There are a number of ways you can deliver online training to customers. Some are more effective than others. In this article, Steve Penfold outlines four best practices that can improve the way you deliver training online. When you provide online training as a paid service, you have to balance two broad factors. On one hand, you want to create training that meets your clients’ needs in an engaging, enjoyable way. But to maximize profits, you’ll also want to create and manage that training in the most efficient ways possible. These requirements aren’t mutually exclusive, but they do rely on selecting the right tools and using them wisely. When delivering training online, consider the following four points. 1. Your elearning authoring tool is essential The authoring tool you use is one of the main factors affecting how efficiently you can develop online training—and how flexible and engaging that training is. An ideal authoring tool will: Create Responsive Output. This means the training you publish will appear similarly on desktop, tablet and smartphone devices with little or no additional development effort. Online training that’s viewable on multiple devices opens itself up to more potential learners and can be accessed in more flexible ways. Be Template Enabled. Authoring tools that allow branding and common functionality to be set once and reused across multiple learning projects speed up development times. Quicker development means you can create more titles in less time and be more responsive to changing customer demands. Be Easy to Use. The simpler an authoring tool is to use, the more people in your team will use it. By putting the authoring capability directly in the hands of your subject matter experts, you can get more training to an audience more quickly. Be Powerful. Your authoring tool needs to do more than simply put text and images on screen. It should engage customers with on-screen elements, immerse them in branching scenarios and hook them with gamified learning experiences. Related: Comparison and review: five modern authoring tools 2. Your Learning Management System must play nice with your authoring tool Once you’ve authored your training, you have to deploy it to customers. This is where your Learning Management System (LMS) comes in. All LMSs share common functionality: they enable you to create catalogues of training (that you’ve built using your authoring tool) and allow customers to access it. How a given system achieves this, however, and what additional functionality it gives you is where LMSs differ. The kinds of extra features that make one LMS suit your needs better than another are: Integrated eCommerce functionality Sophisticated customer relationship management/learner management Event-based email communications—i.e., automated emails to customers after registration or course completion How easy it is to apply your branding to the LMS and create sub-branded portals How flexible the learner and content grouping mechanisms are; for example, can you create cohorts of learners and easily manage them as a whole, or can you create groups of content titles and make them available only to select learners? Reporting depth Whether the LMS has built-in gamification mechanisms, like badges and leaderboards There are many LMSs in the marketplace. The right one for you is the one that best matches your needs and workflows. There are two dominant standards that allow courses from one vendor’s authoring tool to launch and track in another vendor’s LMS: SCORM and xAPI (aka Tin Can). Theoretically, if the content and LMS both conform to a standard, then the content will launch and track properly from within the LMS. I say theoretically because it isn’t always plain sailing. Vendors are getting much better, but sometimes one authoring tool’s standard implementation doesn’t quite gel with an LMS, and the content doesn’t launch and track progress as intended. This is becoming less of a problem, but it’s always wise to test an authoring tool and LMS combination before you commit to a purchase. 3. Make sure your online training is easy to maintain Your online training and LMS aren’t static. You’ll add new courses to your catalogue, maintain existing courses and manage learner cohorts. To be competitive and maximize your authoring and LMS products’ return on investment, you must do these things as efficiently as possible. When assessing authoring and LMS products, consider how simple it is to initially set things up and how easy it will be to make changes and manage them in the long-term. Some authoring tool and LMS vendors have particularly tight integration and offer attractive features that less well-matched third-party products can’t. For example, the Elucidat’s online training software offers a single-click publish to Docebo LMS for a streamlined and painless content upload process. 4. Monitor analytics to understand and improve your training Most LMSs will give you some information about the people who access your courses and what scores they get in your online quizzes. But to truly understand how customers use your online training, you may have to dig deeper. Detailed analytic data can tell you things like: What paths learners actually take through your courses How long learners spend on each screen The devices learners use to access the online training The times of day that learners access online training This kind of insight can enable you to create learning experiences that work with how your customers prefer to learn. For example, if you identify that the majority of your audience access training on a smartphone, then you can ensure that the training is smartphone friendly or leverages smartphone features, like geolocation. Even if your LMS doesn’t provide this level of detail, you may use Google Analytics to extract more granular information from your online training. This short video shows how to link a Google Analytics account to an Elucidat project. Related: Stay on top of the latest online training ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. Final thoughts Your authoring tool and LMS are two big factors that influence how effectively you can meet customer needs. To maximize your competitive edge, choose products that work well together, match your workflows and allow you to achieve maximum output with minimum effort. The good news is that most vendors have free trial products that allow you to try before you buy. Take advantage of that, and play with various products to see which combinations work best for you. The post How to deliver online training to customers (4 best practices) appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

