In the modern information economy, where talent is one of the most precious resources and the landscape for recruiting and retaining talented employees gets ever more competitive, a combined Learning and Talent Development strategy, along with an appropriate HR focus, is the not-so-secret weapon of many a successful enterprise. With eFrontPro you can have the best of both worlds — a capable eLearning system combined with strong Talent Development features, a combination that allows you to shape and develop your workforce in the ways needed to move your company forward and help it achieve its goals. Revamped and advanced in many major ways compared to its end-of-lined precursor (eFront), and in addition to its fair number of powerful and easy-to-use content creation, course, and lesson management features, eFrontPro also has the functionality and workflows needed for training, engaging and developing your talent. In this post, we’d like to tell you more about the ways eFrontPro goes beyond eLearning, to being a perfectly capable Talent Development and Learning platform for the enterprise, that can cover anything from employee on-boarding and skills training to talent development and knowledge retention. A Learning and Talent Development platform will help you: • welcome new employees into your company (onboarding) • accelerate employee learning & development • ensure compliance training • deliver critical safety training • evaluate employee skills and performance • implement continuous employee learning strategies • discover star employees (e.g. for promotions and career advancement) • train your talent to changing business needs • prepare employees to take over a senior post (succession planning) and many other things besides these (e.g. collect and assess employee feedback). In fact, we could write several posts for each of these, regarding their importance to modern HR practices, best practices for their implementation, etc., and in fact that’s exactly what we’ll be doing over the followings weeks and months in this blog. So, how does eFrontPro fare for talent development? Pretty well, actually. eFrontPro was designed from the start to offer enough flexibility in talent development areas, from its excellent integration features to automated employee surveys and advanced organizational options. Here are some eFrontPro’s features that make it a perfect fit for your talent development and learning needs: Continuous Talent Development and Performance Support Experience and research have shown that real talent development happens through micro-learning programs and continual testing — the fastest and most non-intrusive way to increase employee knowledge and performance. eFrontPro’s talent development features make continuous learning easy and practical, allowing your employees to learn as they commute or just whenever they have a few minutes of downtime — all they need is their smartphone. Automated competency and skills management (with skills gap analysis) eFrontPro’s sophisticated skills management features make managing employee accreditation, certification, skill sets and competencies simple and automatic. And, if you don’t know who has which skills to begin with, you can use the Skills Gap Analysis to ensure you identify and associate the right skills to the right role, and then continue to benchmark and develop them until you have the right models for your organization. Individualized Analysis and Reporting Talent development is all about understanding the individuals in your organization and empowering them to become better. eFrontPro’s analysis and reporting features help you to monitor employee progress, identify and highlight potential issues and distribute your insights through easily understandable presentations. Gamification for better talent engagement eFrontPro’s Gamification Engine introduces the competitive spirit and some playfulness into the talent development process to increase employee engagement and training performance. Use badges, rewards, and the leaderboard to signal accomplishment and success. Use levels to test your employees’ endurance and measure their progress. Make their development fun and let gamification drive their retention and performance up without them even feeling like it’s work. Blended Learning eFrontPro supports eLearning courses, classroom training, and online videoconferences and webinars as part of a single unified curriculum. Combine online and offline (or real-time) talent development and get the best of both worlds. Easily manage your online and offline training programs (and the physical locations and scheduling for the latter) through the same simple interface, and set optional course prerequisites and paths to ensure that your employees complete their modules in the right order. Better user experiences with Extended Enterprise eFrontPro allows you to easily integrate with your HR system & customize all the extra functionality you need to ensure the best user experience for your corporate learners. And loads more to come… With the 4.4 update coming soon, and bringing with it several major new Learning and Talent Development features and workflow enhancements, you can rest assured that eFrontPro will only get stronger in both areas, while retaining its familiar ease of use and flexibility, which you know and love. Conclusion Whereas most enterprise Talent Development products offer weak Learning feature sets, eFrontPro, as a combined Learning and Talent Development platform, offers you the best of both the (closely related) employee training and talent development worlds. In eFrontPro, Learning features live side by side with Talent Development, creating a unique synergy that enables your business to not only train, position, certify, engage, and in general develop and retain its talent, but make it thrive. The post Make your talent thrive with eFrontPro appeared first on eFront Blog.

"Roses are red, violets are blue, and boy do we have a great new eFrontPro update for you…" Excuse my bad attempt at verse, but I’m quite excited by our new eFrontPro 4.4 update, and I think that after reading this post, you will be too. More than a mere point release, it’s chock-full with major new features, and, more importantly, it represents a big turning point for the platform; but more on that later. The Best of eFrontPro 4.4 H5P content creation toolset H5P is a collection of libraries and tools that empower content creators to create rich HTML5 interactions. H5P support in eFrontPro 4.4 allows instructors to add rich interactive content, mini-apps, videos, presentations, games and more to their courses, that they can either create themselves from scratch or download and adapt from the community shared projects at H5P.org. Learning history eFrontPro 4.4 allows administrators to view the complete training history of a user, including all courses attended and completed, test results, certifications, and more. What’s more, instructors can even revert a user to a previous learning history state. Batch Importer The new Batch Importer plugin provides a quick way of building your course and lesson structure from already existing SCORM content. Using the batch importer, an eFrontPro administrator just has to import a single zip file containing all of their SCORM content, and the system will automatically create the necessary courses and fill-in the appropriate lesson content for each course. Two factor authentication eFrontPro 4.4 introduces 2-factor authentication as an optional security setting. 2-factor authentication improves security by requiring an additional identification key ("factor") on top of the regular user password. The technology is used to secure highly critical systems such as banking websites and corporate accounts, but has been seeing widespread adoption from popular SaaS providers such as Google, Facebook and Apple too. 2-factor authentication options in eFrontPro 4.4 include SMS tokens, the Google Authenticator mobile app and email. And the rest of eFrontPro 4.4 While those were our new flagship features, eFrontPro 4.4 goes much deeper than that, with several new capabilities and important workflow improvements. These include: • Content versioning As far as minor features go, this one is a biggie: past versions of a unit are saved and can be retrieved for future reference, allowing you to keep a history of your unit edits and changes. • xAPI 1.0 support While we already supported previous versions of xAPI (a.k.a. TinCan), we now have support for the standard first stable version too. • Course prerequisites You can now indicate that a course is only accessible if the user has completed one or more other courses. • Clone content You can now select a unit, test, survey etc, and clone to another lesson (provided that you have access to it). • Self-assessment tests A test now may be characterized as "self-assessment", meaning that it doesn’t count in the overall lesson (and course) score. • Express interest End-users may now request a training session to be organized near their preferred area. • Branch settings You can now specify at the branch level the site name and motto, as well as the preferred SAML gateway to use for SSO. Finally, we’ve made new Bookmarks and Glossary plugins available alongside the 4.4 release. The new release is already available to download / update to, and of course it also comes with the usual assortment of fixes, improvements and fine-tuning to our User Interface from our UX ninjas. eFrontPro got talent Starting from right about now, eFrontPro will be rebranded as a Learning and Talent Development Platform. Worry not, this doesn’t mean we’re dropping your favorite eLearning management features, or that we’ll stop adding new LMS functionality — just that we will fine tune and enhance eFrontPro for Talent Development workflows as well. So think of eFrontPro 4.4 as a super-set of Talent Development and eLearning Management features, in other words even better for modern enterprise needs. The post eFrontPro got talent: version 4.4 released with major new features appeared first on eFront Blog.

