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.

Whether a small business or a large chain, and regardless of the rise of e-Shopping, the retail sector remains the front face of the economy. Retail employees, more so than most other fields, have to deal with customers in person, and while good people skills are essential, they are not enough by themselves. A successful sale or a satisfactory customer service experience is built upon years of experience in dealing with customers who, as the old saying goes are always right, combined with rigorous training and continuous reeducation to new products, selling techniques and market trends. At least that’s the ideal retail employee. Unfortunately, the reality leaves a lot to be desired. A recent research produced by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills contains the rather unsettling finding that the retail workforce is in desperate need of training. As the authors put it: "60 per cent of sector employers with skills shortage vacancies have difficulty recruiting employees with these skills" and "In order to meet the predicted skills demand retailers will need to up-skill existing workers and attract appropriately skilled new entrants". The ever-shifting landscape of the retail business, dominated by unpredictable forces such as fashion trends, shifting demands and guerrilla marketing, requires navigational orders that are communicated fast, understood completely and executed smoothly. Oh, and it wouldn’t hurt if they also come cheaply, as the razor thin margins an awful lot of retail businesses operate on don’t leave much of a budget for training expenses. As the creators of the industry leading eFrontPro eLearning management platform we might be biased, but when it comes to fast, flexible and cost effective training, eLearning is the only viable option that comes to mind. Let’s see how eLearning can help you build and retain a successful retail team that will keep you ahead of the competition. Employee orientation Employee orientation is the task of introducing new hires to your working environment and giving them the basic information they need to start being productive, including your company’s operating procedures, policies, guidelines. If your retail business hires new people frequently, e.g. to cover increased seasonal business, automating employee orientation is one of the best investments you can make, and eLearning software like eFrontPro is your best option for achieving this. With eFrontPro you can organize your orientation material in accessible units, incorporate video, audio, images, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations etc., and integrate material from third parties (YouTube, Wikipedia, RSS, etc). And because it’s a full blown LMS as opposed to a static content management system, you can also include tests and quizzes in order to better access your hires’ progress and understanding of the onboarding material. eFrontPro also logs orientation course attendance, something that in case of legal dispute can serve as proof that your company has informed your employees about stuff like labor safety, environmental protection laws, sexual harassment issues, etc., though, you should consult your legal team before relying on this, as it might not apply to your jurisdiction. Training In retail, change is the norm. Employees are often re-assigned or promoted to handle different accounts and/or departments, and there are always new hires, especially in sectors such as clothing retail that frequently hire younger employees that are prone to leave the business after a couple of years or so. All these things make training necessary. eLearning makes it easy and cost effective, enabling your employees to complete their training at their own pace, thus minimizing business disruptions and reducing employee overtime. eFrontPro also provides a comprehensive reporting system that gives you quantifiable information and statistics for your employees’ attendance, progress and understanding of the training material. An eLearning based solution will also help if have a frequent need to change your training material (e.g. to introduce new tech products or clothing lines, to teach employees new sales techniques and marketing tactics, to promote a new customer service strategy, etc.). eFrontPro allows you to update all your courses without wasted paper and dead trees, re-use and expand content as you see fit; and share courses between different retail departments and branches. Plus, with eFrontPro’s integration to the OpenSesame eLearning content marketplace, you can buy ready-made professional courses in thousands of topics, including sales and marketing. Knowledge retention In all lines of business there are a few employees whose experience is crucial for an organization’s day to day operation, as well as others who are the only ones that know how to handle some rare emergency situation. Retail is no different in this regard. If your supervising employee takes the day off or quits to join a cult, can the rest of your retail employees manage the store by themselves? Can they handle an especially demanding, but very valuable, customer? An eLearning platform like eFrontPro will help you store all of your business’ valuable operational knowledge in a formalized and easily accessible way, safe from changes in personnel, and available to be consulted at any time. Sure, you could just put all that into a document management system, and have them forgotten and buried under digital dust. By putting it in an LMS, though, you ensure that they’re not just static documents sitting on a server, but rather live content that you can use to educate the rest of your staff and even train new hires with — while leveraging all of your LMS’ learning related functionality (from tests and quizzes to gamification and certification features). Sold? Take eFrontPro for a test drive today, and see for yourself how eLearning can help boost employee skills and increase sales for your retail business. The post eLearning for the Retail Industry with eFrontPro appeared first on eFront Blog.

Adopting eLearning, settling on some employee training software, and deploying your own enterprise online courses are all big steps towards achieving more efficient, flexible and effective employee training for your organization. As is true for most things in business and in life, however, eLearning doesn’t run very well on autopilot. It might give you that impression, of course, as it’s much a more automated and hands-off affair compared to traditional classroom based training. But even so, it still needs you, or your instructors that will be operating the courses, to be on top of your employee training program to ensure employee participation and engagement — two things that are essential for its success. In this article we’ll examine several ways to come up with an effective employee training plan that will increase employee participation and ensure that your employees complete online training courses inside your LMS portal. 1. Schedule properly One of the main issues that might keep your employees from paying more attention to their eLearning is simply not having enough time. If your employees have some important project deadlines to meet then they obviously will prefer to invest their time in meeting them instead of "wasting" time learning new skills they don’t immediately need. The same goes for overworked workers (e.g. due to increased seasonal workloads). It’s not their fault; rather it is you and their managers that have to prioritize what’s important and what’s not, and schedule things like eLearning for the appropriate time when workloads are lighter. In fact, it’s best that you allocate some time during the week that your employees are allowed to do eLearning — so that they don’t have to sit through their training after a full day’s work, or, worse, on their weekend. Unless, of course, they prefer that. You should also ensure that their managers are sold on the importance of the company’s training program, and don’t try to rush employees back to work considering any time spent on their online training as "wasted". 2. Embrace asynchronicity Another common scheduling mistake when it comes to employee training, is having too many instructor-led-courses that have to happen in real-time, or insisting that your employees take an online lesson at a specific time. One of the great advantages that eLearning has over classroom-based learning is its asynchronous nature. That is, the fact that learners can login and access their lessons at any time (and from any place). For example, some of your employees might like studying from home or on weekends. Others might prefer accessing their lessons during their morning or evening commute. As long as they do access them, let them make up their own schedule and keep their own pace. 3. Set a deadline Yeah, I know, we have just advised you to let your employees "make up their own schedule". And we still stand behind that advice: you should not try to micromanage your employees’ access to the LMS portal. But you should definitely give them specific deadlines for completing each of their course modules. If you don’t, and only set a single far-off final deadline, then they’ll do what the average university student does: they’ll forget about the training program until the very end, and then haste to go complete it as the final deadline looms. If you don’t want that, and you shouldn’t; it would be very ineffective in terms of knowledge assimilation, set a generous deadline for the completion of each module of your employee training program. 4. Get employees to relate to your training material Blah blah blah blah blah. That empty blathering is all that your employees will be able to read in their eLearning courses if you can’t get them to understand "what’s in it for them". In other words, to have an effective and engaging online employee training program you need to make your employees see that your course content is relevant to their work. For this you’ll need two things. First, the managers, and/or instructors need to set clear objectives for your training program, and communicate them successfully to your employees, while also touting their importance. Second, the content should be to the point, with concrete examples relevant to your employees’ roles and experiences. Lengthy abstract theoretical passages should be edited out — your employees will only snooze over them anyway. So, when it comes to effective eLearning content, keep it simple, keep it short and keep it relevant. And then sell the heck out of it to your employees, until they are convinced of that the new skills you’re trying to teach will prove important in their everyday work, not to mention their career advancement. 5. Encourage participation Sure, you can always yell at them for not completing their training. It won’t help, but it might make you feel better. But before it gets to that, how about trying some positive encouragement first? You could, for example, give an extra day off to people who have completed a particular course or course module. Or give a bonus to those who had the best training results. Or maybe just praise your best learners openly, in a company wide email or within earshot of the other employees. There are may ways you can go about it, including a virtual way, which we’ll describe in the very next tip, but the main goal remains the same: you want to make employees feel that increased participation in the company’s eLearning program is something that will be appreciated by upper management. 6. Let the games begin Adding an element of play is another sure-fire way of making any process more fun and engaging. In web based employee training software, or any other kind of software for that matter, this can be achieved through a technique known as "gamification". Increasingly popular in eLearning and even more so in mLearning, gamification refers to the use of game-inspired techniques to increase engagement in a non-gaming activity. It’s not kid stuff either: applicable to learners of any age, gamification has demonstrable and measurable effects, as well as deep roots in pedagogy, cognitive science and human psychology. eFrontPro offers several built-in gamification features, such as points, badges, levels and leaderboards, and it even allows instructors to mix and match them and to customize their behavior in order to implement a particular gamification strategy. It also allows companies to use their custom badges and naming schemes, to get them more consistent with their training content. We suggest you try to incrementally introduce a few gamification elements to your employee training — you’ll soon discover that there’s nothing like a little competitive element to increase learning engagement and get your employees to try to outdo each other. 7. Hear them out Training should always be seen as an interactive affair. By this we mean that there should be a two-way connection between instructors and learners, such that not only the learners acquire new knowledge and guidance from their instructors, but the instructors also get important feedback from the learners, which enables them to improve their course content and teaching approach. This is just as important for web based employee training as it is for traditional classroom based training. Perhaps even more so, as in traditional learning teacher and learner interaction is inevitable, whereas in eLearning you need to work hard to achieve it. Where we’re getting with this is simple: you should listen to your learners. They’ll tell you what works and what doesn’t work in your training courses. Some things might be too abstract, while others might be overly specific. Others, yet, might be hard to understand, or written in a confusing way. There will be also some things that your learners might want to see covered in their courses — stuff that your instructors didn’t consider, or thought was too trivial. Have your instructors listen to your employee feedback and suggestions, and have them iterate on the course materials until they get them just right. A modern enterprise LMS like eFrontPro makes the whole process extremely easy, allowing you to work on your content iteratively, create new versions and re-use stuff with ease. 8. Numbers don’t lie To best way to make sure that your employees are up to date with their eLearning courses is to be up to date with your employees’ training progress yourself. Don’t just wait for their final test results — take advantage of your eLearning management platform’s reporting capabilities to track their attendance, scores, and overall progress. eFrontPro, for example, offers a flexible and intuitive reporting system that allows you to track, monitor and chart employee training progress across your whole company, for a particular department or branch, or for any particular employee. And you can even configure eFrontPro to notify you with an email when a particular event, like an employee completing a course module, or test scores becoming available, occurs. By leveraging your LMS monitoring and reporting capabilities you can get a good, and quantifiable sense of the progress of your employee training program, and easily spot problematic lessons and courses or employees that need a little extra help. Conclusion In this post we’ve examined a few tips and techniques for increasing participation and engagement in your company’s online employee training program. The main takeaway we’ve tried to drive home is that running an effective eLearning program needs organizational support and supervision. Do you have any relevant tips to share with our readers? Let us know in the comments section and we’ll try to cover the best of them on a follow-up post. The post How to Ensure your Employees are up to Date With Their eLearning Courses appeared first on eFront Blog.