How do you price online training courses? It’s a difficult question for many online training providers. In this article, we’ll look at three pricing strategies and examine how a number of successful organizations price their training products. Simply ‘winging’ your pricing strategy is risky. While you may be able to estimate what your online training is worth to customers, it can be helpful to learn about the different pricing strategies (and theory) available. Before getting into strategy, let’s look at a number of elements you need to understand about your product before you can price it correctly. Calculate the cost What does it cost to create your online training? You should have an understanding of how much it costs you to create a course. Factor in additional fixed and variable costs and you’ll quickly learn what you need to be charging to break even. Any revenue above the break-even line will be your profit margin. Understand external factors What are your competitors doing? You must consider what moves your competitors are making. For example, if you set your price too low, you may trigger a price war. If you set your price too high—and can’t communicate the value—you may lose customers to lower priced courses from competitors. Estimate the demand for your product It’s important to understand the demand curve for your online training. As you sell more courses, you’ll be able to better estimate future demand based on current sales. Now let’s look at three pricing strategies used by online training providers: pay per course, membership, and free. 1. Pay per course pricing model Pay per course pricing involves setting a price for each individual course. Customers buy each course for a set price. Why I like it: It offers simplicity—customers only pay for what they want. They aren’t locked into month-to-month billing contracts, and they only have to pay once to get unlimited access to the course. Provides online training organizations with immediate revenue—this is great for cash flow! It is easier to measure and forecast. You can clearly see which courses are selling the best, and in turn you can invest resources in creating (or improving) more courses on that topic. Here are three online training providers that use this pricing strategy well: Franklin Covey Franklin Covey is a provider of leadership and time management training and assessment services for organizations and individuals. BSI Group BSI Group is a global leader in ISO standards. The company equips businesses with the necessary solutions to turn standards of best practice into habits of excellence. ADMA IQ ADMA IQ offers the most comprehensive marketing education program in Australia. 2. Membership (unlimited access) pricing model Membership pricing gives customers all-in-one, unlimited access to the entire library of online training. It’s popular with because it offers them a low cost entry to get started. It’s popular with online training providers because it offers ongoing, predictable revenue. Why I like it: Low financial barriers to entry for customers. Provides reliable, ongoing revenue for the training organization. Customers feel like they are getting a great deal—access to lots of training for a simple monthly (or annual) fee. Good point of difference for training organizations (if competitors only offer pay per course). Here are five online training providers that use this pricing strategy well: Pluralsight Pluralsight offers unlimited online developer, IT, and creative courses starting at $29.99 per month. BMJ Learning BMJ Learning is an online learning resource that helps doctors and healthcare professionals enhance their knowledge and progress in their careers. It is one of the world’s largest and most trusted independent online learning providers for medical professionals. Lynda.com Lynda.com is an online education company offering thousands of video courses in software, creative, and business skills. Market Motive Market Motive offers marketing courses designed to hone skills and broaden expertise with self-paced training. Treehouse Treehouse has a library of lessons that goes far beyond the surface, touching nearly every aspect of how to design and develop for the web and iOS. 3. Free pricing model The free pricing model is usually reserved for nonprofit organizations. Since there is no profit incentive, these organizations focus on teaching students for free. Why I like it: The free pricing model uses the internet to spread information. Through education, these training providers are helping people learn and develop new skills. It is suitable for all skill levels. Most of these organizations help people with a range of skill levels, from beginners to experts. Here are three online training providers that use this pricing strategy well: Duolingo Duolingo provides courses to help people learn languages completely free, without ads or hidden charges. It’s fun, easy, and scientifically proven. Codecademy Codecademy offers interactive courses on how to program. Courses are created by community users and cover CSS, Java, and HTML. Khan Academy Khan Academy offers free courses on math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Related: Stay on top of the latest online training ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. Final thoughts Your pricing strategy significantly impacts the profitability of your online training organization. If you price your courses too low, you risk not making enough money to cover your costs. If you price your courses too high, you risk competitors stealing your customers. Make sure you understand your costs, competitors, and potential demand before you price your training courses. Related articles on pricing strategies for online training providers: Jeff Cobb: Pricing online learning Pricing your education products: Two essential factors NetMBA.com: Pricing strategy explained The post Pricing strategies for online training providers (3 examples) appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Stuck for ideas with your online training? Take a look at these innovative examples from eight of the world’s leading online training organizations. 1. Khan Academy Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan with the aim of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. The organization produces short lectures in the form of YouTube videos. Why I like it: Q&A and discussion features let learners and coaches engage with each other in a community environment. Good use of branching to create a seamless learning experience that is easy to navigate. Gamification features (missions, badges, points) encourage learners to complete more courses. Each learner creates their own personal profile which includes information about them and the courses they are participating. This helps learners build relationships with other learners and coaches. Visit Khan Academy 2. Udemy Udemy.com is a platform or marketplace for online learning. Unlike academic MOOC programs driven by traditional collegiate coursework, Udemy provides a platform for experts of any kind to create courses which can be offered to the public, either at no charge or for a tuition fee. Why I like it: Wide range of courses taught by 19,000 instructors offers plenty of variety for students. Simple navigation makes it easy to search and find courses you are interested in. Discussion features encourage communication between instructors and students. User profiles add a human element to the online learning. Well-designed mobile apps provide access to all courses on-the-go. Visit Udemy 3. Duolingo Why I like it: You can set yourself daily goals to achieve. Content is delivered in small, bite-sized learning nuggets. Clear roadmap and progress markers for your learning path. Placement tests to put you start you at the right level. Gamified design unpins the whole experience, with key gamification features: currency, points, leaderboards, and rewards. Users can vote on the best translation submitted by other users . Visit Duolingo 4. Codecademy Codecademy is