Colorado, or "the Centennial State", is known for its beautiful state parks, its fabulous mountains and ski slopes, being home to the Denver Broncos and the fictional (and, amusingly enough, the real) South Park, and for being the microbrewery capital of America. It’s also the state hosting this year’s Association for Talent Development (ATD) conference — the event you can’t afford to miss if you are interested in the latest developments in Talent Development. Which is exactly why Epignosis will be there, touting its wares, so to speak, discussing potential partnerships and collaboration deals, mingling with the industry’s best, keeping up to date with the latest innovations and trends in the field, and generally absorbing everything we can. The ATD 2016, like those before it, is organized by the eponymous Association for Talent Development, a professional membership organization that has been supporting knowledge and skills development businesses and professionals for over 70 years. This year’s ATD 2016 International Conference & Exposition brings together professionals from the Talent Development and eLearning industries with key decision makers and employee development stakeholders from the corporate world, attempting to offer an in-depth guide for the path to success in talent development and a clear outlook on what the future of the industry holds. With numerous keynote speeches, round-tables and learning sessions, participants will get the opportunity to share their experiences, discuss the industry’s present state and future goals, and learn about innovative tools and solutions for designing, delivering, implementing, and measuring the success of employee training and talent development programs. As for Epignosis, we’ll be there to showcase eFrontPro, our flagship enterprise Learning and Talent Development Platform geared towards large businesses with high user volumes and advanced customization requirements. Meet us at our booth and we’ll be happy to tell you all about eFrontPro’s features and deployment options (including self-hosted and private cloud), as well as the numerous integrations on offer, including our support for IBM Connections, Big Blue’s leading business social network platform. Along for the ride, will be TalentLMS, our cloud-based Learning Management System that’s a powerful yet simple to use solution for businesses and educators, and Snappico, a mobile app that builds on the intersection of micro-learning, gamification and infographics to provide bite-sized business training for the modern enterprise. If you’re attending this year’s ATD, come and say hi. We will be waiting for you at the Exhibit Hall, booth #1839. For more information on ATD 2016, visit the event’s page. The post Epignosis announces Bronze Sponsorship of the ATD 2016 Exposition (Denver, CO - May 22-25 2016) appeared first on eFront Blog.

Learning Evolution is a successful Elucidat partner based in the United States. Here are six training courses they have built with Elucidat’s authoring platform. Titleist’s Vokey Design SM6 Education Course This is a great example of using Elucidat to create product training for new product launches. This course provides amazing ROI for the company by leveraging expensive marketing production videos and wrapping elearning with them to deliver engaging and simple product training. The goal for this course is to educate on the new product and train sales reps and trade partners to deliver the SM6 marketing message to customers in the most intelligent way possible. Visit elearning Titleist’s 915 Driver Education Course Product training for new product launch. This course is built to educate customers, retailers and internal sales reps on the features and benefits Titleist’s 915 drivers. Visit elearning Delphi’s Fuel Pump Training Concise product training module aimed at counter staff selling Delphi fuel pumps, to help them to position features and benefits. Visit elearning Wildlife Foundation of Florida’s Invasive Species Youth Education Course This course educates youth on the dangers of invasive species and how to help conserve natural resources. Visit elearning PepsiCo’s Detective Theme: Analyzes Data and Trends Course Uses a fun and interactive theme to train employees on how to analyze data and identify industry trends. Visit elearning PepsiCo’s Formula 1 Racing Theme: Understands and applies industry knowledge Uses a Formula 1 racing them and game component to bring new interactivity for the learning. Learners travel Formula racing circuits and meet with their "pit crew" to learn about the industry. After a successful completion the learner gets to play a fun and cheeky racing game using their "super charged" car. About Learning Evolution At the core of Learning Evolution’s learning programs is a purposeful approach that leverages adult learning expertise and instructional design with responsive design and delivery. Ideal for employees on-the-go. Deliver custom content and training. Responsive design works across all devices. Next step: Visit LearningEvolution.com for more details or take the 80-second Elucidat tour The post 6 training courses created with Elucidat (built by Learning Evolution) appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Are you considering using an learning management system (LMS)? Perhaps you don’t think you need one. In this article, guest contributor Brendon Noud shares six reasons why you should consider using an LMS. An authoring tool that makes delivering effective elearning content quick and easy is essential. But once created, that content’s potential to deliver results depends on a LMS. Your chosen authoring tool and LMS should work together to form one cohesive elearning process. Firstly, they must be compatible on a technical level. But both tools should also deliver value to specific areas of your elearning programs. If you already use an authoring tool like Elucidat, here are six reasons why you also need an LMS. 1. Deliver course content to learners The engaging content an authoring tool allows you to create is only the beginning of the elearning process. Once exported, an LMS must step in to deliver content in a way that engages learners and makes it easy to measure performance. Learning content on its own is not very useful; the LMS must help you decide how that material is best distributed and delivered to users. Your LMS should provide a single location where learners can access all materials relevant to their training, from guides and manuals to coursework and assessments. It should also make it easy to organize the content that has been exported from an authoring tool. 2. Benefit from SCORM and Tin Can API technology Modern authoring tools now offer considerable SCORM and Tin Can compatibility. But exporting course content in SCORM or Tin Can formats is meaningless unless your LMS is powerful enough to manage that material effectively. Many LMS’s claim they are SCORM compliant but struggle in practice. The design of LearnUpon’s SCORM implementation was inspired by these common problems. The result is an LMS that offers the most intuitive SCORM and Tin Can API in the industry. Simply drag and drop the SCORM or Tin Can zip exported from your authoring tool into LearnUpon’s LMS, and it springs to life in seconds. When you upload your course, LearnUpon will validate it and provide feedback on errors so you can correct them. Your LMS’s SCORM and Tin Can functionality should help you make the most of the content your team has put such effort into creating. Related: To SCORM or not to SCORM, that is the question 3. Measure learner performance Distributing content is usually just your first task. A good LMS must also help you measure and optimize the performance of elearning. You need to know how much learners have understood, whether for formal compliance purposes or to evaluate program effectiveness internally. An LMS can help you reward learners and deliver professional credentials (such as certificates) linked to specific courses and learning paths. In addition to evaluating performance with assignments and assessments, reports and training histories can be