The term "flow" was introduced by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a Hungarian psychologist. It refers to the state when one is so focused and concentrated on a particular activity, that they may lose track of time. Flow is widely used in a variety of therapeutic fields, but it can also be a powerful tool in eLearning. When your online learners are in "psychological flow", their minds are open and ready to explore the subject matter. In this article, we’ll share 6 tips on how you can integrate a psychological flow into your eLearning experiences. How To Add Psychological Flow In eLearning Experiences "Flow" is a term used in positive psychology that refers to a state of total absorption. Online learners who are in the flow are able to immerse themselves into the eLearning experience without distractions or lack of focus standing in the way. They are fully involved in the eLearning process and enjoying every minute of it. For this very reason, creating a psychological flow is the ultimate goal of any eLearning professional. It also happens to be one of the most challenging tasks to accomplish, as it deals with positive attitude towards eLearning, cognitive processes, and mental states. Fortunately, there are 6 tips to take advantage of psychological flow in eLearning. 1. Create challenging goals Online learners who are encouraged to go beyond their comfort zone and challenge themselves are more likely to be in the flow than those who are certain that they will succeed. If there is a risk that they may not overcome a challenge or there is a distinct possibility that things will not go according to plan, then they are going to go above and beyond to ensure that they achieve the desired outcome. If everything comes easy, on the other hand, they may not be driven enough to put in the extra effort. With that said, the goals should still be attainable and realistic, or you run the risk of making learners feel defeated. For instance, if you set a goal that they do not have the skills or resources to achieve, then no amount of hard work or determination is going to get them to the finish line. 2. Remove any distractions from your eLearning course design Distraction is the foe of flow. An online learner must be able to completely focus on the task at hand, as well as the goals and objectives they must achieve. Chaotic graphics, irrelevant images, and other technical pitfalls or interruptions can stand in the way of full immersion. This is why it’s so essential to remove distractions from your eLearning course design whenever possible. There are, of course, some things that you cannot control, such as a noisy learning environment. In this case, you must do your best to minimize them, like integrating background music to your eLearning course or including subtitles that stress the key takeaways. 3. Focus on intrinsic motivation Extrinsic motivation, like rewards and praise, may drive some online learners. However, encouraging intrinsic motivation is one of the most effective ways to trigger the psychological flow. You can achieve this by emphasizing the benefits of the eLearning course so that online learners will know exactly what they’ll gain by actively participating. Cultivating a strong learning culture is another way to bring in intrinsic motivation, as it stresses the importance of building their skills and expanding their knowledge. 4. Use colors and audio to create the right atmosphere Individuals who feel safe, secure, and tranquil are emotionally prepared for the flow. All of their basic needs are met, so they are free to fully engage in the eLearning process. They may even lose all track of time, simply because they don’t have to worry about anything else than mastering the task or absorbing the information. In essence, they are able to live in the moment and focus on the subject matter, which is the epitome of being in the flow. Incorporating the right colors, sound effects, and music can set the right tone for your online learners. Classical music, for example, can make them feel at ease, but heavy metal or rock might have the opposite effect. 5. Develop self-guided eLearning activities Mastering the art of psychological flow can be challenging, as it involves relinquishing control over the outcome while having complete control of the eLearning experience. In other words, the eLearning course must be challenging enough to test their mettle, but online learners must also feel empowered and know that they are in charge of the entire process. Create self-guided eLearning activities that allow them to explore the subject matter at their own pace, without having to keep up with their peers. Simulations, online scenarios, and serious games are all examples of self-guided eLearning activities that may give them control of the eLearning process. 6. Offer immediate, constructive feedback Online learners who are in the flow are constantly aware of how they are performing and what they must do to achieve their next goal. For this very reason, it is essential to provide them with immediate personalized eLearning feedback that centers on their abilities and skills, instead of their traits or personalities. They shouldn’t feel as though they are being attacked on a personal level or that you are criticizing something that they cannot change or improve. To the contrary, they need to receive constructive feedback that they can apply as soon as possible. For example, modifying a performance behavior or improving how they perform a specific task. Use these 6 tips to integrate a psychological flow into your eLearning course and engage every member of your audience. There are very few eLearning experiences that can achieve this feat, but just imagine the possibilities if you were able to get online learners "in the zone" and fully immersed in the subject matter. Flow is just one of the psychology principles that you can apply to your eLearning course design. Read the article 5 Psychology Principles That eLearning Professionals Should Know to discover additional ideologies that you may want to integrate into your next eLearning experience. The post 6 Tips To Add Psychological Flow In eLearning appeared first on eFront Blog.

During the last 10 years, improvements in mainstream eLearning offerings, widespread availability of broadband connectivity and developments in web technologies have helped make eLearning not just a useful educational tool but also an essential part of corporate training. So much, in fact, that eLearning in general and corporate online training, also known as "enterprise online training", in particular, have become a hundred billion dollar market. The phenomenon is only going to grow from here as, online learning’s proven flexibility, effectiveness and lower TCO have businesses increasingly adopting corporate eLearning solutions or expanding their already existing LMS-based corporate learning and development programs. The only problem is that not all corporate training systems are made alike — which makes choosing the right corporate training LMS a real challenge when a business attempts to make its first steps into online employee training. In this post we’re going to discuss 8 requirements that your corporate training software (LMS) should cover — and the ways in which eFrontPro supports them. Of course, as corporate environments vary, you might not need some of the items in the list, or your businesses needs might dictate that your LMS offers some additional functionality. Based on our extensive experience dealing with business customers though, we believe that this list is a great starting point for the average enterprise or organization looking into online learning solutions. 1) Single Sign On A prerequisite for any kind of enterprise software and not just eLearning, Single Sign On (or SSO for short) is the ability to re-use the same passwords and authentication mechanism for all your enterprise services. Having an additional authentication system just for your LMS is not just a hassle (employees having to remember and enter yet another password, etc) but also an administration time-sink, as your IT department now has to do double the work to secure all your online assets. It also introduces serious security issues, as things like password expiration policies won’t be in sync between your enterprise authentication system and your LMS. Thankfully, eFrontPro natively supports the two most popular enterprise Single Sign On protocols, namely LDAP, an Open Source standard that’s popular in the Linux world; and Active Directory, Microsoft’s variation on LDAP, popular with Windows-based installations. If LDAP and Active Directory are not your thing, then eFrontPro can also integrate with any identity provider that supports the industry standard SAML 2.0 authentication protocol, as well as federated authentication through its Facebook login integration, although we mostly recommend the latter for public facing eLearning portals. 2) Reporting What’s the use of having a corporate training program if you can’t evaluate its results? Waiting until employees try to put their new skills to use in their work would be too late — and it won’t give the chance to fix any issues in your training material until the next training period. That’s where an LMS’ reporting functionality comes into play. Corporate eLearning, with a capable LMS, can give you real-time, micro (focused) and macro (big picture) actionable insight into your employee’s training progress, and eFrontPro’s reporting capabilities were built for just that. In fact, unlike with some competitive products, where reporting is optional or needs convoluted configuration, eFrontPro comes with a variety of ready-made reports built-in to help you get started immediately. Not that getting deeper into eFrontPro reporting is difficult. The LMS intuitively splits reports based on the subject matter, giving you different reports for the System (an overview of events such as registrations, logins, etc. that occurred in a given time period); Users (information about your instructors and learners); Courses (information about particular courses or groups of courses) and Tests (test score, participation, etc). There’s also an additional "Timeline" view, that gives you a time-based list of any action occurring in your LMS (employees completing a course, a webinar session starting, etc). All report types have filtering options so you can narrow down the results by date, user type, job, skills, groups, categories and many other dimensions, and only see the items that you are interested in. This allows you yo create your own reports by filtering eFrontPro’s database for the information you need, going from a general overview to information about a single specific user, course or test with ease. 3) Import and Export Interoperability with different data formats and good importing and exporting capabilities are essential features of any kind of enterprise software, as half (or more) of the job of an IT worker is to get data out of one program and into another. Obviously, you’ll want your corporate eLearning software to be able to participate in that chain. eFrontPro, for one, does. First, there are the extensive content import options. eFrontPro allows you to import and integrate into your courses all kinds of content files, from the industry standard MS Office formats (Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, Excel files) and PDF documents, to numerous image, audio and video formats — and even Flash files if you got them. And the best thing is that importing just works — you don’t need to convert or "massage" the documents to fit into eFrontPro, the system does that automatically thanks to our proprietary EncodeMagic data conversion engine. This allows you to easily incorporate all of your existing enterprise files and training material into your new eLearning based courses, saving you tons of time in the process. But that’s just part of the story. eFrontPro also support the (de-facto) industry standard SCORM/TinCan protocols, allowing you to import eLearning content created in any compatible system and have it converted into eFrontPro’s native lesson units. In fact, it’s by leveraging this capability that eFrontPro was able to provide native integration with OpenSesame, the leading SCORM compatible eLearning content marketplace, giving you access to thousands of professionally-built high quality courses in all kinds of business related subjects. Of course data exchange is not just for eLearning content — it can also be used for administration purposes. eFrontPro, for example, allows you to export your LMS configuration (including all of your users, courses, branches etc.) as Excel or CSV files, which you can then use to setup another identical installation, or to feed into another program altogether. This can even be automated, as eFrontPro has the option (called an "import task") to periodically check for CSV files in specific folders, and import any data (user account info, etc.) contained in them, for easy making integration and syncing with external sources (such as your ERP platform). Last but not least, eFrontPro can also export reporting results in Excel format, and even produce richly formatted Excel files for test and survey results and other statistics, with nice headings and appropriately styled cells. 4) Integration APIs Sometimes importing and exporting data manually just won’t do. For those times, you want the ability to directly integrate a piece of enterprise software with another. And while some of these integrations can be standard and provided natively, like our support for different Single Sign On protocols or payment processors, other times you really need the flexibility to built a custom integration with a non-standard piece of software or some legacy platform that your business relies upon. For this, you need integration APIs and extensibility that your IT department or a contract programmer can leverage to build you the custom integration solution that your business needs dictate. eFrontPro, once again, has you covered, offering not just a powerful, PHP based plugin API, but also a full blown REST API that makes connecting it to any application server and exchanging data with external services a breeze. REST, in case you’re not familiar with the term, is an increasingly popular way to "talk" to a service using simple URL-like queries. Having got its start in the web development area, it’s now a staple in all kinds of enterprise software services too. As for eFrontPro’s "plugin API", that’s tech-speak for the ability to add your own custom code into eFrontPro to extend its functionality. Both are very powerful ways to connect, script and make eFrontPro interoperate with any platform and service, and both are well documented and explained in depth. 5) Branding Corporate identity matters — and branding is a big part of that. Especially for larger businesses, enterprise software should be able to adapt to their corporate-wide look and feel guidelines. This starts from the prominent display of company logos, and goes all the way through custom themes, colors and fonts, including the ability to add standard legal and confidentiality disclaimers on any intranet page. eFrontPro handles all that with aplomb, allowing you to easily add logos, and change colors, fonts, and other design options through its web management interface. If you want to take it up a notch, eFrontPro even lets you to build your own themes from scratch, allowing you to bundle your own HTML, CSS, images and Javascript files. You can also include custom scripts to an eFrontPro web page to affect its behavior, with full access to the page’s DOM and events. And if you rather just use some ready-made theme, either as is, or to add your own customizations, eFrontPro comes with several beautiful themes to chose from, covering all the range from casual business, to minimal and fancy. 6) Feedback We talked about the need to have "actionable insight" when we discussed reporting, but there’s another indispensable method of getting that for your training program: asking for it. User feedback is one of the most powerful tools you can use to improve your courses, or any other employee-related business process for that matter, and it’s even more powerful when it’s integrated into your eLearning management platform instead of being an afterthought. eFrontPro allows you to conduct surveys and collect their results automatically through the web interface. Leveraging this to get feedback from your learners is the best way to understand their use and identify problematic spots in your training program (which courses offer the most value, lessons that they find particularly difficult or not comprehensive enough, etc.). Having the feature built in allows you to handle it as an essential part of your training workflow, as opposed to having to resort to ad-hoc mail-based surveys (which you’d then have to sit through and aggregate their results) or third-party poll services. 7) Hosting flexibility Corporate data centers have changed a lot with the rise of the Cloud. Some companies use third party Cloud offerings like Google Apps openly, others host their own services in Cloud IaaS platforms like AWS, where others still prefer to keep everything in their own, tightly controlled, datacenter. Even more common is a mix and match of all three approaches, depending on the service. Your corporate LMS platform should offer you the same deployment flexibility, and eFrontPro, once again, delivers. If you prefer total control, you can run eFrontPro as a self-hosted application in one server in your datacenter. Or you can install it on some IaaS platform, like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace or any other you prefer, and access it from there, taking full advantage of everything the infrastructure provider offers and having it close to your other IaaS-hosted services. There’s even another option, our "Managed Cloud" plan, that gives you the best of both worlds, being halfway between a locally deployed server and a public cloud option. With it you get a secure and private LMS environment that doesn’t share resources or code with other businesses, thus giving you both the ease of mind of a managed service (as we take care of installation, monitoring, backup and updates) and the best possible performance and security. 8) ILT support Online based learning is of course, a great and proven training option, but it’s not always the best approach. Sometimes, and for some learning subjects, you need to be able to have a real-time eye-to-eye training session, either in the physical world or online. That’s why your LMS software should provide support for instructor-led training (ILT for short), which is the industry name for real time training sessions that are managed through an eLearning platform. Instructor-led training can take place in the physical world (e.g. in a classroom or conference room) or be held via video conference and similar interactive real-time means (in which case it’s known as a "webinar"). With eFrontPro you can handle ILT with the same ease and leverage all the same features, with which you handle your online courses. eFrontPro allows instructors to add ILT-based "training events", which can in turn have one or more "training sessions" (e.g. different classrooms being taught the same lesson), each taking place in its own location and/or time. It will even handle enrolling and capacity issues for you, with automatic wait list management and automated invitations (compatible with MS Outlook, Apple Calendar and most popular calendar applications), while it also offers native support for BBB and Webex-enabled webinars. Conclusion Choosing the right corporate training system is not an easy task, as you need to ensure that it covers all kinds of disparate business needs while at the same time playing well in your datacenter. In this post, we’ve examined 8 basic requirements that an LMS platform should cover to be fit for corporate training use, and gave some concrete examples of the ways that eFrontPro covers them. The post 8 LMS Requirements For Corporate Training appeared first on eFront Blog.