an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in 9 different programming languages including Python, Java, PHP, JavaScript, and Ruby, as well as markup languages HTML and CSS. Why I like it: Responsive design with a simple interface. Clear progression and scaffold approach (lessons build sequentially on what you’ve learned before). Interactive practice activities and quizzes to put learning into action. The content and practice is separated into bite-sized series of very short exercises so it’s easy to roll through or get back into after a break. Visit Codecademy 5. Lynda.com Lynda.com is an online education company offering thousands of video courses in software, creative, and business skills. Why I like it: Really good granular course design: each course consists of around 40 videos, grouped into ‘chapters’ with bite-sized segments of around 8 minutes. Online training is organized into ‘playlists’, collections of courses curated by Lynda.com. Anyone can create and share playlists, so learners can create their own learning pathways. Multi media multi channel - includes digital materials from publishers such as Wiley, and interactive PDFs that can be downloaded and used in exercises as learners work with the videos. Users can make notes below the videos which helps transform the entire UI into a work space. Visit Lynda.com 6. Treehouse Treehouse is an online interactive education platform that offers courses in web, mobile and business development. Why I like it: Clear progression - uses ‘achievements’ to unlock new information. Raises the bar with high quality studio produced video lessons hosted by in-house team of trainers and contemporary visuals. Courses organized into ‘tracks’. These are pre-selected sequences of training topics that you complete in a specific order. Visit Treehouse 7. EF Englishtown EF Englishtown is an online English school offering elearning for adults. The organization has teaches English to 1,200 companies and has 15 million users. Why I like it: Video scenarios situate learning into real life contexts. Interactive text-to-speech tool helps students practice pronunciation and dictionary definitions. Speech recognition with feedback for speaking practice. Snap-shot reporting to view progress. Student-to-student challenges. Visit EF Englishtown 8. Google Primer Primer is the fast, easy way to learn new marketing skills. Why I like it: Breaks down information in a really simple way. Lessons are bite-sized - they take five minutes or less. Uses real case study material, insider tips and interactive tips and quizzes for you to see how you’re doing. The offline feature means you can learn anywhere, anytime (on the underground if you can get elbow room) Access via a really easy to use native mobile app. Visit Google Primer The post 8 online training examples you can draw inspiration from appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Unless you’re very lucky, you’ll have business competitors working hard to take customers away from you. In this article, Steve Penfold shares five ideas to help you create online training that gives you a competitive advantage. How well your online training offerings differentiate themselves from your competitors’ will play a big part in how well you’ll be able to defend your existing market share and win even more. Here are five ideas to make your online training courses stand out from the pack. 1. Use design to make your online training look better Content and context are two major factors in determining whether your online training will satisfy your customers’ needs, but the aesthetic appeal—how it is presented—is way up there with these. Put simply, good-looking training appears professional, and anything else seems amateurish, regardless of how good the training is. One well used acronym for good visual design is CRAP. This acronym gives some good standard advice for page layout: Contrast: Use contrast to make content easy to see and to direct the audience’s eye to the important parts of the screen by making these things stand out. This can be achieved with color or white space. Repetition: Use colors, fonts, graphic treatments, and metaphors consistently to create familiarity and a strong, pleasing visual identity. Alignment: On-screen elements should be placed with purpose, usually aligned vertically or horizontally with other elements, e.g. in appropriate rows or columns. Proximity: On-screen elements should be grouped or positioned to emphasize relationships. These broad principles leave a lot of room for freedom of expression. Check out Elearning Superstars for inspiration and to see how professionals use and break these principles to good effect. Another good place for graphic design inspiration and to see how the pros use font, color, and layout, is Canva. Modern authoring tools such as Elucidat give you full control over the appearance of your courses and let you use the ideas you get from Elearning Superstars and Canva to create learning experiences that will stand out from your competitors. 2. Use branching scenarios to make your online training easy to navigate The navigation you build into your online training must be simple to use; you want your learners to be focused on your learning content, not on how navigate around your course. Even if your learning has complex branching paths of content rather than a single linear thread, the mechanism to move through it must be intuitive. Here are three engaging, yet simple, methods of allowing the learner to progress through the course: Posing a question and providing several answers that each branch the learner to a different screen or set of screens Having images of settings or scenarios that the learner can select from to drill down into a specific topic Providing an intriguing scenario or point of conflict, then having a button that invites the learner to "See what happens next . . .." Because these three navigational mechanisms are integral to the content (as opposed to the ubiquitous Next button sitting on the edge of every screen and outside of the story), they draw the learner in to the learning and are almost invisible; just engaging with the on-screen content progresses the learner rather than this being a separate conscious step. City Witness is a great example of interesting navigation. The forward and back navigation make it feel like you’re panning around a landscape rather than moving from screen to screen. Things that create a high level of engagement like this will give you an edge over competitors that employ a "click Next to continue" methodology. 3. Use gamification to enhance the learner experience Gamification is the application of game-like mechanisms (e.g., points, status, badges) in non-game settings. I recently wrote about why gamification in elearning is important. If your competitors aren’t using some kind of gamification in their offerings, then you could have a big point of difference if you are using it. Gamification fosters a high-level of intrinsic motivation for people to persist and strive to do better within the gamified activities. This, in part, comes from the sense of achievement derived from overcoming obstacles and progressing towards an end goal. This article discusses 3 ways training providers can use gamification in their courses that leverage this psychological phenomenon. Authoring tools such as Elucidat make it easy to allocate badges to learners to incentivize them as they progress through a course or gain mastery over a topic. Even more powerful is allowing learners to see where they sit on a leaderboard relative to their peers. Learning Management Systems (LMSs) such as Docebo incorporate badges and leaderboards to entice learners to take more courses or get higher scores to improve their ranking on the leaderboard. 