maintained in your LMS as long as they’re legally required. These processes can be automated with an LMS, reducing admin workloads. Related: New way to measure and evaluate the performance of elearning 4. Deliver a fantastic user experience While the authoring tool only needs to work closely with an LMS, your LMS should integrate with your existing CRM, marketing and finance systems. With close integration, you have greater reporting options and a simpler user experience. If your team creates engaging course content, your LMS should support it by delivering a positive branded experience. It helps if your vendor offers comprehensive customization options. LearnUpon customers can customize portals with a logo, banner image, and style to keep their LMS consistent with existing platforms. Tailoring your login page, emails, and notifications helps you deliver a seamless learner experience. Related: How to design personalized learning experiences 5. Deliver blended learning You’ll frequently need to deliver a lot more beyond the online content created with an authoring tool. It’s rare that such material exists in an isolated portal. A good LMS must go beyond online content delivery to offer blended learning features that allow you to track performance at classroom-based, instructor-led sessions too. An LMS can help you supplement content created through your authoring tool with these real-life sessions. This makes it easy to inform and remind users about locations, instructors, rosters, and marks awarded for attendance. Related: What is blended learning an why is it important 6. Sell courses online Are you selling courses online? If so, you’ll need an LMS that offers eCommerce functionality. With LearnUpon, it takes less than two minutes to set-up and configure an eCommerce store. It also integrates with services like PayPal, Authorize.Net, Stripe, and Shopify to provide a secure and simple shopping cart experience. Related: Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. Learn more about LearnUpon Visit LearnUpon.com to see all the features and sign up for a free trial. The post Why you need an LMS and an authoring tool appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Is gamification in your online training delivering the results you want? Before you add gaming elements, you need to ask yourself how gamification will help you design great learning experiences. Here are five questions you should be asking yourself. 1. What is the goal? Why are learners doing it? This question helps you focus on what the course needs to achieve. Do you need to engage the learners? Try hooking your learner in with a warmup: How many questions can they get right in thirty seconds? How many mistakes can they spot in the statement? Do they need to improve their performance? Or build collaboration with other learners? Try giving them polls or scoring so they can compete on leader boards. Is there knowledge or information learners need for their job? Give them a quick quiz to see how much they know, then branch to parts of the course where they’re a little shaky. Do they need to develop new skills or simply need to know about some important changes in the business, new product or service developments, or new rules or laws they need to comply with? Give them challenges, quests, or problems to solve that they can relate to. Knowing where you’re going with the course can help you settle on the strategies best suited to reaching your goal. Related: 5 ways to use gamification in online training (that can’t be done with traditional training) 2. What is the desired outcome? At the end of your course, do learners need to know more about a topic? If so, you might want to build a quiz at the end so they can measure their progress and see their achievements. Or they may need to understand where they can go to get support, in which case give them a challenge to find answers by linking to other resources or websites. Perhaps they need to become competent at specific tasks. For example, in the immersive interactive video Lifesaver, learners need to show they can perform CPR. The course makes use of the following gamifying elements: Beat the clock feature - decision objects are timed to simulate the real event, where time is of the essence and making swift decisions can help save a life. Levels are unlocked as you advance through the scenario by gaining points for correct decisions. 3. Who will the learner be as a game player? Are learners better off doing your course alone or collaboratively with other learners? Is it designed for personal improvement or as an engagement activity? Can you pitch learners against each other in order to motivate them? If your learners are lone wolves, try adding a ‘beat the clock’ feature to get them totally engrossed in the activities. For example, is this spot the fake smile challenge, learners have to keep an eye on the time while they undertake the interactive tasks. Other gamification techniques for lone wolf learners could be opportunities to improve their score (provide an interactive quiz with scoring that they can take as many times as they like), and ways to challenge themselves (lock the next level until they get the correct response). Or are you learners team players? Does it make sense to pitch them against others? Let your learners record their score for a quiz or collect and display badges. Use dynamic scoring to set up leaderboards so learners can compete against each other alone or in teams. 4. What does the interaction framework look like? Do your learners need to access lots of information in your course? Can you deploy case studies that convey information in a familiar context? What tasks and actions do learners need to be able to do? Depending on your answers to these sorts of questions, you can begin looking for the kinds of interactions that will deliver a good learning experience. Instead of giving learners information, give them scenarios in which they are immersed in real-life situations and have to make decisions in order to move to the next stage of the story. Medieval Swansea is an example of scenario-driven elearning with branching. Learners journey through a series of stages to unlock a medieval mystery. Interactive challenges allow them to gather points and bonuses in order to tackle the quest. 5. What variables will learners choose from? Consider the options that learners will need to weigh up. Do they need to decide between objects to take on a mission? (Select job aids to help complete a task). Do they need to answer a question correctly in order unlock the next task? (A yes/no question or a multiple choice question, set a rule to allow the learner to move to the next question or along a pathway). These sorts of questions will help you anticipate what you need to include in your storyboard or how your project view may look. Each question can lead a learner down a different pathway. You need to factor in these sequences when you design the course. Storyboarding the course with each different learning path is a good way to visualize your course before you begin to build. Related: Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. Conclusion Gamification isn’t really about playing games, it’s all about designing engaging interactions that will hook learners, motivate them to continue the course, and help them get a sense of enjoyment and fulfilment on completing it. Ultimately, you want to be asking, does this element of design make the course a better experience for the learner? And be honest, because a word game may be great if you’re teaching your learners a new language, but if it doesn’t fix a problem, go back to your storyboard and change it. The post Don’t add gamification until you answer these five questions appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Stuck for new ideas? Draw inspiration from these elearning examples from Ulka Academy, University of QLD and Tim Slade. Ukla Academy: Save the Island A neat little module demonstrating gamification in language learning.   