Who doesn’t like things? I know I do. And most of the things I like, from laptops and smartphones to cars and hi-fi speakers are created by the aptly named manufacturing industry. It’s really difficult to overstate the importance of the manufacturing sector for the economy. It creates jobs, attracts investments and feeds exports. It’s also highly competitive and, contrary to the stereotype of the unskilled "factory worker", it’s increasingly knowledge driven. For a company to be productive, competitive and profitable in the global manufacturing arena, a skilled workforce is not just a nice-to-have asset, but an essential part of the success recipe. Are your employees able to respond and adapt to the introduction of new manufacturing infrastructure and technologies? Are you prepared for the inevitable retirement of your older and more skilled personnel? How fast and smooth is the transition of new employees? Can you handle increased seasonal demand? eLearning can help you address these challenges in a reliable, scalable and cost-effective way — and a learning management system (LMS) like eFrontPro is the right tool to get the job done. Employee orientation Employee orientation is the task of introducing new employees to their working environment and giving them the basic information that they require to be productive pronto — including your company’s operating procedures, policies, restrictions and guidelines. Being in the manufacturing industry, you obviously understand the great benefits and importance of automation. eFrontPro lets you automate employee orientation and training — so that you can concern yourself with meeting your production and shipping deadlines, as opposed to searching for classroom space and scheduling training classes. With eFrontPro, instructors can organize orientation material in accessible units, and include text, video, audio, images, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, and even online content. They can also create tests and quizzes to help access their students’ training progress — complete with automated grading and detailed statistics. What’s more, in an industry such as manufacturing, riddled with regulations and bureaucratic ordinances, eFrontPro’s tracking of training attendance can, in case of legal dispute, serve as proof that your business has informed its employees about environmental protection laws, safety procedures etc. Of course consult with your legal team first, as this might not be the case in your jurisdiction. Training If you want to stay ahead of the competition, it is important to be able to adapt quickly as opportunities present themselves. A new niche market or a sudden surge in demand can require reassignments across the production process, the assembly line or the plant. Plus, there are always new hires, including temps hired to cover seasonal demand or some sudden big manufacturing contract. eLearning makes adapting to increased training needs easy and, something that’s especially important when tight margins are involved, cost effective. It also enables your employees to follow their training at their own pace, minimizing business disruptions that can be costly when you have tight production deadlines to meet. An eLearning based solution will also help if your training material has to change frequently (new assembly lines, the latest green energy rules, new safety procedures, new infrastructure, etc.), since it allows you to update all your courses, re-use and expand content, and share courses instantly between different departments, facilities and plants, anywhere in the world. You also get the flexibility to choose whether to run all of your training from a central location for complete control, or install dedicated LMS servers in each branch or facility. Plus, with eFrontPro’s integration with course marketplaces, such as OpenSesame, you can even buy ready-made, professional grade courses in thousands of topics — allowing your instructors to focus on covering your organization’s custom training needs instead of re-creating material that’s common across your whole industry. Last, but not least, eFrontPro’s comprehensive reporting system will give you detailed statistics for your employees’ attendance, progress and understanding of your training material. Knowledge retention All organizations have a few employees whose experience is crucial for their day to day operation, or for handling some special crisis scenarios that occur once in a while. This can be especially true in the manufacturing industry, where even the smallest plant often has a multitude of roles, responsibilities and procedures. Ideally, of course, this shouldn’t be the case — and with eFrontPro it doesn’t have to be. eFrontPro will help you store this valuable information in a formalized and easily accessible way that can be consulted by existing employees and taught to new hires. Storing that knowledge in an eLearning platform, as opposed to some document management system, or worse, a few word files nobody would bother to read, makes it instantly usable for training employees and new hires, allowing you to leverage all of your LMS’ eLearning features. An industrial revolution in training If you’re looking for a modern, capable LMS platform for your manufacturing industry training needs, take eFrontPro for a test drive today, and join thousands of satisfied customers, including several multinational companies and organizations in both the private and public sectors. The post eLearning for the Manufacturing Industry with eFrontPro appeared first on eFront Blog.

We have experienced the wonders and convenience of Skype video conferences. Notice how inexpensive and effective such online meetings are. The emotion, the human face and the human voice help fill for the missing warmth in an eLearning setting. And yes, there are indeed many learning situations that call for a video-conferencing session. Find out the four ways to improve your next video conferencing session. Video conferences are one of the leading strategies to implement telecommuting or distance education. With greater broadband connectivity, users increasingly prefer to communicate using videos conferences. Meetings occur over miles at the same time. Productivity and performance are boosted and so is user satisfaction. The human face, voice, expression and body language orchestrate together to produce satisfying communication experiences. Many misunderstandings created during a voice or text chat are eliminated automatically. Demonstrations of critical procedures or steps are easily carried out on video and easier to replicate than if the instructions were text-based only. This ensures a complete learning achievement. Video conferences are also advantageous in inclement weather. Despite such uncontrollable barriers, users can still interact meaningfully and continue business as usual. The total effect has lead to serious financial gains. Think about the money and efforts saved when interviewing an instructor based in India to invite them to work in New Zealand. Depending on the quality of the Internet connection, both the interviewer and the interviewee can communicate and get their message across with little ambiguity. If things work out, the interviewer can be invited to attend the second interview. The first video communication helps both parties decide if the in-person interview is feasible and useful or not. One drawback of videos is that people tend to think that videos are easy to create. Most use their smartphones to shoot amateur videos and upload for the world to see. We have experienced many distasteful videos that had too many technical errors. Avoid these pitfalls and create professional looking videos ready for live transmission easily. When your learners are ready to connect with you and expect to learn from your actions through the video conference, you do not have a lot of time or space to make mistakes. Live videos cannot be edited! You need to plan out well before the session begins. Rehearse and watch yourself before you are ready to go live. In an eLearning environment, video conferences can help establish stronger rapport and bond between the cohorts. Logging in and communicating for project-based meetings is also more enjoyable than simple chat. Video conferencing software options are plentiful. The simplest ones allow quality live videos to be exchanged easily. They also provide the option of cancelling the videos and using still images of participants if they are not comfortable. There are plenty of video conferencing tools available, all rich in functionality and excellent in what they do. What they lack however, is the ability to connect a live training session with other aspects of elearning. Here’s where an LMS comes into play: It allows for seamless integration of one or more video conferencing sessions with the overall training plan. eFrontPro can work out of the box with two popular video conferencing tools, Webex and BigBlueButton (BBB). Cisco’s Webex is a well-established, feature rich conferencing tool suitable for small to very large enterprises. BigBlueButton (BBB) is a free and open source video conferencing platform that offers all tools required for effective real-time training. eFrontPro allows for single-click setup of conferences, mixed-and-matched with traditional elearning content, storing and delivering recordings of past sessions and more, while at the same time takes care of the conferencing tool’s own configuration complexities and requirements. Your next Instructor-Led Training will be smoother and more enjoyable with eFront learning management tools. In an eLearning video conference, the geographically dispersed participants can see and hear each other. Video conferencing enables learners to see a small video image of the learner or a still-image. Video conferences are utilized for online demonstrations, role-playing activities and for presenting feedback on physical actions. Follow these four best practices when conducting an Instruction-Led Training (ILT): Prepare a video-conferencing studio: No matter where you hold your video-conference from, make sure you have a good camera and the presenter is well-lit, by natural light or even an artificially designed solution. Minimize the background distractions. Tidy up the place. Make sure everything is stationary in the background. Frame the background and make sure the camera is steady at all times. ILT sessions need to give off professional vibes to the learner. So make sure the background is work context related as opposed to a casual setting. Prepare your presenter or yourself if you are presenting: Make sure the dress of the presenter is simple and preferably in lighter or solid colors. Rehearse and watch a sample video before presenting. Dark colors against a light background are great for ILT’s as they allow integration of additional onscreen messages for the learner. Prepare the learners for the session: When the session is open, instruct your learners to keep their cameras off until they are given a chance to speak. Discipline in using the camera can prevent clogging of the network connection. Provide instructions similar to the first and second points above to your learners before the session. A notable tip to add here is to inform the learner of the nature of the session. Provide a short tutorial on ILT’s and their expectations from such a video session. Conduct a smooth session: Make all movements and transitions predictable so that the entire presentation seems to follow a uniform theme. Keep any demonstration-props ready for use. Use close-ups to show details. Vary the camera angle to keep things interesting. Keep sessions prepared for live questions and answers with peers, experts and with instructors. A good idea would be to hire a transcriptor who would record all conversations in text format for all to see and respond appropriately. Great applications of video-conferencing involve showing moving objects. This occurs when your course content requires you to show how a piece of machinery works. In a live video conference or an instructor-led training session, your learners can watch and imitate; and also interrupt you to ask questions. Video conferences also make people seem real in an otherwise remote learning environment. Lastly, deliver powerful emotional messages through video sessions to convince and change the attitude of your learners towards a concept. If used properly, video sessions and conferences between instructors and learners can prove to be motivating and engaging. They also lead to pleasurable learning experiences. Avoid showing long video sessions or a talking head! Do tell us about your own video-conferencing or ILT sessions. The post 4 Ways to improve Video Conferences in Instructor-Led Training (ILT) appeared first on eFront Blog.