4. Use an authoring tool that lets you build online training that can be accessed on mobile devices Different learners will want to access your learning on different devices. By making your online training adaptive to desktop, tablet, and smartphone screen sizes (i.e., responsive), you allow more learners to access the learning in more flexible ways. This gives you a great advantage over competitors who only offer learning for the desktop. This Johnson & Johnson case study tells how the responsiveness of their JJVC training course contributed to a 740 percent completion-rate increase. This short tutorial shows how Elucidat lets you create responsive output as part of an efficient develop-once-deliver-anywhere model. 5. Use bite-sized online training By making smaller, targeted training deliverables (say, 5 to 20 minutes in duration) focused on one specific topic, both you and your learners win. These smaller nuggets have the following advantages: They take less time to create than a larger equivalent. They are easier for time-poor learners to consume. They can be combined in different ways to cater for different learners’ needs. They can be used as Just-in-Time training. The flexibility and quick development times that bite-sized online training provides can give you an edge over competitors who are marketing large, slow-to-market, inflexible courses. Related: Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. Final thoughts It’s important to differentiate your learning offerings from those of your competitors. The best way to do this is to understand who your customers are, to make sure that you’re providing a quality product that meets their needs, and to apply effective modern techniques such as those we’ve discussed here. Have you used any other techniques to make your online training standout? Share them with us via Twitter. The post How to differentiate your online training from that of your competitors appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Bite-sized elearning modules are small, self-contained elearning information nuggets. They typically range in duration from 1 to 15 minutes and are usually focused on one or two tightly defined learning objectives. This is in contrast to more conventional elearning modules, which can take between 30 and 60 minutes (or longer) to consume and have a wider range of objectives. Bite-sized elearning is gaining in popularity. And it isn’t something the theorists are forcing on us! One study from the Rapid Learning Institute showed that 94 percent of learners prefer modules less than 10 minutes in duration (particularly for soft-skill topics), and 65 percent said most elearning modules contain too much information. In addition to general learner preference for bite-sized learning, here are three good reasons to consider adopting it. 1. It takes less time to consume and is more flexible Increasingly, employers are squeezing training into gaps in employees’ schedules, rather than allocating extended blocks of study time. Elearning pieces that are designed to be meaningful in a short session (10-15 minutes) fit more easily into this model. A great example of this is the Johnson & Johnson Vision Care (JJVC) Eye Care Practitioners course, built using Elucidat’s elearning authoring tool. This course contains a number of accredited 10-minute nuggets, each one allowing time-poor eye care professionals to accumulate Continuing Education and Training (CET) points necessary for their ongoing professional registration. Bite-sized nuggets also tend to be better than larger modules for just-in-time support. For example, if an employee needs a refresher on a seldom-used software feature, they probably want it immediately. In this case it’s more meaningful and convenient for the employee to watch a simple 2-minute video on that one feature rather than wading through a 60-minute module that talks about all of the software features. Generally speaking, the design of larger, monolithic courses makes assumptions about how and why learners access and navigate them — or worse, imposes how the learners must do these things. In contrast, bite-sized nuggets can be combined and consumed in flexible ways. For example, one learner can access nuggets A, C and D, and another can access C, B and A, depending on their preferences and immediate needs. Learners only have to work through the topics (nuggets) that are meaningful to them, and they can access them in the order that makes the most sense for their needs. 2. Shorter sessions suit modern learners One report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) tells us that millennials (those born between 1980 and up to the late 1990s) already form 25 percent of the U.S. workforce, and by 2020 will form 50 percent of the world’s workforce. Mellennials’ brains aren’t different from the generations who went before them, but millennials do have different expectations of how their media is served up and the contexts in which they consume it. For example, millennials have never known life without (relatively) quick Internet, instant information retrieval and media on demand. They have always been connected with their social circle 24/7 and do most things with at least one Internet-connected screen in front of them. This means that there’s always something vying for a millennials attention, and if their current task is taking too long or doesn’t actively engage them, they’ll soon move on to something else. Millennials are sometimes referred to as the Instant Gratification Generation. Maybe that’s an unfair title, but as we all adopt the technology and practices that millennials take for granted, everyone will increasingly exhibit these traits. For this reason, short, sharp, targeted learning modules suit the modern learner. Related: 5 ideas to help you motivate learners in 2016 Even under the best circumstances, you can only expect people to concentrate for about 20 minutes. Like a muscle, a brain that is called upon to work hard for longer than this without a break will start to tire, struggling to transfer anything to long-term memory. Interesting work by Dr. Paul Kelley has shown that intense 20-minute bursts of study separated by 10-minute breaks can yield better long-term memory retention than longer, continuous periods of study. 3. Demand for mobile learning is growing We know that mobile learning is becoming more important as devices become more powerful and more pervasive in the workplace. The reality is, however, that if people are on the go or are reviewing learning material on small screens, they’ll be less able to watch or focus for extended periods of time — no matter how keen a learner they are! Imagine the difficulty of concentrating on a lesson on a smartphone for 40 minutes while being jostled on the morning commuter train. The obvious solution is to break modules into smaller, more meaningful chunks. But that doesn’t mean the nuggets can’t tackle sophisticated issues or be absorbing. To Lie or Not To Lie is an excellent example of an Open University bite-sized nugget that tackles a deep subject in an engaging way. This would only take a learner around 15 minutes to complete, and it is responsive — that is, it adapts and renders well on desktop, tablet and smartphone screens. In conclusion The three arguments for bite-sized learning presented here are very compelling from a learner’s point of view. But as a training provider, the good news is that learning nuggets are also quicker to produce and easier to maintain than larger modules! Have you created, viewed or participated in any bite-sized elearning modules? Share your experience in the comments section below. The post Why bite-sized elearning is important (3 reasons) appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