Why we like it: Gamification - levels that only unlock as you progress. Personalized by using the learner’s name interactive language practice tasks built in feedback provided. Provides the learner with an opportunity to review or retry the game. Creative fun way for grammatical and lexical structures drills. Visit elearning University of Queensland: SBLi 4 Orthodontics A one-stop shop for higher education program, based on real world scenarios to help students practise orthodontics. Why we like it: Good example of instructional design based on feedback loops. Multi screen approach - giving 4 windows in one, so that you can see the scenario and the resources as well as the activity all at the same time. Directed specifically at reducing the need to use multiple learning channels. Visit elearning Tim Slade: How to Cook a Turkey mLearnCon DemoFest award winning entry, this little module is bursting with great examples of interactive elearning. Why we like it: Good example of how interactions can drive the discovery of content. Takes inspiration from apps designed for tablet devices, the look and feel is bold and pleasing. Great example of interactions including: slider, drag and drop, input text/numeric. Nice example of using rules and variables to create a dynamic calculator to work out how long you need to cook your turkey. Interactive pop-ups provide extra tips and hints. Visit elearning Post Primary Languages Initiative: Teachers’ Use of the Target Language (TL) SHRC worked with the Post-Primary Languages Initiative on this elearning module to help language teachers. Why we like it: Great example of using authentic video from teachers to demonstrate good practice. Show me, test me model learning model. Self-reflection exercises allow teachers to set goals and print out their record for future reference. Consistent look and feel. Good use of transitions and audio voice over. Visit elearning Related: Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter.   The post Elearning inspiration: Ulka Academy, Uni of QLD, Tim Slade appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

If your organization relies on your delivering elearning content to a paying audience, the authoring tool that you use can dramatically impact both the learner experience and your bottom line. Here are 10 questions that you should ask before choosing an authoring tool for your business. 1. Is it easy to use? The tool you select should be simple to use. When your subject matter experts (SMEs) can produce content without the need for tech-savvy developers, the time to create your training will be shorter, the number of courses can increase, and the return on the investment for your authoring tool will be higher. 2. Does it give you the flexibility and control you need? Your brand is important to you, so you’ll want a high degree of control over where your logo  appears and the color palettes and fonts that are used in your courses. A high level of control is good, but if you have several people developing courses, you won’t want them applying your standards in non-standard ways. Modern authoring tools, such as Elucidat, address this by allowing you to create themes or templates that position and lock-in certain on-screen elements, including logos, background colors, and formatted text blocks, and to leave the course author free to focus on manipulating the dynamic elements, for example text content, images, and drag and drop elements. 3. Can you collaborate with team members inside the tool? To ensure quality, your course authors need to collaborate quickly and accurately with stakeholders, reviewers, and testers. Consider using an authoring tool that has a streamlined online system to enable reviewers to make comments or recommendations right on the page they’re reviewing. This means no more crossed or missed e-mail recommendations and no more duplicate or conflicting change requests. Apart from avoiding frustration, this efficiency results in higher-quality content produced in less time. Related: Why online collaboration is the solution you’re your team’s efficiency problem 4. Can you create mobile-ready learning? Content that can be written once and deployed to a desktop, tablet, and mobile phone is a huge plus. It increases your audience and gives it the flexibility to access your content in multiple ways. This case study shows how Utility Warehouse was able to reach 46,000 learners by using Elucidat’s responsive write-once-publish-anywhere design feature that allows learners to access content on their tablet and mobile devices. Related: Why mobile learning is important (4 reasons) 5. How long does it take to publish and maintain courses? It’s inevitable that you’ll want to make changes to courses that you’ve published, either because the material changes or because you find an error that needs to be fixed. When this happens, cloud-based authoring tools are usually more efficient and convenient than their desktop equivalents. This is because the source files for your courses and the authoring tool itself are held centrally and are accessible to all your authors, wherever they are. So, for example, if a course requires an urgent fix, and the primary author is on the road, another author can quickly make changes, or the primary author can make the changes from his or her hotel room or home. All that’s needed is a web browser and Internet connection. To further streamline the process, Elucidat has a rapid release feature that, with a button click, can save and publish course changes directly to your Learning Management System (LMS). 6. How easy is it to localize for overseas markets? At some point, it may be necessary to translate your courses into different languages, for example to access foreign markets or to cater to a client request. It’ll pay you to use an authoring product that has a built-in translation workflow if this is a possibility for you. A common standard to allow translation from one language to another is XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format). An XLIFF file is a structured file that contains all the text to be translated and corresponding spaces for a human translator to enter alternative language versions of that same text. This video shows how Elucidat allows you to export an XLIFF file containing all a course’s text for translation with the click of a button and then how to automatically import the translated text. 7. Does it come with prebuilt themes, page types and interactions? The best authoring tools shield you from the complexities of what they’re doing under the hood, yet they enable you to incorporate powerful, engaging interactivity into your courses. For example, an Elucidat theme can contain dozens of page types, such as drag and drop, hotspots, text and graphics, and multiple choice questions. Where appropriate, these page types give you a simple mechanism to customize them (e.g., to position hotspots or add an answer option to a multiple choice question page), but the high-tech programming that makes them function will be hidden. These simple-to-use pre-built page types become the building blocks that you use to create your highly interactive learning masterpiece in the quickest possible time. 8. Does it integrate with an analytics platform? Data about who your learners are and how they are accessing and using your courses is an important part of understanding your business. Without this, how do you know how effective your courses are? Good data could highlight a new potential market or indicate ways to better serve your current customers. Some of this information may be available from your LMS, but it is more likely that more granular demographic data can be captured by using Google Analytics linked to the courseware. This short video shows how to link a Google Analytics account to an Elucidat project. Related: Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. In conclusion Your authoring tool is one of the most important pieces of software that you’ll rely on, so it pays to do a lot of homework before you commit to it. I have recently written a post comparing a few high-profile authoring tools. Most of these have generous free trials; take advantage of these to test them out and see if one is a good fit for your business. The post Online training providers: 8 questions to ask before buying an authoring tool appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Do you want to sell more courses and drive more revenue? In this article, Ross Beard shares some marketing strategies to help online training providers attract more customers and sell more courses. Today’s training industry is ultra-competitive. The Learn 2020 project found competition to be one of the three biggest challenges online training providers will face over the next five years. With more and more solutions entering the field, it’s more important than ever to differentiate through marketing. Here are three simple marketing strategies you can use to differentiate your offerings and sell more training courses. 