Assessment, design, and implementation are the cornerstones of the Hannafin-Peck Μodel. It is the ideal approach for a subject matter that is more complicated, thanks to the fact that it tackles each stage of the eLearning development process separately. In this article, I’ll delve into the basics of the Hannafin-Peck Model, so that you can decide if it’s the ideal strategy for your next eLearning course. A Guide For Applying Τhe Hannafin-Peck Model In eLearning The Hannafin-Peck Model involves three essential stages that are each followed by a thorough evaluation and revision process. It was first introduced back in 1987, but still remains an effective approach for designing comprehensive eLearning experiences to this day. In this article, I’ll highlight the 3 stages of the Hannafin-Peck Model, how to apply them in your eLearning course design, and 3 advantages this approach can offer. The 3 Phases Of The Hannafin-Peck Model 1. Assessment The first stage in the process involves a thorough needs analysis. This includes the needs of your online learners, such as their goals and performance gaps, as well as the needs of the organization. You should also develop objectives and start thinking about which eLearning activities and resources will help you achieve them most effectively. Use eLearning assessments, surveys, and other feedback tools to identify the needs of your learners. In a corporate environment, on-the-job observations are also a valuable assessment method, as they can give a complete picture of the tasks, job duties, and skills that your employees utilize on a daily basis. If task mastering is a main concern, then conduct tasks analysis to break each process or procedure into its most basic components, then determine the best way to convey the information to your employees. Is an interactive scenario the ideal choice, or would the task be better suited for an online tutorial? 2. Design The second stage of the Hannafin-Peck Model is actually designing the eLearning experience. This is the time to map out every aspect of your eLearning program and create a storyboard or outline that highlights the online exercises, multimedia components, and eLearning assessments you are going to use. Essentially, the design stage is when you begin to put all of the pieces together so that you can determine how to fill the performance gaps and fulfill the needs and wants of your learners. For the design phase of the Hannafin-Peck Model in eLearning, gather all of your resources and online materials so that you can create a plan of action. Meet with Subject Matter Experts to develop a list of key takeaways and start crafting the eLearning content. The design process can often be time-consuming, as you will need to develop a clear and cohesive strategy to use as a foundation moving forward. This phase relies on organization and planning, so get your eLearning team together and create all of the puzzle pieces for your eLearning course. 3. Development & Implementation The third and final phase involves developing your eLearning program and actually implementing it. After you upload it to the LMS you’ve chosen and ensure that all of the elements are in place, it’s ready to launch. This also typically includes maintaining the program and updating it on a regular basis to meet the ever-changing needs of your learners. In terms of application of the Hannafin-Peck Model in eLearning, now it’s time to put the puzzle together. Proofread and edit your eLearning content to make sure everything is in order, conduct testing, and prepare your learners by giving them detailed instructions on how to access the eLearning course. Once you’ve launched your online training program, be certain that you have IT staff and facilitators on hand to offer assistance. 3 Advantages Of Using The Hannafin-Peck Model In eLearning 1. Ideal for all experience levels One of the most significant advantages of using the Hannafin-Peck Model in eLearning is that virtually anyone can use it to create effective eLearning experiences. This is due to the fact that you are able to break each stage of the eLearning course development process into manageable steps. You have the opportunity to focus on one phase and fine tune every aspect before you move onto the next. Therefore, even Instructional Designers who may be new to the field or those who don’t have much experience with a structured eLearning course design process can benefit from the Hannafin-Peck Instructional Model. Likewise, more experienced eLearning professionals can also take advantage of this strategy, as it can be custom tailored to fit the talents, skills, and expertise of your audience. 2. Improves the quality and consistency of eLearning experiences This Instructional Design model includes a revision round that follows each phase. Thus, you are able to provide high quality eLearning experiences that are cohesive and well organized. Instead of waiting until the end to make the necessary changes, you have the opportunity to improve upon your eLearning course and remedy issues as soon as possible. 3. Allows you to evaluate your eLearning course as you go along There are some issues that are only noticeable after you’ve actually built your eLearning course from the ground up. For example, you may not detect certain coding or formatting problems until you’ve created a rough draft. At that point, it may take extensive modifications to fix the issue, which requires even more money and time. By applying the Hannafin-Peck Model in eLearning, evaluation is part of the revision process that takes place after each phase. Thus, you can carefully analyze and assess every element of your eLearning program in order to catch common errors. The Hannafin-Peck Model is particularly useful when you are dealing with subject matter that is more in depth or complex, as you have the ability to make the necessary revisions as you go along. However, you can apply it in virtually any eLearning project in order to stay on track and achieve your performance goals. Identifying your corporate learners’ needs and goals is a key component of the Hannafin-Peck Model. Read the article Online Training Needs Analysis For Each Of The 5 Stages Of Employment to discover the different online training needs for each of the 5 stages of employment, as this has a significant impact on your corporate eLearning design. The post Applying The Hannafin-Peck Model In eLearning appeared first on eFront Blog.

There sure is a lot of chemistry between us. And I mean it not in the "we are attracted to each other" sense, but in a much more literal sense: we live in a world that is densely populated with the products of the chemical industry. From consumer goods ranging to personal care products, soaps, cosmetics, and food supplements, to raw manufacturing materials such as plastics and paints. Even the laptop that you’re using to read this post is 50% physics and 80% chemistry. And yet, despite all the huge demand and all the scientific breakthroughs related to chemistry, there is a substantial lack of skilled chemists and technicians in the industry. In fact the problem is so big, that a recent study on the UK chemicals sector [1] shows evidence that apprentice training is gaining ground, due to the inability of the labor market to supply a sufficient number of experienced chemical technicians. eLearning can be the catalyst (pun intended) that will enable the mass scale, cost effective, and flexible solution to this training demand. Employee orientation Employee orientation is the task of introducing your hires to their new working environment and giving them the information they need to start being productive, including your company’s operating procedures, policies and guidelines. If your business frequently hires new people e.g. to cover increased seasonal demands or to ramp-up production to handle a big customer contract, then automating employee orientation is one of the best investments you can make, and eLearning management software like eFrontPro is your best option for achieving this. With eFrontPro your orientation material can be organized in accessible units (courses and lessons) that can include video, audio, images, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations etc., and even integrate material from third parties (YouTube, Wikipedia, RSS, etc). And because eFrontPro is a full blown LMS as opposed to a static content management system, you can also include tests and quizzes to help you access your hires’ progress and understanding of your on-boarding material. eFrontPro’s attendance and progress logs can even be used as proof that you have informed your employees about labor safety, environmental protection laws, sexual harassment issues, etc. in case of legal dispute (consult with your legal team before relying on this, though, as it might not apply to your jurisdiction). Training Chemical industry technicians can be assigned a variety of tasks, ranging from process operation, mechanical testing and maintenance, electrical maintenance, control and instrumentation. That, combined with the pace of technological progress, where manufacturing infrastructure and materials can change every few years, means that you will frequently need to retrain your employees in order to keep their skills up to date. eLearning makes this training and retraining easy and cost effective, while enabling your employees to complete their training at their own pace — something which minimizes operation disruptions and reduces employee overtime. And unlike traditional classroom-based learning, where you only have some periodic tests and final exam results to go by, eFrontPro’s comprehensive reporting system gives you quantifiable information and statistics on your employees’ attendance, progress and understanding of the training material in real time. An eLearning-based solution also gives you additional flexibility in updating and expanding your training material, e.g. to introduce new chemical processing machinery or new raw materials, to teach your employees the production process for a new product and inform them of the associated safety guidelines. eFrontPro, for example, allows you to update all your courses without costly printouts (and dead trees), re-use and expand content as you see fit, and share courses between different departments and branches. And with eFrontPro’s integration to the OpenSesame eLearning content marketplace, you can buy ready-made professional courses in thousands of topics, including environmental and green energy issues. Knowledge retention Alchemy, the middle-ages predecessor to modern chemistry, had tried (and failed) to create the so-called "philosopher’s stone" — a mythical substance capable of turning base metals to gold. eFrontPro won’t do that yet, but it is capable of turning operational intelligence into long-term informational gold. In all businesses there are a few employees whose experience is crucial for the company’s day to day operation, or who are the only ones that know how to handle some rare emergency situation. If your supervising technician takes the day off or quits to start an organic farm, can the rest of your employees manage the plant by themselves? Can they handle any sudden disruption or malfunction that might occur during the manufacturing process? eFrontPro can help you store all of your organization’s valuable operational knowledge in a formalized and easily accessible way, and help you keep it safe from changes in your personnel and ready to be accessed and consulted at any time. By putting this information in an LMS, as opposed to some content management system, you ensure that it’s not just a set of static documents sitting on your intranet servers, but rather live content that you can use to educate the rest of your staff and train new hires with, leveraging all of your LMS’ learning related functionality, from tests and quizzes to gamification and certification features, and everything in between. Take eFrontPro for a test drive today, and see for yourself how eLearning can be the catalyst that helps you boost your employees’ skills and increase the output of your business. [1] http://www.gatsby.org.uk/uploads/education/reports/pdf/chemical-industry-technicians-report.pdf The post eLearning for the Chemical industry‎ with eFrontPro appeared first on eFront Blog.

