, we saved the best for last, all this power and flexibility comes at a fraction of the cost of classroom based training, as there’s no need to book the right venue(s) or budget for the reimbursement of the trainees’ travel and accommodation expenses. With eFrontPro an instructor, or even a couple of them, are more than enough to serve hundreds or thousands of trainees across multiple facilitates. Interested? Take eFrontPro for a test drive today, and see for yourself how eLearning can take your franchise business to the next level. The post eLearning for Franchising with eFrontPro appeared first on eFront Blog.

For all the improvements in communications, business IT, collaboration tools and technology in general, running a productive team remains as hard as it ever was. If anything, it might even be more hard, since we not only have tons of new distractions to tempt us, let they who have not checked their Facebook at work cast the first stone, but we have also invented tons of novel technology-enabled busy work. Heck, even checking our work-related email can take anything from two hours to half a day. In this post we’ll examine 6 tried and true ways to improve employee productivity. Measure It might sound obvious, but the key to ensure that you’re getting more of something (in our case, employee productivity) is to measure how much you’re getting in the first place. Only after you have established a baseline you can begin to understand how your team is doing productivity wise — and that’s the first step of besting your existing performance. So how does one go about measuring employee productivity? The exact details will, of course, depend on your employees’ roles and responsibilities, but there are a few standard productivity metrics to keep an eye on. If your team produces some kind of artifacts for example (cakes, motorcycles, forensic reports, articles, customer care resolutions, etc.), you can always measure how many of those are produced over time. Other kinds of businesses, such as an IT consultancy or a law firm can do something similar by measuring hours billed. If you run a web development shop, for example, then obviously having 10 customer websites delivered within a month shows increased productivity compared to a month where you only delivered six. Of course you’ll also need to account for variation in project scope (for example, delivering one very large and complicated website might be equal in productivity with delivering 5 smaller ones). We suggest that you stay clear of the crude methods that some managers have adopted for measuring employee productivity, such as obsessing over total time spent at work and encouraging a culture of unnecessary overtime over actual productive work hours, or trying to gauge productivity from useless metrics like emails sent and meetings attended. Generally, avoid anything that might encourage needless busy work. For example, if an IT manager measures the productivity of their QA team by "bugs filed", then they only encourage them to file trivial bugs that will merely waste the development team’s time. Oh, and when everything else fails, diving revenue by team size is a surefire way of estimating employee productivity. In fact, unless you’re running a charity or a non-profit it might be the only "performance metric" that actually matters. Bribe Do you know what the greatest motivator for increasing employee engagement is? Can you take a wild guess? That’s right: it’s good old money. In fact, unless you run an volunteer organization, money is exactly what motivated your employees to work for you in the first place. The mere prospect of a salary raise is often enough to boost employee productivity. But don’t just mention it now and then as a lure and then forget about it; go out and actually give a raise to the employees who deserve it. If you care about productivity you can’t afford to be stingy. That said, a salary raise is not your only option. You can also give end-of-year bonuses for great performance, or for some employee’s special contribution to your bottom line, like helping you land an especially important client gig. If your line of business permits it, you can also encourage employee productivity but giving them a cut, like a percentage of the profit that their retail sales bring in. Keep an eye on them, though, as this kind of motivation easily turn against your business by making employees uncooperative as each tries to secure the most work (and thus a bigger cut) for themselves. By the way, while we focused on monetary compensation in this tip, a kind word and a sign that you appreciate what they do is also an effective way to motivate your employees and increase your team’s productivity. Now imagine the productivity boost if you actually combined those two methods… Communicate In a business, just like in a relationship, communication is everything. And yet it’s often made more difficult by the very tools and mechanisms that we invented to help us with it. Take email for example: once seen like a productivity booster, which it undeniably can be, it now feels like a huge time sink, as employees have to discard the hundreds of bogus, half thought and unnecessary emails that they receive each day to focus on what really matters. Not to mention the fact that new email notifications can be a huge productivity killer themselves, as they require a context switch from whatever an employee was doing at the time back to their email client. Or how about team meetings? Initially devised as a way to bring a team on the same page quickly, they are now a way to waste company time on useless banter, boring presentations, and brain-dead "brainstorming" sessions. You can easily boost your team’s productivity by taking back control of its communication. Start by putting down some ground rules. For example, specify some specific hours of the day when employees are allowed to check their emails. Discourage emails that are sent to everybody in the group when they are only meant for some specific team members, or others that only serve to waste time. Oh, and