You’ve got a great product or some really useful information, and you want to add value by giving your customers training opportunities. That’s a fantastic way to differentiate yourself from competitors and delight customers. But if you’re serious about providing useful training that’s as professional as the rest of your customer-facing services, you must approach it like a learning pro. Here are five things to consider when setting up a customer training program. 1. Establish program goals Before thinking about anything else, establish what you’ll use as a success marker for your new training initiatives. What can’t your customers do now that your training will enable them to do? It’s not enough to answer that question with a statement like, "We need customers to use our product more effectively." That’s too broad, and it would be difficult to prove if you succeeded. A better goal would be "to enable customers to use feature X of our product." Defining smaller objectives at this level helps in several ways: It forces you to think about what your or your customers’ needs really are (as opposed to a broad blanket statement that’s hard to work with). It begins to expose what you need to tell/show customers and what they need to know/do to improve. It’s easier to evaluate whether you accomplished each of these small steps after training—for example, by providing customers with a simulation they must successfully complete, by passing an online quiz or by seeing a downward trend in support requests on that topic. It exposes a possible program structure; each objective could form one module or one section within a larger module. It enables you to prioritize which training objective to tackle first, which ones will be the easiest or hardest to address and which ones your customers will appreciate most. 2. Choose the right technology There are two pieces of your elearning deployment puzzle to carefully consider: Content authoring tool Learning Management System (LMS) The content authoring tool is the software that allows you to create the elearning courses your customers engage with. There are eight things to ask before deciding on an authoring tool: Is it easy to use? A tool that non tech-savvy staff can use enables you to get more learning titles to market more quickly. Does it provide flexibility and control? You want a product that allows you to easily apply your brand colors and logo. Can I collaborate with team members within the tool? Reviewer and tester communication is more efficient when it happens asynchronously in the authoring tool. This is far better than relying on email or other external communications. Can I create mobile-ready elearning? Mobile learning is important. It’s no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have. More and more customers will expect access to your content via mobile devices. Is content easy to maintain and publish? Content that’s incorrect or out of date is no good to clients. You must be able to quickly and easily update content and get it out to customers. Can I localize content for overseas markets? If multiple languages are necessary for your customers’ courses, you’ll need a product that supports this feature with a minimum effort. Does it come with prebuilt themes and interactions? Pre-built themes and interactions optimize development times and lessen the need for specialized developers. Can I extract analytic data? Understanding how customers interact with your courses gives you the insight to better meet their needs. Your LMS is the software portal through which customers access your courses. All LMSs have similar basics. For example, they create course content catalogues and manage customer access logins. LMSs differ in how they achieve these basics and what extras they provide. Some features that vendors might provide that make their LMSs a good fit with your organization (and differentiate them from others) include: eCommerce functionality The ability to easily apply branding to the LMS and create sub-branded customer portals Custom email or push notifications sent to customers when certain events occur Flexible learner and content grouping features—for example, you could create customer groups and easily manage them or organize libraries of content titles and make them available only to select customer groups Sophisticated activity reporting Inbuilt gamification mechanisms, like points badges and leaderboards The right LMS for your organization is the one that best matches your (and your customers’) needs and workflows. 3. Create useful and engaging learning How well customers engage with your training determines its success. The biggest success driver will likely be whether the training effectively meets customers’ needs. If customers don’t think your training is useful, nothing you do will make them feel it’s a good value. Assuming your training does address a real customer need, there are extra things you can do to further engage customers and provide a more effective learning experience. Here are four examples: Scenario-based learning is a technique that engages customers through an immersive training experience modelled on real-life scenarios rather than a theoretical knowledge dump. Providing bite-sized learning nuggets (a small elearning event that focuses on a specific topic and takes between 1 and 15 minutes to complete) gives customers a flexible way to access specific information. This can be especially useful for time-poor customers or those in distracting environments. An excellent example is the JJCV Eye Care Practitioners This Johnson & Johnson course contains numerous accredited 10-minute nuggets, each allowing time-poor eye care professionals to accumulate the Continuing Education and Training (CET) points necessary for their ongoing professional registration. Mobile-friendly elearning events can be especially useful for customers on the move or those who don’t have ready access to desktop computers. The Utility Warehouse rolled out training to its 46,000 distributors, over 30% of whom only had access to a mix of mobile and tablet computers. Gamified learning experiences engage and boost a customer’s intrinsic motivation levels through a variety of game mechanics, like points, leaderboards and badges. Doing these things well and creating the most engaging learning experiences can set you apart from competitors and keep customers coming back for more. 4. Deliver training to customers at the right time It’s important to provide training to customers in the ways that are most useful to them. For example, which of the following will your customers find useful? Training is provided before they use your products or services. Training is provided on demand, immediately prior to the customer using a feature of your service or product—i.e., Just-In-Time (JIT). Hints or push messages are triggered in your software products that point the customer to training when they’re stuck—for example, if the customer is spending a long time on a certain feature or using it incorrectly. Customers are pulled to the training (directed to support pages) when necessary. Training is pushed to them (i.e., hints, tips or videos sent by email). The training is embedded inside your software or service portal rather than a separate website or LMS. The correct answer may be one or a combination of these models. The important thing is that the training is convenient and easy to access. You may need to pilot some training delivery models or interview a cross-section of customers to decide which will work best in your environment. 