There’s a well known saying that "No man (or woman for that matter) is an island". Well, your eLearning management system should not be an island either. When it’s used in the enterprise space, a modern LMS should be able to connect to all kinds of internal (intranet) and third party (Cloud) services, programs and tools. eFrontPro, for one, comes with quite a few built-in integrations, including with third party authentication providers (LDAP, Active Directory, SAML 2.0), payment processors (PayPal, Stripe), eLearning content marketplaces (OpenSesame), tele-conference tools (Webex, BigBlueButton), and many more, including several under-the-hood integrations, like with our proprietary Encode Magic solution that makes sure your uploaded content is appropriately formatted for online use. Beyond that, there’s our REST API, that allows your IT team to create its own custom integration with every external platform that’s capable of speaking HTTP (that’s nearly all of them), and our PHP plugin API which lets you expand eFrontPro’s code with your own plugins to make it talk to any system that PHP has some way of talking to (that’s absolutely all of them). Between these two cases (native integrations AND APIs for creating your own integration) there’s also a third option: Zapier. Enter Zapier Zapier is a third party app (a Cloud-based service, to be exact) that makes it easy to connect different platforms and have them work together. Zapier integrations are based on the notion of triggers ("when this happens") and actions ("do that"). Using this scheme, eFrontPro (or any other application) can invoke certain triggers and have another application respond to them by performing an action (or vice versa). And all that without having to write even a single line of code. eFrontPro, for example, could invoke a "New User Registered" trigger when someone opens a new account, which would in turn have your CRM copy the new account details. In this sense, configuring a Zapier integration is all about connecting the appropriate triggers to the desired actions. The beauty of this scheme is that triggers and actions can be independent, so multiple target applications could be made to respond to the same trigger (that you only have to build once). Thanks to this fact, Zapier offers over 300 integration options, including all major Cloud platforms such as Gmail, MailChimp, Trello, Evernote, DropBox, Slack, Magento, Amazon AWS, ZenDesk, JIRA and many, many more. Connecting eFrontPro to Zapier First you’ll need both an eFrontPro and a Zapier account. Since you’re reading this, I’ll assume that you already have the former, so go on and create a Zapier one too. I’ll wait here. Done? Let’s move on. To allow Zapier to connect to eFrontPro you’ll need to tell it your eFrontPro domain (the URL part of your eFrontPro installation after http:// and before "?") and API key (a alphanumeric key that authenticates remote services attempting to connect to your eLearning portal). You can find your API key in the System Settings > Integrations > APΙ page. Enable it first, by clicking on the checkbox, and then copy the API text, because you’re gonna need to paste it into Zapier. Now you need to login to your Zapier account, and visit the "Zapier Connected Accounts page" (you can access it from the menu at the top). Now click on the "Connect a new account" drop-down, select eFrontPro, and follow the on-screen instructions. Basically you just need to enter your eFrontPro URL and API key in the popup window that appears. Click "Continue" and you’re ready to roll. Integrating eFrontPro with an external service using Zapier Now that you introduced eFrontPro and Zapier to each other, so to speak, you can start using Zapier to integrate third party services with eFrontPro. As a first taste, we’ll show you how you can connect eFrontPro with (popular email marketing service) MailChimp, so that new subscribers from MailChimp lists are automatically added in eFrontPro as new users. As we said before, using Zapier is all about connecting triggers to actions — in this case letting the "user subscribed to MailChimp list" trigger to invoke the "create eFrontPro user" action. Such a pre-programmed integration in Zapier is called a "Zap". First, go to your Zapier dashboard and click to create a new Zap. You’ll need to define the application doing the triggering. In our case, it’s MailChimp, so select that as the "Trigger App". Zapier will show you all the triggers that MailChimp supports. For our example, select the "New Subscriber" trigger. Now you’ll need to connect your MailChimp account, as both ends of an integration must be registered with Zapier. You can either do that while creating a MailChimp related Zap for the first time, or earlier from the "Connected Accounts" page (like we did with eFrontPro, adding its API key to Zapier). Zapier will then show you all your MailChimp lists, so you can select which one your Zap is going to pull new subscribers into eFrontPro from. Once you’ve selected a MailChimp list, click to test that data come along successfully. This concludes the trigger setup. Now you should configure your action — i.e. what happens when some new subscriber’s information comes into Zapier from MailChimp. Your Action App is of course eFrontPro, and the action is "Create User". Next, select your previously connected eFrontPro installation from the list. We’re almost set. New MailChimp mailing-list subscribers will be created as eFrontPro users to the specified eFrontPro installation. But first you need to create a "Template", that is, determine how MailChimp subscription data should be converted into eFrontPro user registration data. E.g. the email of the MailChimp subscriber should be used as the "login" in eFrontPro, etc. Zapier helps you by showing you all the data that flow from the first (trigger) system into the second (action) system. Click to test your Zap. You’re now ready to save it. Alternatively, you could add another step, to create a more complex multi-step Zap (which we will not cover here — the basic steps will be the same anyway). When this Zap is live, every time a new subscriber is registered in the MailChimp list that’ve you selected in the beginning is going to be also added as a new user in your eFrontPro system. More integration The MailChimp-eFrontPro integration was just an example to whet your appetite. You can create your own, custom, Zaps, including multi-step ones, leveraging all of the hundreds of Zapier compatible services. Currently TalentLMS-Zapier service offers several triggers and actions for your integration needs, and eFrontPro can be used as both a trigger or an action in your Zaps. Triggers include: New User, New Course, New Category, New Branch, and New Group, triggered each time a new corresponding entity is created in your eFrontPro system. Actions include: Create User, Create Branch, Add User to Course, Add User to Group, Add User to Branch, and Update User’s Status in a Course. For more details on the data that eFrontPro triggers generate and the required/optional fields for each particular action visit: http://docs.efrontlearning.com/how_to_integrate_efrontpro_and_zapier Conclusion In this post we talked about the powerful Zapier meta-integration service, and how eFrontPro users can leverage it to make their favorite LMS integrate with thousands of different Cloud apps. Zapier offers integration with over 3000 third party apps and services, from Gmail and MailChimp to SalesForce and Dropbox. Integrate eFrontPro in your enterprise or organization today, and see for yourself why it’s the leading learning management platform for employee training and educational uses. The post Custom eFrontPro Integrations Made Easy With Zapier appeared first on eFront Blog.

With an increasing number of enterprises and organizations adopting eLearning, or extending their existing online training programs, eLearning has now become an essential tool for business development. Merely deploying an eLearning solution and hoping for the best, however, will just not do. To really leverage the benefits of online training, businesses need to identify their corporate training & development needs, develop a corporate training plan, and (more or less) stick to it. In this post we’ll examine the six most important things to consider while building your corporate training strategy. Know thyself And by yourself, we mean your company. Sure, you need to have an employee training program; every enterprise does. But do you know in advance what it should cover, how long it should be, what it would cost, and even what technologies to use to implement it? Similarly, you may have some specific department’s training needs in mind, but could there be other departments in that vast enterprise of yours that might also benefit from an online training program? Brainstorming it out yourself is not enough. It’s time to assemble the Avengers. And by Avengers we mean your company leaders, department heads, human resource leaders, employee representatives and other stakeholders. Arrange a few meetings to discuss (and determine) the scope, goals and objectives of your employee training program. Keep detailed notes and try to get a clear view of each department’s employee development needs. Know thy old training If you already had an existing corporate online training program, whether it’s merely a pilot of smaller scope or has even failed, now it’s time to do a postmortem. See how it was designed, implemented and run, and whether its goals were met. Ask your instructors and your learners to evaluate its success (or lack thereof) from any aspect that can help you improve upon it for your new online training strategy (e.g. course quality, user engagement, instructor performance, LMS suitability, skills enhancement, etc.). You should, of course, do the same with any traditional employee training regime that you might have had — e.g. classroom-based seminars. Just because your old training was done offline doesn’t mean it is obsolete. Some parts of employee training, especially those that concern physical skills (like operating some complex machinery), are better done as real-time, hands-on courses, and modern LMS systems offer support for this with "blended learning" or "instructor-led training" courses and webinars. Questions you should be asking: Were they effective? Should you maintain some elements of them in your new online training program (e.g. in the form of instructor-led training)? Does it make sense to re-use existing content (PowerPoint presentations, printed handouts, etc.) from them? Long vs Short-term needs After you’ve gathered your company’s training requirements, evaluated earlier training programs, and solicited feedback from all the relevant stakeholders, it’s time to put all these together and formally develop your corporate training strategy. A lot of the information and feedback you will have gathered (especially from "brainstorming" style meetings where everybody goes off on tangent), will be incomplete, conflicting, or even completely out of scope. Do a first pass and remove anything that doesn’t seem helpful for developing your online training strategy, then use the remaining material to identify your company’s real training needs — which will be of course based on its business and development goals. Some training needs, especially those that are associated with explicit or short-term needs, will be easy to identify. If for example you run a factory and are introducing some new assembly line machinery, you’ll obviously need to train your employees into using it. Or, if your employees are having trouble with some particular skill, that will be another example of an evident training need. Other training needs, especially those that depend on long-term business development goals, might not be so easy to determine — though they might prove the most crucial ones for the company’s feature. If you worked on intranet-focused IT services in the early 2010’s for example, it would make quite a lot of sense to start schooling your employees in Cloud-based technologies and support, because that’s where the market was heading. Separate those two cases (concrete and short-term training needs vs long-term business development training needs), and try to come up with a mix of them that works. Don’t try to fit everything in your corporate training strategy from day one — it will probably turn out very hard to develop, costly, and overwhelming for your employees. After all, the beauty of eLearning management systems and online training is that you can introduce new training courses piecemeal. Balance it all In general, your role as the corporate training strategist will be to balance a number of variables, including breadth (scope), cost, employee availability, etc. Of course if you work in a Fortune 100 company and have been given an unlimited training budget, by all means, go wild. But most corporate training strategies are better off with a balanced approach — and some resources, like your employees’ availability and learning capacity, cannot usually be improved by throwing money at the problem. In the end, it all comes down to taking into account all your pressing needs and constraints while still keeping an eye on the big picture (long term corporate development). The end result of the design stage should be a, still abstract, corporate learning and development strategy that defines a number of training courses, each with a clear scope and specific learning objectives. Make it concrete Now it’s time to make your corporate training strategy concrete. This means filling in all those tricky to calculate numbers and figures, and delivering a final plan, with specific timelines and associated costs, to the big bosses that will sign off on your training program. With your finalized training courses listing, you should meet with department heads and company leaders again, and discuss employee availability to come up with a viable training schedule. Key word here is viable. While understandingly training will be your number on priority, this won’t, also understandingly, be the case for department heads, who will be more concerned with meeting their deadlines and deliverables. This is where, for example, you’ll find out that your suggested 4-hours per week/one month training regime is just not possible under your current workload, and you need to make it into a 2-hours per week/2 months one. It’s also a good time to talk to your IT department and a couple of eLearning solutions providers (such as, *ahem*, Epignosis), discuss with them the desired specifications for your eLearning management system, and decide upon a specific LMS platform, deployment strategy (e.g. self-hosted, private Cloud, public Cloud, etc), and pricing plan. Your goal at this stage is to minimize business disruption, and ensure that all corporate stakeholders are OK with your corporate training schedules. This is crucial, because not only you don’t want them to sabotage or downplay your training program’s importance, but you also need their full support in getting the employees they manage engaged and fully cooperative with their training. Make sure you have the departments’ leaders support and agreement even before you start deploying your eLearning program, by filling them in with all the details, answering their questions and concerns, and making any adjustments necessary to get their approval — before you finalize your plan and start deploying. Rinse and repeat Just because you’ve deployed your online training program doesn’t mean you’re done developing your corporate learning strategy. A corporate learning strategy is not meant to be static — after all, neither the markets nor your business needs are. What worked for 2013 might be old news by 2016 — or even faster if you work in a high velocity industry, such as fashion or IT. While your overall corporate training strategy and eLearning program structure might be good for a while, you’ll need to re-examine employee training needs, course and timelines often. This is for things like adding a new course, updating your training materials, adjusting training schedules, etc. Depending on the rate of change in your particular industry you might also want to re-evaluate your overall strategy once a year or so, too. In general, your goal should be to incorporate all the wisdom and feedback you’ve got from running your eLearning training program to make it better in its next iteration. Reporting tools let you have an overview of the progress your employee are making in their training over time — and make it easy to notice any problematic spots, e.g. lots of employees faring badly at some particular course or lesson. Talking to your employees and conducting online surveys is another great way to solicit feedback from them — provided that you ask concrete questions that can lead to actionable changes to your training program. If you’re just starting out, and are worried about the completeness and effectiveness of your proposed corporate training program, you might want to consider launching it in pilot mode (e.g. for only a few specific departments), watching how it goes, gathering feedback, and then finalizing your overall corporate training strategy. Conclusion A successful corporate training and development program requires a well thought-out training strategy. Such a strategy must reflect and address the company’s training needs and development goals, both in the short and long-term, and much be created with the involvement and support of all relevant stakeholders. Finally, your training strategy, just like every other business strategy in a changing market, must be iterated upon and re-evaluated constantly. The post 6 Important Considerations When Building Your Corporate Training Strategy appeared first on eFront Blog.