1. Understand your ideal customer Before racing into actionable strategies, take a step back. Think about your ideal customers. Who are they? What companies do they work for? Where do they hang out online? Once you know who your ideal consumer is, clearly define why customers buy from you over competitors. In others words, identify your value proposition. Communicate this value proposition in all your marketing communications. This is what differentiates your training product from others. It’s no longer good enough to compete solely on price—you need to focus on why customers buy from you. Not sure where customers buy from you? Ask them! 2. Invest in your top marketing asset When it comes to marketing, your website is your biggest asset. It’s often the first thing potential customers see when they come across your training organization. With that in mind, there are a number of things you must do to ensure your website markets courses effectively. Communicate what you do and why you’re better This ties in with the above section (your value proposition). Use your website to communicate what training courses you provide—and most importantly, why they’re better than others. Build trust and credibility through your about us and contact pages Customers need to trust you before buying from you. Use your about us page to tell a story about your organization. Where did you start, and how did you get where you are today? Use your contact page to share contact information: address, phone number, email address, and a contact form. Sell courses online and manage customers with an account portal Use your website to sell courses online. Facilitate transactions with a secure payment gateway, and manage customer details via an account portal. Choose a learning management systems that offers ecommerce and portal functionality so you can quickly sell courses online. If you don’t have an LMS that can handle ecommerce, consider Docebo, LearnUpon, DigitalChalk, or Cornerstone. Use a blog to give customers a taste of what they can expect in the course Content marketing is an effective way to build trust with customers before they’re ready to buy. Try publishing a blog article once every two weeks that focuses on a challenge your ideal shoppers might face and how taking your training course can help them overcome it. For example, say you operate a leadership training business. A blog post might focus on why generation Y struggles with taking up leadership positions. You could explore this topic and highlight sections inside your leadership training course that teach members of generation Y to become better leaders. Optimize for search engines Google and other search engines are the gateway to your website. Optimize your pages to ensure they know who you are and what you do. Search engine optimization (SEO) can get complicated, but there are three core principles you can personally tackle: Technical SEO, linking, and content. Technical SEO: This encompasses the SEO basics: make sure your pages have meta titles and descriptions that accurately represent the page’s content. Read more about on-page SEO. Linking: Ensure you’re always looking to build relationships with other related companies. At every sensible opportunity, ask these enterprises to link back to your site. This is where incredible content can really help; if you publish a stellar article on leadership training, other organizations will use it as a resource and link to it from their websites. Read more about link building. Content: Google looks at your website as a whole to see what you write about. Keep a consistent theme that is relevant to the training courses you sell. For example, if you offer leadership training, product pages must talk about leadership training. Also, make sure you’re blogging about leadership training. By focusing on a theme (or niche), you can tell Google that you specialize in this area. In turn, search engines will trust your site and reward you with higher rankings. 3. Try paid advertising on Google Google’s AdWords platform lets you find customers looking for your online training courses. This is an excellent advertising solution. Since you only bid on keywords that you believe customers search for, you can control costs and keep them within budget. Paid search advertising with Google is easy to launch. In fact, it can be set up in three simple steps: create a product page, choose keywords, and create ads. Create a product page Sending traffic to a low-quality homepage is the biggest mistake beginners make with AdWords. If your homepage isn’t specifically crafted to communicate a value proposition to your ideal customer, create a new product page. On this page, highlight the reasons why shoppers choose your training over competitors. Add a call to action encouraging visitors to sign up or try a course for free. Choose keywords Select 5-10 keywords that accurately represent the training you sell. For example, if you offer leadership training, here are six keywords that will work well for your organization: Leadership training Leadership online training Leadership courses Leadership training provider Leadership training program Leadership skills training Always start with a small selection of keywords, and expand as you become more confident with the marketing channel. Create ads Now you need to craft ad copy. This can be tricky if copywriting doesn’t come naturally, but anyone can be a copywriter by following these basic principles: Ensure your ad copy links directly to the product page. Use value propositions in the copy; tell customers why you’re better or different. Include keywords in the ad copy. This helps with click through and overall performance. For example, here’s a good ad for leadership training: This works well because it focuses on the value proposition (a course designed for new managers), includes keywords (leadership training), and provides links to more information (a course outline and instant quote). Related: Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. Final thoughts I hope the ideas in this article inspire you to use marketing to differentiate your online training. The industry is changing. You’ll face new hurdles over the next five years, including competition. If you ignore this marketing advice, you risk losing customers. By clearly communicating a value proposition, your training organization will continue to sell more courses well into the future. The post Marketing strategies for online training providers appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Are you ready to start using branching scenarios in your online training? In this article, we’ll share seven branching scenario examples to give you inspiration for your own online training. Branching scenarios tell a story and pose challenges in a real-world context that learners can understand and identify with. They are a great way for learners to practice their skills in realistic situations. Learners can test out different approaches in a low-risk setting when choosing how to respond to tough scenarios. Let’s look at seven ideas that can help you create simple branching scenarios in your online training. 