5. Track and improve Training programs aren’t static. The best ones evolve and continually improve. Watching how customers access and interact with your training and evaluating how effective it is informs how you can make it better. Consider the following activities: Use analytics embedded in your software to see how customers use your products; for example, are they getting stuck in certain spots? Or are they navigating to screens/features in unusual patterns? Review your support requests to see where training could be created or improved. Measure customer satisfaction to determine if users have real or perceived training needs. Directly ask customers what their training pain points are. Findings from this kind of research will point you to where you can direct your next training efforts. Related: Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. In conclusion There’s much more to implementing a meaningful customer training program than putting a few PDFs on a website. But if you do it well, it can really make you stand out from competitors. As you’ve seen here, the best way to achieve a good result is to think carefully about what training you’re going to provide, how you’re going to deliver it and how you’ll evaluate it to make future releases even better. The post How to implement a successful customer training program appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

A recent report from Towards Maturity contains some great news for online learning, with 80% of those surveyed saying how it helps further their career. In fact, "70% think online learning has had a positive impact on job performance." But the report also says that corporate learning is "wildly out of sync" with how people prefer to learn. So, stay ahead of the game with our guide to the report and what you can do to close the gap. Tapping into the ways people prefer to learn is a winning strategy for training providers, leading to higher take-up, more engagement, and better, longer-lasting results for individuals and their organization. Going with the grain rather than against it pays off in this case. Yet many training teams are missing some tricks and delivering only part of the winning combination. If you’re already providing some online learning, according to the stats, you’re going in the right direction. But you need to factor some silver bullets into your blend to get in sync with your learners. What the report says: How do people prefer to learn? Towards Maturity surveyed 2,000 people who paid for their own development—i.e., they were learning by choice. This is what the survey discovered about their natural learning tendencies: 80% can see how online learning helps with furthering their career. 66% rate self-paced elearning courses as essential or very useful. 90% are going mobile, using apps to further their learning, with half being education-based and half being productivity tools or on-the-job help. 70% use their own smartphone, and 52% their own tablet for learning (so BYOD is big news). 77% rate working in collaboration with others as essential or very useful, with 70% liking technologies that enable them to network and connect with others. 80% say Google or other web search resources are either essential or very useful to learn what they need to do their job. 47% rate classroom courses as essential or very useful. What does this mean for training providers? What stands out is that online learning is soaring in the rankings, and access from mobile devices has become the norm. In light of this, should we all be creating multi-device elearning? Absolutely! But not in isolation. Learners are crying out for blended approaches that provide a mixture of resources, courses, performance tools, and, crucially, collaboration. It’s the latter that’s often left off the list. Classroom-based learning still has a place, and for certain types of learning, it’s a top choice. What people like about face-to-face sessions is learning from each other: the war stories, success stories, anecdotes, teamwork, and the ability to interact with colleagues in other departments. It’s the context for the learning content. Related: Why blended learning is important People might experience a jolt when training providers move to more digital offerings, forgetting the human factor—the bit that enables people to learn from one another. With only minimal context, how can we expect learning to stick? Training is about changing behaviors—stopping or starting something in the workplace. Collaboration and social learning are crucial to this, because underlying such training can be the need for a shift in groupthink and organizational culture. But we also need to take heed from the fact that most people’s first point of call for help is Google, not the LMS. When we need help, information, inspiration, or demonstration, we’re there, phone at the ready, running a web search without even thinking about it. Should we give up and let Google do it all? No, but alongside deeper dive specialist content, training providers need to provide short, to-the-point, just-in-time performance support and on-the-job tools and templates of their own. Six takeaway tips In summary, training providers need to develop blended strategies that: Provide multi-device online learning and performance support. Support people on the job with quick-to-find tools, templates, tips, examples, and performance-support resources alongside deeper dive learning content. Enable self-paced learning: Courses are still rated highly, but learners must be in control. Either that or go for a fully resource-based approach, where learners pick and choose from a range of bite-sized topics. Use online collaboration and social learning tools, such as Elucidat polls, forums, Yammer, online coaching, and more. Jane Hart provides an entire list here. Consider virtual classroom sessions as part of the blend to foster collaboration and story sharing. Include face-to-face when and where it counts. We’ll be following up with more on blends and how you can plug in social learning and collaboration to get the most from your elearning. Related: Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. The post Get in sync with learners for better ROI appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Customer training is on the rise. We look at three customer training