Ever wondered why young trainees complain about today’s training materials, especially when these training materials have been developed by seasoned and mature training developers? Why, despite being a state-of-art eLearning course, its learners do not meet the learning achievement expectations? In this article, we share a recent research on learning habits of millennials and a proposed teaching strategy for them. The digital generation of today is affectionately called the millennials. This generation is also referred to as generation Y - they were born between the early 1980’s to around 2000. Christy Price, EdD, a psychology professor at Dalton State College, became interested in millennial learners when she discovered a performance and expectation gap between the learners and their educators. (Price, 2009). She noticed that this group of learners utilized technology differently than generation X - their predecessors. Technology is intimately embedded in their lives, in fact, it is almost an extension of their bodies! Creating educational experiences that become a part of their lifestyle was her main goal. She created her famous 5 Rs of engaging these millennial learners. Training mangers and eLearning developers can benefit from these 5 Rs to create a millennial-centered learning environment. Research-based methods: Millennials prefer a broad spectrum of learning strategies. The concept of learner-style is more pronounced in this generation. They prefer learning materials that are delivered to cater to their visual, auditory and even kinesthetic needs. They need to experience change in delivery formats to maintain interest. Their attention spans are shorter - they quickly move on to other forms of learning. Their ideal learning environment involves less lecture and more collaboration with peers. Group-based projects that emulate the work environment (authentic assessments) are ideal for these learners. Relevance: Millennials are aces at "googling" and discovering information. They do not value a piece of information for its own sake, rather for its relevance to their lives. Trainers will find millennials engaged in hands-on or application-based case studies, where new knowledge is discovered and synthesized actively between group members. The goal for trainers here is to connect the eLearning environment to the performance context of these learners to convince them of its relevance. Rationale: Baby boomers or generation X-ers respond well to an authoritarian teaching style. They follow orders for the sake of complying with commands. On the other hand, millennials were raised in a less authoritative environment - where decisions and actions were constantly justified. Flexibility and recognizing the socio-emotional rationale behind new ideas and processes are expectations of millennials. When trainers and instructors provide the rationale behind policies and regulations in a learning environment, these young learners are more likely to respond positively. Relaxed: Think "laid back" when you conduct your training sessions. Millennials prefer a relaxed learning environment, with minimum pressure, more freedom to complete assignments and also more freedom for personal expression and creativity. eLearning course mentors need to create a warm, empathetic, "no wrong answers" collaborative environment. Rapport: Millennials strive on personal relationships. When being raised, they had complete attention from their parents. They are used to older adults showing more interest in their lives. They prefer and appreciate instructors showing a personal interest in their learning plans and achievement goals. These learners also perform better at work and in the classroom when instructors connect with them on a personal level. The workforce is quickly being replaced by millennials. Training managers need to modify their teaching and course delivery strategies to rein in the potential of these learners. Incorporate these 5 Rs in your course mentoring strategies to weed out those that did not work well in the past. Ideally, train your trainers on these 5 Rs so that they experience a rewarding teaching environment. The post 5 Important Moves to Engage Millennials appeared first on eFront Blog.

Trainers have several roles and responsibilities in the eLearning environment. When a course is launched, its success and popularity depends on the input and involvement of a trainer. An indifferent trainer will have fewer registrations and active members in the online community. On the flip side, an enthusiastic trainer has a vibrant learning community that evolves according to the learner and training needs. Apart from this valuable trait, there are the famous 3 Ps that need to be implemented for an effective eLearning course. The online trainer functions have been the pinnacle of debate for the past two decades. Every eLearning researcher has come up with timely functionalities and roles to be executed by the trainer. For our current times, with the proliferation of educational technology and devices, Pallof and Pratt’s (2007) model of People, Purpose and Process (3 Ps) can be used as a guide to ensure that the trainer is executing all that is required. In this article, we share and discuss these 3 Ps. People: People are the first layer of an eLearning environment. These include the learners and the instructional team. There could be more than one trainer working with learners on a course. When groups of learners are assigned a trainer in an eLearning course, a stronger social presence is to be expected. This is because of the deeper level of engagement encouraged by trainers. Manageable groups of learners experience a greater sense of community and binding with distant peers and their trainer. They are able to correspond without hesitation on ideas and expression of problems. The trainer needs to utilize the desirable methods of connecting like-minded and similarly aspired learners together for a powerful sense of community. Being in frequent touch with all learners is the key here. Purpose: Establishing learning community rules and Learning Management System usage guidelines early on in the training program provides a sense of purpose and confidence in every action the participants take. The trainer can also add to these rules by asking learners about their personal opinions on what should or should not be enforced. Trainers are responsible to show the designated areas for finding new content, for discussing various topics, an area for resources (where everyone involved in the training can post) and for uploading assignments. There should also be an area for "technology tutoring". This is a common area for all eLearning programs, where learners are instructed "at a glance" in regards to the common productivity tools that enable learners to publish their assignments online or present them in an innovative manner. Submitting assignments and projects using these tools adds another learning dimension that strengthens the purpose of the training program and consequently, learning satisfaction. Process: The processes deployed to run the eLearning program include the various formats of expressing the act of learning. Trainers should be aware of the different assignment and interaction formats (productivity tools, types of online submissions and multimedia) to build a robust learning community. Group collaboration should be asynchronous or synchronous, depending on the topic of discussion. Learners should log their learning process through reflection. This ties their current experience with their existing knowledge to create new knowledge for future job roles. Group knowledge is social knowledge; it’s precious in any eLearning course. Trainers should be able to generate this precious knowledge and sum it up in the form of touch points and bullet lists for all learners to agree upon. In short, the process should aim towards creating group-based knowledge. Outcomes of the 3 Ps Model: The 3 Ps model guarantees the development of co-created knowledge. This type of knowledge holds a greater value for all learners and is hard to forget. It leads to transformative learning - a step all line managers are looking forward to. It encourages participants to announce their presence and reinforce it through various strategies (uploading resources for others, posting questions or answering someone, posting a technology tutorial, sharing a "lessons learned" experience, etc.). This model also enables the online trainer to foster self-direction in learners to realize their potential and plan their future learning. Trainers who enforce the 3 Ps model can expect a higher enrollment rates and requests for more training programs! An eLearning environment is distinct from the face-to-face training environment. Many steps that are taken for granted in the live environment are deliberate and planed in the eLearning environment. Trainers can be confident when running their online courses if they keep the above mentioned 3 Ps in mind. These are the fundamental responsibilities required by the trainer that enable a successful eLearning experience for all stakeholders. The post The 3 Ps For Effective Courses! appeared first on eFront Blog.

Time has rendered the question of whether a modern enterprise needs eLearning, irrelevant. Of course it does. Once a niche product, online learning rose to a $100+ billion dollar global market, with corporate and vocational training claiming the lion’s share of this growth. And why not? As an effective, convenient, lower maintenance, and cheaper alternative to traditional classroom learning, eLearning is the perfect fit for the modern, knowledge-based economy, and the often thin margins in which competitive businesses must operate. It’s only natural that we see an ever increasing number of businesses adopting it for the first time or expanding their existing online training programs. But while the eLearning solutions market offers several excellent LMS platforms, including our very own eFrontPro, not all business have the necessary resources, skills and time required to develop their own employee training material. This is especially true for small and medium enterprises, which may lack the necessary personnel altogether, but it can also hold true for large companies with dedicated design and copywriting departments — in this case usually because they prefer to focus these employees at their core products, instead of having them organize an official or ad-hoc training department. Fortunately, thanks to the growth of the eLearning market, it’s quite easy to outsource eLearning content development to an eLearning consultant or firm — and there are plenty of eLearning development companies to choose from. In this post we’ll discuss custom eLearning development services, and give some advice on how to pick the right one, and how to successfully work with them from the requirements definition stage all the way to the final results. 1) Do you really need it? Before you proceed to outsource your custom eLearning content creation you should ask yourself whether you really need to. Modern LMS platforms such as eFrontPro make content creation so easy and effortless that it’s no more challenging that writing on your blog or on Facebook. And with extensive content import capabilities, you can easily incorporate any PowerPoint or Word documents that you’ve used in the past to train your employees in your courses. This means that if your training needs are restricted, and your budget is not that big, you could forego outsourcing and assign the content creation to one or more of your more tech-friendly employees. The end result might not be as eloquent and well written as a professionally produced course, but it will, more often than not, do the job just fine. For larger companies where money is not an issue (especially since, with eLearning being so cost effective, the costs of running an eLearning program are usually dwarfed by payroll and other operating expenses), establishing an online training department and keeping content creation inside the company sometimes can still make sense. For a company such as Apple or a government contractor handling sensitive data, for example, where secrecy is the norm, keeping your training content creation in-house means you can have it under close guard. Similarly, for companies belonging to the traditional education sector, like a university or other established educational institution, doing their eLearning content development on their own means that they cut out the middleman and have total control of their product. If your case does not fall into one of the above categories, then it makes perfect sense to outsource some or the entirety of your eLearning content development to an outside consultancy. You’ll get professional results, faster than you could ever do it, and without diverting resources from your core business. 2) Choosing the right eLearning development firm With so many eLearning development companies to choose from, you can really be spoiled for choice — and scratching your head trying to pick the right one. The key insight (if it’s an insight) is that not all eLearning development companies are made the same. Some are just more professional and trustworthy than others, and flashy webpages or ads can’t help you determine which is which. Fortunately, there are other ways. First, there is the traditional way: ask around. Perhaps your business partners already use and swear by some eLearning development company. Ask them for a recommendation, and discuss their experience outsourcing their training courses with them. Ask if you can see the courses they had made, and see if they meet your quality criteria. Then there’s always the wild wild web — check eLearning news outlets, and industry blogs for mentions and/or reviews of eLearning development firms. Ignore paid "informercial" style content, and pay special attention to user provided experiences, in comment sections and discussion forums (keeping in mind that positive comments could still be "covert" advertisements for a firm, and negative comments could have been made on purpose by its competitors). If you already have invested or plan to invest in a corporate eLearning management platform (LMS) then make sure that the firm knows how to produce content for it. Look for eLearning development consultancies that have partnerships with your LMS provider. This not only ensures that they will know how to produce content that leverages your preferred platform, but also serves as a kind of endorsement for the firm. When you’ve narrowed down your list to a few firms, it’s time to ask to see their portfolio, ask for quotes based on your particular course creation needs, and (for larger businesses wanting to order multiple courses) maybe take their services for a test drive, by ordering a smaller course first. 3) Prepare for it Between the time you’ve made your pick of an eLearning development company to outsource your content creation needs, and the time they will start working on your courses, there’s a small, but essential, step that you need to take care of. You need to search for, find, organize, annotate and prepare your raw material. It could be some PDFs, PowerPoints and Word Documents spread throughout your intranet, or safely organized in your Document Management system, complete with titles, tags and descriptions. Or it could be several printed manuals and ancient hand-written notes that have to be scanned and converted into digital form. Whatever the case, you’re the one who knows what needs to be in your training courses, and you’re the one that has access to your company’s documents, so you should prepare all these files to give to the eLearning development company. Other stuff might not even be anywhere. If you didn’t have an informal, or semi-informal training before, either online or classroom-based, then a lot of the necessary employee training information will just be stored in your senior employee’s heads. Of course, the eLearning development company, if they’re worth their salt, will also ask you and work with your staff, to get the information necessary for them to write your training courses. But there are some things that they won’t know about, and wouldn’t think of asking about either, unless you tell them explicitly. At the very least, you should gather all the files and documents you have that are related to your training course, and catalogue them for the eLearning development people. 4) Be clear regarding your needs You might not know how to write a proper training course, but you should know what it needs to cover, and you should tell your eLearning development consultants. It’s important to be as clear as possible with regard to your needs, and especially with regard to the desired results. Corporate training after all, unlike academic learning which can be abstract and wide-ranging, works better when it’s result oriented and focused. Some things, the eLearning content creators will be able to deduce from your existing training material (as discussed in the previous section). Others, you’ll need to tell them explicitly, and have senior employees work with them to ensure that they have a clear understanding of what they need to convey. If you ask them to create a custom training course for your assembly line workers, for example, you’ll talk them through all the the necessary steps and procedures that an assembly line worker will need to know. This includes emergency procedures for when things go wrong, something that you might easily oversee when you describe the basic workflow. Speaking of giving clear instructions, you’ll also need to tell the eLearning content development consultants about any other restrictions, preferences and guidelines you have for company content. This includes proper naming (e.g. if they should refer to your product as iGizmo and not IGizmo or i-Gizmo), branding rules, including logos and colors they should use in their final deliverables, etc. Last, but far for least, you’ll need to come up with a clear timeline (including milestones and sign-offs), and a final price for the whole endeavor. 5) Be involved Outsourcing eLearning content creation doesn’t mean that your job ends as soon as you hand over your raw materials and course requirements. If you want to ensure that you have your best possible result, you’ll need to stay involved in the whole process. You should be working alongside the eLearning development company to make sure everything goes well, that the provided content matches your specifications, etc. This doesn’t mean that you need to micromanage them, or breathe down their neck (and please don’t). It just means that it’s not a fire-and-forget affair, but an active collaboration. In fact, professionally run eLearning development companies will be glad to keep you in the loop, in order to ensure agreement and minimize surprises at the final delivery. Ideally, the eLearning development company should have use some collaboration platform (e.g. Basecamp, Slack, etc.), where you can share documents, read early drafts, make comments and even discuss the course creation process in real time when needed. In some cases, it might even be possible to login and check your course as it’s being developed directly in the LMS platform. Besides the raw materials and things that you assembled for the requirements gathering stage, there will also be some stuff whose need becomes evident later, and which you’ll be asked to provide while the course is developing. An employee orientation course, for example, will often need a "message from the CEO" type introduction, which your company will have to provide. The key here is to stay involved throughout all parts of the content creation, so that there are no nasty surprises when you finally get to review and approve the completed content. But don’t set your content development company loose too soon: you’ll want to be able to have them make changes and improvements after you’ve seen how your course content fares when used in your training program too (e.g to better explain some hard parts). The best relationship with an eLearning consulting firm is a long term one, where they get to understand your needs better and cater to them faster, and you get a custom content development partner whose work you can trust. Conclusion In this post we’ve examined how companies that either lack the internal skills to create their own custom training content, or prefer to stay focused on their core business, can make the most of outsourcing their eLearning content development. Among other things, we discussed preparing for outsourcing your training material, picking the right eLearning consulting firm, and working alongside them to ensure the best results. The post 5 Tips For Finding (and working with) An eLearning Development Company appeared first on eFront Blog.