1. Put the learner in control A great way to engage learners is to let them steer the program. Consider providing a series of scenarios so they can choose which one they want to do. This has an added bonus of appealing to a wide range of learners in one program. Here’s an excellent example we made with Elucidat that puts the learner in control: 2. Use linked menus Elucidat makes it very easy to link a menu item to a scenario. Just select one of the "Menu" page types. These page types allow you to make a button, hotspot, or image box into a link. In the example below, we linked the cupcake image to page 3: "Cupcake kerfuffle." 3. Use real-world contexts Give the training relevance. Consider the real-world contexts for specific topics and issues being addressed in the course. Your training should address real challenges in real situations that your learners are likely to face at work. Making mistakes is a great opportunity to give feedback to learners, so be certain to provide plenty of good advice and practical suggestions if they require a bit more support. Some of the elements that help drive a good scenario include: Thought-provoking situational contexts with good use of characters, engaging video, and consequence-style branching. Here’s another example we made with Elucidat that shows how to use real-world contexts: 4. Make it challenging Branching scenarios need to challenge the learner. By providing learners with decision-making contexts and a range of choices, they are given the chance to practice their knowledge and skills in a safe environment. The decision-making process becomes critical through the use of branching scenarios; depending on the choices learners make in the scenario, the outcome -or at least the path through the course- will alter and adapt. Here’s an example of how to pose a challenge to learners: In another example we built with Elucidat, the Fraud Prevention course, the simple branching scenarios provide a framework for presenting the learner with a challenge and consequence-style feedback. The result of this is that it helps to raise their awareness of how the characters can become unwitting victims of fraud. In this scenario, the learner is asked to consider what he or she would do when faced with a stranger entering the office: The interaction is set up as a multiple choice question. But instead of having a "right" or "wrong" response when choosing an answer, each option is instead linked to another screen. The next screen advances the scenario in a way that relates to the answer given by the learner. If the learner chooses "Phone security or reception" when they discover a stranger in the office, they get the following response from the program: This approach of posing a challenge and giving immediate feedback is more effective than simply telling learners what they should do. It is simply more engaging and memorable. Related: 5 ways to use gamification in online training (that can’t be done with traditional training) 5. Use linked pages Pages can be linked to one another with ease. Regardless of what route a learner takes in one scenario, you can always ensure they move seamlessly to the next section by linking to the end screen. Here we have a screenshot showing how simple this process is in Elucidat. Just select the page you would like to link to and press "Save". Easy! 6. Start with a storyboard The starting point for any good branching scenario is a storyboard. Some people like to write storyboards through text or use software like PowerPoint. Others like to use the "Project View" in Elucidat to create a visual storyboard that showcases the different pathways learners can take. Elucidat offers a simple way to structure an online training course so you can design the branching points to be provided. In the example below, notice how the third page splits learners down two different pathways, and then how each pathway splinters and leads learners down even more branches. Related: Why storyboarding is important (4 reasons) 7. Provide extra support Instead of writing a course that simply tells your learner what good practice is, design courses that ask learners to respond to challenges and show where their responses lead. If they need a little extra support, you can build in "information" pages. Below is an example of a hotspot screen. From this screen, learners can select each fruit and learn about the environmental impact of each before selecting which one they plan to have for lunch. Related: Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. Final Thoughts Branching scenarios are an effective way to engage learners through challenges that provide a framework to safely practice their skills and knowledge. When done well, scenarios guide learners deeper into problem-solving activities that can help change behavior and improve outcomes. Creating branching scenarios for your online training doesn’t have to be a headache, provided you’ve selected the right tools. Use Elucidat’s simple authoring tool that empowers non-technical authors to design immersive learning experiences. Keep reading:  5 killer examples of branching scenario eLearning How to create cutting edge scenario-based eLearning Why scenario-based eLearning is important (4 reasons) The post 7 ideas to help you create simple branching scenarios with Elucidat appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

I’m excited to show you how three industry-leading organizations use Elucidat. If you tried Elucidat’s authoring tool but didn’t know how it could help your organization, read this article. Tesco uses Elucidat to simplify the authoring process Tesco is the UK’s largest retailer, employing over 500,000 people globally. The company needed a platform that could deliver learning programs to employees far quicker than past solutions. Why Tesco uses Elucidat to create elearning: The team was using an authoring tool, but it wasn’t widely adopted internally. A simple tool (but flexible enough to customize) was needed to encourage adoption. Employees wanted to take courses on their tablet and smartphone devices. Tesco rolled out Elucidat to 37 authors. Every user was surprised at how easy it was to operate; even inexperienced staff could use the tool with just two hours of training. Within three months of using Elucidat, Tesco saw a 50% increase in the number of people using Elucidat to create digital learning opportunities. Read case study: Learn why and how Tesco uses Elucidat Utility Warehouse uses Elucidat to quickly build and test responsive learning Utility Warehouse is a multi-award winning provider of home, phone, broadband, mobile, and gas services. The organization has a team of 46,000 distributers across the UK. Utility Warehouse needed a solution to help produce interactive and engaging content on desktop and mobile devices. Why Utility Warehouse uses Elucidat: The company trialed several tools but struggled to produce interactive and engaging content that worked on desktop and mobile devices. The company needed a way to deliver a consistent learning experience to 46,000 distributors using mobile devices for training. Instead of using multiple tools for multiple tasks, Utility Warehouse uses Elucidat to handle the entire design and development process. The organization can now encourage all distributors to access the training programs through their mobile phones. Read case study: Discover why and how Utility Warehouse uses Elucidat Johnson & Johnson Vision Care uses Elucidat to create bite-sized, interactive learning Johnson & Johnson Vision Care (JJVC) is a leading provider of Continuing Education and Training (CET) to Eye Care Practitioners (ECPs). Why JJVC uses Elucidat: Changing compliance regulations required Eye Care Practitioners (ECPs) to ensure at least 50% of the training they completed was interactive. ECPs have little time between appointments and limited internet access on their work computers. JJVC wanted a new way to deliver training that could be consumed quickly and accessed via mobile and tablet devices. Elucidat’s flexible and build once, learn anywhere solution made it easy for JJVC to produce bite-sized, interactive eLearning programs that ECPs can complete on mobile and tablet devices. To stay current with new regulatory requirements, Elucidat’s Rapid Release feature made it easy to quickly make changes