programs and explain why we like each of them. Which one do you like the best? Hubspot Academy: Customer training that helps people understand Hubspot and Inbound marketing HubSpot Academy offers certification, documentation, and training programs to help people understand how HubSpot and Inbound work. The Hubspot Academy team aims to educate and inspire people so that they can transform the way the world does business. Why we like it: Very easy to navigate through different topics. Good use of instructor led learning through web conferencing. Comprehensive Q&A section with lots of useful information available on demand. Certification gives customers an incentive to complete the full training program. Visit Hubspot’s customer training Zendesk: Zen University offers virtual and instructor-led training to customers Zen U. training courses are open to anyone. All the courses are virtual, instructor-led sessions that are conducted through a web conferencing tool. Why we like it: Free and paid courses provides a two-tier training program. Pre-scheduled training and one-on-one training available to customers. Additional opportunities offered to customers who complete the paid academy courses. Visit Zendesk’s customer training Xero U: The hub for Xero’s educational content for small businesses, accountants & bookkeepers Xero U is the hub for Xero’s educational content for small businesses, accountants & bookkeepers. Choose your learning path with webinars, videos & more. Why we like it: Courses are neatly organized into sections tailored to specific types of customers. High quality video production. Xero certification program gives learners credibility and opens up additional opportunities. Visit Xero’s customer training Related: Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. The post Customer training: Hubspot vs Zendesk vs Xero appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Are you leaving money on the table? With more and more training providers entering the competitive online training space, it’s becoming harder to sell training courses. Instead of sticking to your old trusty sales methods, learn how to stand out from the crowd by applying these five strategies. 1. How to attract the right customers The Learn 2020 project found competition to be one of the three biggest challenges online training providers will face over the next five years. With more and more solutions entering the field, it’s more important than ever to differentiate yourself through marketing. There are two key areas you should focus on: Understanding your ideal customer and investing in your website. Understand your ideal customer Who are they? What companies do they work for? Where do they hang out online? Once you know who your ideal consumer is, clearly define why customers buy from you over competitors. In other words, identify your value proposition. Communicate this value proposition in all your marketing communications. This is what differentiates your training product from others. It’s no longer good enough to compete solely on price — you need to focus on why customers buy from you. Invest in your website When it comes to marketing, your website is your biggest asset. It’s often the first thing potential customers see when they come across your training organization. With that in mind, there are a number of things you must do to ensure your website markets your courses effectively. Communicate what you do and why you’re better. Build trust and credibility through your About Us and Contact pages. Use an account portal to sell courses online and manage customers. Publish a blog to give customers a taste of what they can expect in the training courses. Optimize web pages for search engines like Google. Related: 3 marketing strategies that will help you sell more courses 2. Start differentiating your online training from that of your competitors Unless you’re very lucky, you’ll have other training organizations competing for your customers’ business. Follow these three suggestions to create online training that gives you a competitive advantage. Use design to make your online training look better: Good-looking training appears professional, and anything else seems amateurish, regardless of how good the training itself is. Use gamification to enhance the learner experience: Gamification fosters a high level of intrinsic motivation for people to persist and strive to do better within the gamified activities. Use an authoring tool that lets you build mobile-friendly online training: Different learners will want to access your training on different devices. Modern tools - like Elucidat - help you build online training that adapts to desktop, tablet, and smartphone screen sizes (i.e., responsive). This will allow more of your learners to access the training in more flexible ways. Related: How to differentiate your online training from that of your competitors 3. Choose the right pricing strategy How do you price online training courses? It’s a difficult question for many online training providers. Simply "winging" your pricing strategy is risky. While you may be able to estimate what your online training is worth to customers, it can be helpful to learn about the different pricing strategies (and theories) available. Calculate the cost What does it cost to create your online training? You should have an understanding of how much it costs you to create a course. Factor in additional fixed and variable costs, and you’ll quickly learn what you need to be charging to break even. Any revenue above the break-even line will be your profit margin. Understand external factors What are your competitors doing? You must consider what moves your competitors are making. For example, if you set your price too low, you may trigger a price war. If you set your price too high — and can’t communicate the value — you may lose customers to lower-priced courses from competitors. Estimate the demand for your product It’s important to understand the demand curve for your online training. As you sell more courses, you’ll be able to better estimate future demand based on current sales. Related: Pricing strategies for online training providers (3 examples) 4. Create online training that meets the needs of the modern customer Consumers of online training are becoming increasingly sophisticated. They expect engaging learning experiences and will quickly choose a competitor’s offerings if you fail to meet their needs. Here are three tips for building engaging online training that meets customers’ needs and has them coming back to buy more. Use branching to increase engagement Branching gives learners control over the process, allowing them to direct where they go, what they see and what happens. This makes the experience inherently more engaging and personalized than if the same information is presented in a linear and inflexible fashion. Read more on how to create simple branching scenarios. Use bite-sized online training Bite-sized learning enables learners to quickly and conveniently consume content, particularly on mobile devices. One of the biggest benefits is it can be consumed during gaps in busy work schedules. Consider this sales training sample (created with Elucidat) that would only take learners 5 or 10 minutes to complete. Challenge learners Adult learners like to be challenged. Spoon-feeding them