Videos are perhaps the most sought after multimedia format in the eLearning world. Without videos, we feel we are missing real action! They’re a great way to demonstrate the need for the course and the practical emphasis of the course in the learners’ lives. Again, the best video recording and editing equipment does not guarantee quality videos. Let’s find out how you can create better videos. Videos are one of the best ways to convey knowledge and information in the online world. They are a great tool for advertisement and knowledge dissemination. Videos continue to be the centerpiece of an eLearning program. Learners still enjoy watching videos to learn, more so than any other form of multimedia. The biggest challenge eLearning program designers face is acquiring new, copyright free videos for their courses. We often borrow videos from others and include them in our courses. With a little imagination, you can create your own videos for your courses. The question in the modern eLearning world is: Why are videos still this popular? Viewers have even become producers. Reality TV and YouTube videos are the proof of this immense affinity towards the media. In the eLearning environment, where distance and time create more space between the learners and the mentors, videos provide a strong pathway to reach out and communicate on a more personal level. They enable learners to trust the learning environment. A human voice and face with emotions and empathy goes a long way in creating an environment akin to the traditional one. The familiar way of talking and explaining is a motivating act in itself. Videos are excellent teaching tools. They recreate the traditional set up and enable learners to stay engaged for longer periods. They allow users to rewind and replay the lecture in case a point is missed. In the training environment, it’s essential to revisit areas of training that are to be implemented in a work setting. Another wonderful feature of videos is that they have become relatively easier to produce and publish than back in the day. With the availability of many video production software suites and devices, videos do not require much fuss and preparation any more. You Have all the Tools Why hire a professional production house when you have a camera and a microphone right on your computer, even your smartphone? Indeed, current systems are equipped with superior quality multimedia recording hardware and software programs. Several freeware programs are available for video recording, such as HyperCam. Record your own video and talk about why the training is important. You will convince the eLearner more with your video than with just an audio clip or an interactive eLearning program. Talk to the CEO or other senior members of your company and ask them to share their story. This could be a personal experience that encourages learners to register and complete the course. Also, encourage staff to share their experiences related to the training. How did it help them perform better? A short video from successful trainees is a powerful way to motivate your learners. Keep your videos short, not more than five minutes. Have a series of short videos rather than a long one. Movie Clips The next time you watch a movie and really like a scene for its lesson-related value, record it. Use the movie clip in your eLearning programs to capture your learners’ attention. Movie clips will also convey your message in a short and sweet manner, replacing lines of text and scripts of narration. Also, movie clips have made their way in the traditional classroom environment. They can definitely be added in the eLearning class. Make sure that your selected clip is relevant and precise. Always cite your external multimedia sources in the reference section of your course and directly under the clip. Create Your Own Cartoons Ever thought of creating your own cartoons? Nowadays anyone can create their own cartoons. Programs like Powtoon and GoAnimate enable you to create your own cartoon videos. These programs are SaaS (software as a service) that are available in an online mode only. They have a bundle of templates and characters to choose from. Simply create a shorty story and create a cartoon out of it. It is a great way to kick-start your eLearning program. Free and trial accounts are available for basic cartoon creation. You don’t have to hire a production house to create your videos. With a plethora of educational and entertainment technology options available to consumers, you can quickly create quality videos yourself. With some practice, you should be able to produce quality videos, easily. And don’t forget to tell us about your own video creating experiences. The post 3 Ways to Create Videos for your Courses appeared first on eFront Blog.

Case studies in education are an age old teaching strategy. They provide meaningful, content-related experiences through which learners can discover and imagine abstract principles in real world settings. In this article, we talk about effective approaches to using case studies in eLearning environments. Case studies make excellent reading and comprehension activities, while simultaneously serving as information providing tools. These are discovery activities for learners that focus your learners’ analytical and problem-solving skills on the scenario presented in the case study. They are also a great way to demonstrate a real incident or an event that conveys a crucial lesson for best practices. Through this, learners connect intimately and directly with the industry they are training for. In a nutshell, case studies are their first line of contact with the future work environment. Moreover, case studies make great content for an eLearning interface: think about an eLearning screen with tabs like "About", "Synopsis", "Events", "References", "Assignment". Each page includes text and multimedia for learners to tinker and play with. The idea is to display the case in a fun and explorative fashion. This is as opposed to a simple pdf file with lines and lines of text that becomes harder to read with each page! The goal of a case study is to relay relevant learning materials and then ask questions based on the reading. In eLearning, case studies are richer. The material has more variety, as it is linked from the current resources available on the Internet. The eLearning medium also provides an interactive environment for case studies with plenty of room for collaboration and online discussion. A complex case study can be simplified using eLearning tools and also become more engaging than the traditional case study delivery method. The content of your case study could even be retrieved, with the appropriate citations, from a local newspaper. Has there been an article or a news story on some interesting business or an incident? Is it related to your learning objective? Use it as a case study. Case studies are great for teaching complex knowledge that cannot be taught by using simple formulas. They are especially good for teaching judgement skills and decision making skills required when dealing with real-world dilemmas. They can also be presented in multiple formats. For example, in an instructor-led case study, the case is explained by the instructor and so are the assignments related to it. Virtual field trips are also great examples of eLearning case studies. Mini-case studies, or vignettes, presented in the beginning of the chapters also serve as great classroom-to-outside-world connection tools. Some case studies can be utilized to develop "Reaction Papers", in which learners create a summary and reaction to the events they read in the case study. Simple Strategies to Provide Case Studies So what are the best practices for case studies? In an eLearning environment, case studies are a rich mixture of multimedia. In the following cases, using a scenario-based approach will work well: 1. When you can create a simulation of an actual system or have extensive video content on it. Find documentaries related to the content, in the form of YouTube videos. Additionally, create an interactive screen with buttons and dialogues between actors to simulate a scene in the case study. 2. Explain charts, diagrams and other technical and business graphics using case studies. 3. Give some life to your numerical data on spreadsheets by narrating a story in the form of a case study. 4. When explaining blueprints, drawings and specifications of products and systems. 5. When demonstrating conventional business documents such as reports, contracts, instruction manuals, email messages, memos and letters. When using case studies in your eLearning, provide prompts to learners to prepare them that they are about to read a real case. Provide specific guidance and facts to understand the case better. Explain how the case relates to the learning objective or the topic in the eLearning course. What are the important features of the case? What should the learners focus on? Provide sufficient clues on where to start the examination of the case. Also, provide questions in the end of the case to help with brainstorming and critical thinking. Using case studies is an excellent teaching strategy. Case studies are good for teaching complex knowledge. They promote observing and reflecting on new knowledge and experiences. Try to use case studies that are based on the local work context of your learners. Learners should be able to relate to the experiences narrated in the case. For your global learners, try to include case studies based on international businesses. Case studies are also recommended for teaching judgement skills necessary to deal with complex and contradictory situations common in the real world setting. If you are looking for a way to connect your eLearning course to the outside world, simply integrate a case study. The post Case Studies for eLearning: How and when they work best appeared first on eFront Blog.