and publish them instantly to the course. In only 12 months, JJVC doubled the amount of training it delivered to ECPs. Even better, ECPs are now completing seven times as many courses (a 740% increase). The project was so successful it won an award in the Best use of mobile learning category at the 2015 UK National E-Learning Awards. Read case study: Learn why and how Johnson & Johnson Vision Care uses Elucidat The post How three leading organizations use Elucidat to create elearning appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Consumers of online training are becoming increasingly sophisticated. They expect engaging learning experiences and will quickly choose competitor’s offerings if you fail to meet their needs. Here are five tips for building engaging online training that meets customers’ needs and has them coming back to buy some more. 1. Use branching to ramp-up engagement Branching is one of the most powerful techniques in elearning. This is where you give the learner two or more options on a screen. The lesson progresses down a particular screen-sequence based on the choice made—i.e., they branch down one path or another. There can be other choices to make along a given path that further direct where the learner goes. Branching gives learners control over the process, allowing them to direct where they go, what they see and what happens. This makes the experience inherently more engaging and personalized than if the same information is presented in a linear and inflexible fashion. Branching scenarios take this a step further by wrapping a real-world situation around the branches. By setting the branch-point decisions in a virtual workplace and showing a decision’s impact across the resulting screen sequence, you give the learner an opportunity to experiment and learn by doing: "I encountered this situation, made this decision and saw the result. Was it a good outcome or a bad one?" This blog article discusses seven ideas for branching scenarios and further demonstrates this concept. Your project structure can get complex if there are lots of decision points and resulting screen sequence paths! But don’t worry. The best content authoring tools have ways to manage this—for example, Elucidat’s Project Structure View. These tools give you the mechanisms to clearly see and manage the decision/branch points and resulting paths. 2. Use bite-sized online training Creating small, targeted, bite-sized learning is important for several reasons: It’s quicker to design and build than larger modules. It can therefore get to market and respond to changing consumer demand quickly. Smaller nuggets are quick and convenient for learners to consume, particularly on mobile devices. Small, granular learning pieces can be combined and consumed in different ways to satisfy different learners’ needs. It can be consumed during gaps in busy work schedules. It can be used as a refresher or Just-In-Time training. Small doesn’t mean that learning is less effective than a bloated equivalent. In fact, it’s often better. It focuses on key messages without unnecessary nice to have material clouding the important points. Consider this Sales Training Sample that would only take five or ten minutes to complete. 3. Build responsive learning that’s multi-device compatible I’ve written before about the importance of mobile learning. But it’s inefficient and expensive to author separate versions of the same course for desktop, tablet and smartphone devices. Good news! These days, you don’t have to. More and more authoring tools create responsive output that adapts (responds) to multiple device screen sizes. That is, you create content once. The clever output dynamically adjusts the layout depending on the device it’s viewed on. This opens your content to more learners with little or no extra work. Authoring software that creates responsive output will usually give you a mechanism to see how your work will look on different devices during development. Related: Check out Elucidat’s Responsive View Mode slider in action. 4. Challenge learners Adult learners like to be challenged. Spoon-feeding information is a sure way to bore and have them forget what you’re trying to teach. The branching techniques discussed earlier are a fantastic way to engage learners and have them actively participate in learning, but any time a learner has to make a decision or be pushed to think, he or she is more likely to remember the context, content and outcome. Here’s a brief example of how making choices can be fun. Adult learners like to prove to themselves that they understand what they’re being told or asked to do. (I bet you did all the faces in the sample, didn’t you?!) Give learners opportunities to make choices, and your content will be more engaging and effective. 5. Make training relevant to the learners’ work Relevance is something else that makes learning powerful. If material is relevant, learners have a reason to pay attention. One of the best ways to do this is to put it in a context learners can relate to. Here are some ways this can be done: Understand learners’ issues and pain-points, and address them. Pose challenges that will be realistic and meaningful to learners. Use authentic images and language. Use metaphors consistent with the topic being learned: rather than assigning points for challenges in a financial training course, assign (virtual) dollars. Or, let learners accumulate customer satisfaction points in a customer training scenario. Still on metaphors, deliver scenario background information using methods the learner would use in the workplace. I.e., if learners speak with people on the phone in the workplace, use audio (perhaps with a phone effect applied to it for added realism—here’s how to do that in Audacity). Set the scene with an image of a complaint email if that would be more authentic for the context. Related: Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. In conclusion The key to successfully growing your learning content in a competitive market is to provide quality experiences in the most efficient ways possible. By leveraging the power of modern authoring tools and applying the techniques discussed here, you’ll maximize your offerings and produce learning opportunities that delight customers. The post How online training providers create courses for the modern customer appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customers are demanding product and skills training. If you aren’t offering training you’re missing out on a big opportunity to help your customers. In this article, Steve Penfold shares five reasons why you should invest in customer training. You’ve got a fantastic product or service and you have a PDF user guide on your website to tell customers how to use it. Job done, right? Maybe that was true once, but not anymore. Increasingly, vendors are offering sophisticated customer training programs to augment their products, services or brand. But why would vendors go to this trouble? Surely if a customer has bought into a product, they’re happy with it, right? Again, this could be a dangerous assumption. Here are five reasons why providing training to your customers is important. 1. Training teaches customers how to use a product Just because you know your product inside and out, and its nuances and logic make perfect sense to you, it’s unwise to assume this will be the case for your customers. And the more sophisticated or complex a product is, the less intuitive it is likely to be. I’m willing to bet you’ve used software and at some point you’ve hit a dead end. You’d obviously done something wrong (or the software let you take a wrong turn), and a cryptic error message popped up asking you to fix the mistake. Maybe you were able to figure it out, or maybe you contacted a support representative who explained where you went wrong. In extreme cases, maybe you switched software vendors! Regardless, it wasted your time and probably had you cursing the product. Providing training can minimize this kind of frustration and time wastage. 