by the way, invest in a good, company wide, spam filter. Replace long, boring, team meetings with short, focused meetings. Some companies have established stand-up meetings for this very purpose. For any person-to-person communication that needs to be more "real time", invest in an business-focused instant messaging (IM) service like Slack. For another productivity boost invest, if you haven’t already, in some collaboration platform (Trello, Basecamp, Jira etc). This will not only help you formalize and structure your communications, but it will also allow you to have them always available and searchable. Decorate Ever been to zoo? There’s something sad about seeing a lion or a tiger confined in a 20×20 ft cage. Animals don’t exactly thrive in captivity. Employees don’t thrive when you hold them captive in awful cubicles and force them to work in a gray, drab, and joyless working environment either. It’s not exactly by accident that some of the biggest companies on the planet -from Google and Facebook to Uber and AirBnB- have colorful and playful offices that look more like a cross between a Disneyland theme park and some futuristic utopia than your average corporate headquarters. It’s because such workplaces actually boost employee productivity, getting them not only to enjoy their working environments, but to even be inspired by them. This doesn’t mean that you have to build your own corporate palace out of steel, glass and $600 a piece Aeron chairs, especially if you cannot afford it at the moment. There are lots of smaller and bigger changes and gestures you can make towards a more humane working environment. Allowing employees to contribute their own small decorations, like posters, family pictures, Star Wars figurines or whatever else, can be a great way to make them more "at home" while at the office. And while you might not have the budget for a full blown pool room or arcade hall in your premises like those overvalued Silicon Valley startups have, you can probably fit a small ping pong table in there somewhere. Free food and drink helps too. Compared to the average employee salary, the cost of offering free coffee or stuffing a fridge full of sodas and snacks is negligible — but it will make your team feel appreciated. Plus, all that caffeine will help them go through those longer working hours like champs too. On-board Thus far, we’ve focused on tips that will help you boost the productivity of your regular employees. When it comes to new hires though, the biggest productivity boost comes from properly and quickly introducing them to their new roles and responsibilities. This is where employee on-boarding comes in. Also known as "employee orientation", on-boarding is the task of introducing new hires to their working environment and giving them the basic information they need to start being productive. A properly executed on-boarding program helps with the smooth integration of new hires in your company, and allows them to better understand their new position, to get a feel for your company and their career prospects in it. An eLearning platform, such as eFrontPro, can help you automate your employee orientation, making the whole process not only more flexible and cost-effective, but also quantifiable, as it allows you to measure the progress of your new hires in absorbing your orientation material. It also helps minimize business disruptions and downtimes that reduce productivity, as your orientation courses are made available online 24/7, allowing your new employees to study them at their own pace, and freeing you from having to schedule classroom-based orientation courses. Re-educate "Change is the only constant", a wise man once said. This is doubly true in the business world. And while another wise man said that "You can’t teach and old dog new tricks", when it comes to your employees you not only can teach them new tricks, but you absolutely should be doing it. Like, all the time. This, after all, is what it takes to stay competitive and to increase your team’s productivity levels. Now, to achieve that you can always rent some physical space, bring in some instructors, buy some textbooks and schedule some training classes. Or you can finally wake up to 2016 and opt for an eLearning based solution. Compared to traditional training, eLearning-based training has lower costs, offers great flexibility, requires fewer resources, and, when it is implemented with a capable LMS like eFrontPro, it’s also trivial to deploy and easy to manage and operate. Just like training will boost your team’s productivity, eLearning will boost your training program’s effectiveness. As eLearning is by it’s very nature asynchronous, for example, your employees will be able to educate themselves at their own pace, including following their lessons from their office or home. eLearning also allows you to easily create new eLearning courses (by incorporating already existing documents, presentations, images and multimedia files), and to easily update your courses when the need arises. As everything computer-based, eLearning is also easily monitored, offering detailed reporting and statistics to help you track the training progress of individual employees or larger teams and assess their performance. eFrontPro also offers extensive gamification features that work great in getting your employees to engage more in their training. eLearning’s effectiveness is not just our opinion, though, as the creators of the industry leading eFrontPro eLearning platform we’re obviously biased: it’s something that has been proven by the market, time and again, with online training solutions getting adopted at a crazy pace by enterprises and organizations of all sizes. Conclusion In this post we have examined several ways to increase employee productivity. Of course we’ve barely scraped the surface of the subject here, but if you haven’t already implemented those things in your organization, they are some great suggestions to start from. The post 6 Effective Ways To Increase Employee Productivity appeared first on eFront Blog.