How can you change an average performer to an over-achiever? Can talent be created or are we born with talent? The truth is, talent is developed and honed. Training fields are ideal places for honing talent! In this article, we determine how training programs can promote talent in employees. An individual is born with aptitudes and affinities for certain skills. When given the optimum environment, these capabilities can be developed to perfection and sometimes even excellence. Organizations are now not looking for perfection. Rather, they are looking for excellence. Innovation and creativity, leading to performance excellence. Organizations are now spending top dollar in learning and training programs for continuing professional development. The question is, how can organizations discover and hone talent? Take a look at the following strategies to create training programs for employees. Remember, the goal is to help employees realize their talent and develop skills for better performance. This is especially true for employees who may be good with numbers, but not too good with people management. Or someone who has great leadership skills, but needs to brush up their technical skills. Create Learning Goals Before any talent can be recognized and developed, a learning gap assessment is extremely desirable. Organizations need to create a refined list of learning goals: this list should include the skills and behaviors of employees, based on the organization’s needs and the demands of the industry. Assess Achievement Once the learning goals have been established, employees need to be assessed using the relevant testing format. Developing strong learning goals enables an organization to appreciate its current knowledge and design the future knowledge pathway to accomplish current job requirements. It is also the key element in defining future job roles as well as succession planning in the organizational chart. Connect Mastery with Job-tasks Define specific job skills. How do employees need to handle irate customers? What do paramedics need to do in an emergency within the hospital? What is the new product launch protocol? Once the required skills are established, they need to be linked with the learning goals list. Plan the training around learning goals and skills to transform mastery in performance. Align Learning and Development with KPIs Key-performance-indicators (KPIs) are based on the strategic goals of the company. Owing to the uncertainty and unpredictable nature of the marketplace and e-businesses, organizations need to revise their KPIs constantly. Each version should yield a set of learning goals and skills required to meet the strategic goals of the organization. Learning and development training programs need to match their pace with the quickly changing business scene. Develop Responsive eLearning Content Hiring external training organizations is definitely a big "no" in current times. Training companies don’t know your organization as much as you do. Create responsive eLearning programs to get the maximum talent out of your employees. Teaching employees what they already know is a big time energy and resource waste! Build on their existing talents, and hone them with company expectations. Who are the senior members and who are the subject matter experts of your organization? Who are the line managers? Get them involved in refining training programs. Provide options in your training programs for employees to opt out of sections they feel they know after they are able to pass the relevant assessment. This will save learning time and have them focus on the required skills and talents. A great tip here is to have retiring employees offer the training themselves. Such sessions will base more content on the history of the company than other business models. Make Training Relevant to the Role To truly build talent and have employees outperform themselves, link training to their job roles. Sections in the content should be devoted specifically to the job description and task implementation procedures. Offer job aids as often as possible. Job aids help build good performance behaviors. Create the real problems again in the content and have employees solve them with a cool head and calm attitude. Lessons learned in those real mistakes need to be demonstrated in details. Sometimes we learn better when we are told what NOT to do as opposed to what we should be doing. Evaluate Employee Performance When employees transfer their learning directly to their work context, they are also more responsible for their learning and performance. Regularly evaluate performance, discuss any gaps and offer related training. Such fine-tuning actions are extremely critical to maintain the learning mindset and excellence in performance. Delays in evaluation have been shown to slow down the motivation to train and perform better. Recognize the scaffolding talent and promote it actively. Reinforce Learning Go for regular employee evaluation and performance briefing, as opposed to bi-annual evaluations reinforce learning. Create a SWOT Analysis for each employee, in a way they can observe how their performance changes over time. Figuratively demonstrating employee performance will also reinforce learning and motivate them to continue learning. Communicate the learning activities and their impact regularly, and have employees share their opinions casually. This will further aid in discovering skill-gaps and polishing talent. Organizations cannot afford to lose talent by being careless about the their learning activities. In the current business landscape, change through learning is mandatory. We hope these tips will help you create a stronger learning organization with indispensable and nurtured talent. The post Strategies to promote learning for nurturing talent appeared first on eFront Blog.

The Knirk and Gustafson model is ideally suited for eLearning projects with a smaller scope, such as individual online training activities and modules. In this article, we’ll highlight each of the steps involved in this Instructional Design process and share 5 tips on how to apply the Knirk and Gustafson model in your online training course design. How To Apply The Knirk And Gustafson Model In Corporate eLearning Knirk and Gustafson first introduced their Instructional Design model back in 1986, which consists of a three-step process that focuses on a specific problem or task. It gives eLearning professionals the opportunity to zero in on training challenges using a wide range of research techniques, such as task assessments and learner needs analysis. This approach is relatively simple and straightforward, when compared to many other Instructional Design models and theories. This makes it a perfect fit for eLearning projects that have a more narrow scope. Let’s take a closer look at how determination, design, and development can help you to create more meaningful and targeted online training experiences. This design approach is divided into three distinct phases that you should keep in mind when developing your online training materials and activities: 1. Problem Determination The first step in the process is to identify the problem, performance gaps, and primary goals. What do your corporate learners currently know and what do they need to know in order to do their job effectively? One of the most important steps in this stage is conducting a tasks analysis and needs assessment. This will shed light on the skills and information that need to be addressed in your online training program. 2. Design Once you’ve identified the problem you must move onto the second stage, which is determining which strategies, activities, and materials will solve the problem and fill the performance gaps. This also involves defining learning objectives that align with your online training goals and choosing the ideal multimedia components for the task. Gathering the necessary resources or consulting with a Subject Matter Expert are other key sub-tasks in this stage of the process. 3. Development The third stage in the Knirk and Gustafson model involves creating online training materials, conducting user testing, and making the necessary revisions. In many cases, this will involve prototyping and focus groups in order to produce a polished finished product. After any and all issues have been remedied, the online training activity or module can then be deployed. How To Use The Knirk And Gustafson Model In Corporate eLearning 1. Conduct task and skills assessments beforehand Before you can identify the problems that you must address, and the knowledge that must be conveyed, you have to create a "baseline". This involves tasks and skills assessments that provide an accurate picture of what your corporate learners know now, what they need to know upon completion of their online training, and how you can bridge the gap. You can also observe them in the workplace to identify which skills they use on a regular basis and how they actually apply their professional knowledge. 2. Focus on one key task or skill As this model is best for shorter, more targeted online training activities and modules, you should focus on one primary skill or task for each eLearning project. For example, if you discover that there are a number of different skills that learners need to develop in order to complete a process, develop a series of online training activities that each pertain to a specific skill. This also reduces cognitive overload and gives them a chance to absorb the information before moving on to the next module. 3. Identify the ideal tools and resources In order to create an effective corporate eLearning program you must identify which tools you have on-hand and how they can be used throughout the instructional design process. You should also be aware of which media elements are best for the needs of your corporate learners. For example, some corporate learners may require an eLearning video while others prefer an interactive online scenario or simulation. Multimedia is an integral part of the Knirk and Gustafson model. Thus, careful consideration must be given to which resources align with your goals and objectives. 4. Repurpose existing online training materials In lieu of creating online training materials from scratch, you can also repurpose the online training activities and modules you’ve already developed. Gather all of the materials you have at your disposal and determine whether they will fit into your current online training strategy. You may even be able to use certain components of these resources or make minor modifications to make them suitable. In some cases, you may have to completely transform the online training content in order to make it modern, particularly if you are designing a mobile-friendly course. 5. Clearly identify your goals to avoid lengthy revisions The Knirk and Gustafson model features an evaluation phase, but it comes rather late in the game. In fact, this is one of the most significant drawbacks of this approach. However, if you take the time to clearly identify your goals and determine the problem, you can avoid a lengthy revision round in the end. Meet with managers, supervisors, and any other team leaders to ensure that there is no confusion of ambiguity beforehand. Carefully analyze the current online training course to identify its strengths and weaknesses so that you can improve upon the existing corporate eLearning program. This will help you keep revisions to a minimum and make certain that everyone is on the same page before you begin the instructional design process. There may only be three stages involved in this process, but each step brings you closer to solving organization-wide problems, narrowing skill gaps, and fulfilling the needs of your corporate learners. Use this guide to apply the Knirk and Gustafson model in your corporate eLearning program and equip your employees with the resources they require to achieve their goals. The Knirk and Gustafson model is ideal for eLearning simulation and scenario design. Read the article 6 Tips To Create eLearning Scenarios That Offer Real World Benefits to discover useful tips that can help you develop effective eLearning scenarios that offer real world benefits. 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If you’re an avid content creator, be it for training courses development or not, you must have heard about "content curation" several times by now. But how easy is it to create content from scratch? If anything, you always need some form of inspiration from other sources. And if you do look for it, one thing is for sure: simply copying, pasting and then re-writing content will exhaust both you and your learner. So what is the answer then? But of course, providing your content in curated chunks! Undoubtedly, the Internet has become your No. 1 source to retrieve any information you need. From learning how to change a flat tire to looking for a recipe for the Chocolate Lava Cake your son had at his friend’s place, it usually is the Internet to the rescue. And guess what! Same goes for education and eLearning! Even as a learner who’s enrolled in a top training course - despite being under the tutelage of an expert trainer - you are probably still tempted to look up some fundamental answers over the Internet. You may have even found yourself exploring different search engine tools to filter out the best one, namely the one which will give you the answer you were looking for. By all means, there are certain criteria that lead to your final selection. You usually need your search engine tool to: · Be able to provide you with search results that read individual words in the search expression: eg. New + York. · Be able to provide you with search results that read the entire phrase of the search expression: eg. New York. · Be able to customize searches according to your searching behavior · Cut down commercial and advertisement laden searches to a minimum · Trustworthy and viable information And say you’ve gathered the information you need. What do you do with it? First, you browse through the first page of the search results, one by one. Next, you make sure some information is common in all search results, before you start considering it as reliable. And then you gather differentiating facts on each piece of information. That’s how some online course developers go about structuring their content. But, if that’s the case, who would ever blame learners that fall asleep in the middle of an eLearning course? (Yes, this happens!) Let us break it to you: No amount of bells and whistles will keep the learner awake if the content does not mean much to them! Even you as a learner enroll in a course to gain the required information. The information needed for work. Period. So now, having experienced a horrible eLearning course is created, will you create one as an eLearning developer? Unfortunately, it’s hard to kill the habit of compiling research results. But it’s not impossible! So how do you gather content for your eLearning course using a natural information hunting technique called "curation"? When gathering content for your course, here’s how you can reuse separate chunks of information as meaningful, curated content for eLearning: Collecting Hunt for topics under your keyword. Collect website content you like using tools, such as EverNote, OneNote etc. After you are done collecting, take a break! Go back to your collected items and filter the information you can relate with easily, or information related to the work context of your learners. It is a good idea to create criteria by which you’re filtering before you start the process. You will be amazed at how customized the content will look just after this. Curating the content Your next step is to prepare learning materials for your learners. Instead of sharing these links with your learners directly, analyze the content and link it with their context. Once you have made a connection, use images for support. This process of combining source with the context (learning goals and performance context) is called curation. The combination of the link/source and the fact/insight is a single information unit (SIU) and the entire phase is called "adding the value". You have now connected a learning goal with real-world examples available in your links - this is what proper content curation for eLearning means. Chunking the information Instead of bombarding your learners with all these SIUs, decide how to divide them over the course. You need to prevent information overloading. This phase is final and is called "chunking information". As a result, the learner gets a set of several short-learning episodes, instead of a weather worn and, more often than not, too long online course format. In other words, you just present information in a lighter way, which happens to be the manner in which adult learners naturally seek to learn! You actually put together multiple SIUs to create a whole course that is easily absorbed and internalized by your learners. Finish off your eLearning course by offering an optional page called a "learning path". Here, you demonstrate how to make the best use of the learning materials you’ve provided - content and resources combined. Give them keywords to search for in the desired hierarchy. Your learners will enjoy looking up and verifying information in your course. Be prepared for better course reviews and learner achievement! Creating content can be challenging, especially if you are not a subject matter expert. Going through the Internet without a search path can be overwhelming. By curating, chunking and organizing your content in a manner explained above, you can keep yourself and your learners grounded to the content! 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