information is a sure way to bore them and have them forget what you’re trying to teach. Here’s a great example of how making choices can be fun for the learner. Adult learners like to prove to themselves that they understand what they’re being told or asked to do. Related: How online training providers create courses for the modern customer 5. Improve the way you deliver online training to customers When you provide online training as a paid service, you have to balance two broad factors. On one hand, you want to create training that meets your clients’ needs in an engaging, enjoyable way. But to maximize profits, you’ll also want to deliver that training in the most efficient ways possible. These requirements aren’t mutually exclusive, but they do rely on selecting the right tools and using them wisely. Key takeaways to deliver effective online training: Choose an elearning authoring tool that makes it easy to create and maintain training. Ensure your LMS plays nice with your authoring tool. Monitor analytics to understand and improve the learner experience. Related: How to deliver online training to customers (4 best practices) Final thoughts Selling more online training courses isn’t easy. You can’t just turn on the marketing tap and expect new customers to come racing through your door. It requires a strategy that encompasses your marketing, sales and training teams. Instead of relying on your old, outdated sales methods, try these new ideas to effectively position and sell your training to more of the ideal customer. Continue reading: 8 questions to ask before buying an authoring tool The post Stop selling training the wrong way: 5 ideas to help you sell more courses appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Are you considering a move from face-to-face to online training? In this article, Simon Greany shares some practical advice on how to get started with the transition. Many training providers are moving toward online or blended learning offers and for various reasons: to reduce production, maintenance, and delivery costs and to reach wider audiences or simply because customers want it. A recent report by Towards Maturity on people’s learning preferences announced that 70% say that online learning improves job performance and 90%  access learning on their mobile devices. Online learning gives audiences more control with its self-paced and readily-accessible content. But audiences also rank collaboration, tutor-led, and social learning highly, which is why blended learning can provide the ultimate solution. If you’re thinking about making the move from face-to-face but aren’t sure where to start, this post provides a practical guide. It’s the first in a short series designed to help you piece together modern online and blended training packages for your customers. The first step: analyze. 1. Do a top-down analysis You start with the business and performance goals that your training is targeted at. Even if you already have a face-to-face course in place, it’s worth going through this exercise to ensure that the learning strategies and content still align with your core goals. Do this without looking at your content! Ask yourself the following: What business goal is this training aiming to meet? (e.g., reduction in errors, increased sales; better retention of staff). Try to make this SMART. What do learners need to do to attain this goal? (e.g., start or stop doing x). What are the ways in which they can demonstrate that they are doing this? That is, what specific activities or actions do they need to do to meet their performance goal? You may find that there are differences in the actions required by different learners, for example, a manager may need to perform different actions to a team member. Map any differences out. Notice that all these questions are about action not knowledge. You can then drill deeper and identify the examples and theory that the learners will need to help them do the above. The idea with this is to cut out any theory or knowledge that isn’t necessary and to keep the focus on the outcome. Anything that doesn’t link back to the goal, scrap. Cathy Moore calls this approach action mapping. 2. Then go bottom-up If you have been delivering workshops already, great. You can use some bottom-up approaches. You’ll have objectives, content, expertise, and, hopefully, you know what works well and what learners find most challenging. The latter is probably the most important. If you don’t have this information, now is the time to get it. Ideally, you know which elements of your workshops, such as activities or discussions, work well and why. Surely you can just take the content and convert it to online learning? Well, yes, you can, and it will probably work, but your workshop will be much more than just content, right? You’ll have other additional elements. You don’t want to accidently convert a great practical activity into tutorial content if there’s a way to make an interactive practical, right? Equally, you won’t want to lose all that contextualization and story-telling and just focus on facts. So, you might need to do a little re-design to ensure that the new format delivers learning experiences and not just content. It might help to break your workshops down into their components, such as the following: discovery activity: learners uncover something for themselves practice activity: learners get to take part in an activity on their own, in pairs, or groups demonstration: learners get walked through the "how" case study: learners analyze and learn a skill from a contextualized case study tutorial: learners are talked through a process, theory, etc. story-sharing: learners and/or the teacher shares stories and examples (this can occur during breaks too) collaboration: learning takes place because people are working together myth-busters: knock-down common misconceptions or include surprising facts assessment: assess learners’ ability to apply the skill observation: observe learners practicing/applying the skill When using the top-down approach, make sure that everything you do maps back to your goal. Creating this list should help you work out what can be "done" with your learning. For example, elearning can cover off a lot of the above, including an element of (pre-captured) storytelling, but you might realize you need something extra, some video or animation to help you with some demonstrations or case studies if they are in-depth or soft-skill-based or include some social learning. 3. Consider all learning channels If you’re leaning towards a blended approach rather than pure elearning, it’s worth mapping out what learning channels are available to your organization and what may be available to your learners. Remember, a blend is anything more than just a block of elearning, however small. Do this without making any decisions as a listing exercise. For example: elearning mobile learning discussion forums (in an LMS, perhaps) virtual classroom video production/viewing capability virtual tutoring Once you’ve objectively gathered all this information, you’re set to start designing a fit for purpose learning journey. We’ll cover this in step two. Never miss a blog post: Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. The post Making a move from face-to-face to online training? First step: analyze appeared first on Elucidat Blog.