2. Training shows customers how to get added value from a product Even if your customers are not running into problems when using your product, are they getting the most from it? Perhaps there are features customers could use that would make their lives easier. Perhaps showing customers an alternative way to use the features they already know would open new opportunities for them. Having untapped potential in your product does no good for you or your customers. The more empowered your customers are, the more likely it is that other potential customers will hear about your product and want it, too. Providing training is a way for customers to extract the maximum value from your offering. 3. Training stops potentially unhappy customers from leaving (reduces churn) Churn, or churn rate, is marketing-speak for the number of customers who leave a vendor, relative to the number who join. If you’ve changed insurer or mobile phone carrier because of dissatisfaction or because a better deal has lured you away, you’re part of those companies’ churn statistics. Customers leaving you is bad. It’s generally accepted that it’s less expensive to maintain existing customers than it is to win new ones. Losing a customer is a double whammy; you’ll lose ongoing revenue from that customer, and it’s unlikely they’ll be directing new customers to you. Relevant training that excites and gives customers the tools and knowledge to do their jobs (or hobbies) better will keep them from churning. 4. Training delights customers and creates advocates If customers who churn are at one end of the spectrum (the bad end), customers who are delighted are at the other end (the good end). And similarly to dissatisfied customers who give you a double whammy, delighted customers can give you a double win! Not only will you continue to get revenue from a satisfied customer, but there’s every chance that customer will actively push other prospects your way. Providing training can help delight customers and drive additional customers to you. Let your existing customers be your best marketing tool! 5. Training provides an opportunity to gain valuable customer feedback to improve product and customer experience Training can give you invaluable insight into how your customers use your products and services. Imagine that you have a library of how-to videos for certain features of your software product. You notice that one video in particular has been viewed 60 percent more than any other. What does this tell you? Perhaps that software feature is confusing and could be improved. Perhaps one of the other videos hasn’t been viewed at all. This could be because the feature is already perfectly clear, but maybe it’s because customers don’t know the feature exists. The ways customers interact with training may not always give definitive insights into what they’re thinking, but it’s an avenue of intelligence to prompt you to ask more questions and improve your offering. Related: Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. In conclusion These five reasons for providing training on your products and services show that there are benefits for both you and your customers. In case these haven’t convinced you, here’s one final thought. Think about how your customers would respond if your competitors started offering useful customer training as a value-add. Could that take some of your market share? If you think it would, then you should leverage the information in blogs like this to see how to start to build your training program — because it’s only a matter of time before your competitors will, if they haven’t already. The post Why customer training is important (5 reasons) appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

It’s important to differentiate your training from your competitors’ to maintain a competitive edge and to provide a good value-added service to your customers. Here are some ways to do this while also providing your customers with a superior learning experience: Employ quality designs to make your online training standout and look more professional Use branching or linear scenarios to promote learner-engagement Motivate learners to engage with the content by using gamification Ensure that your content is mobile-ready Develop bite-sized learning opportunities that are flexible and engaging. Below are five successful Software as a Service companies that provide online training as part of their product offering. I’ve taken a look at each of these companies’ online training platforms to evaluate the experiences that they provide to their customers. They all provide user guides, so I will focus on the specific online training options that they offer. 1. HubSpot Academy HubSpot provides web-based marketing tools, specializing in inbound marketing. HubSpot’s learning portal, the HubSpot Academy, provides HubSpot customers with three main learning avenues: Videos: These are grouped logically and are of very high quality. The videos are categorized by topic and have links to additional relevant resources. Projects: These are step-by-step sequences that typically feature around 10 to 12 steps. The projects help learners to set up their HubSpot platform. Text, animations, pro-tips, and videos walk you through the steps. Certification: This consists in about 40 videos and self-check quizzes that are spread over 13 "classes." The certification culminates in an online test that gives you a personalized e-badge when passed. Badges can be displayed on websites, social media sites, email signatures, and more. Why I like it: The training was quite intuitive, but navigating the site caused many browser tabs to open. I soon lost track of what each tab was for. The video player had a slower/faster feature, which is useful for note-takers and ESL learners. Topic-specific forum pages for students seem well-used and monitored. Multiple learning streams allow students to choose how they’d prefer to engage with content. Visit Hubspot Academy 2. Zendesk University Zendesk is a web-based customer-service (or, helpdesk) solution. It enables subscribers to support their customers by building stronger ongoing relationships. Zendesk’s learning environment, Zendesk University, uses the Absorb Learning Management System (LMS) to deliver eLearning and video content to its subscribers. My eLearning experience at Zendesk combined guided tutorials and software simulations using the Zendesk platform. It looked like it was created using Articulate Storyline and it had out-of-the-box functionality. Their site didn’t appear very polished (see my comments in the table below), but customers who pay for titles might have a better experience. They do provide high quality videos. The videos are typically two to three minutes in length, so they are easy to watch. Every video "package" that I registered for, such as the Administrator Essentials, included 15 to 20 videos. Each video had a short but meaningful title and a textual description. However, the LMS search software didn’t cover these descriptions, so it could be hard for you to locate specific videos. Visit Zendesk University Why I like it: The Absorb LMS provides a nice learning experience. Multiple streams, including video and eLearning opportunities, let learners choose how they’d like to learn. The videos come in "packages" of 15-20 videos, and each video is usually two to three minutes in length. This makes it quite easy to view the bits you’re most interested in. 3. AdWords Online Classroom The AdWords Online Classroom is Google’s learning portal. There are two primary learning streams on AdWords: YouTube-hosted videos Online "Follow" guides. The videos are of high quality and are generally between two to six minutes in length, making them easy to watch. The "Follow" guides are step-by-step instructions that use text, animations, and videos to talk you through various tasks. Where appropriate, there are links that take you out to your AdWords account. These links prompt you to further apply what you’ve seen to complete certain tasks. Why I like it: The "Follow" guides had "what do you want to do" threads that individually customized my learning experience. Dozens of "Follow" guides mean hours of free content! The "Follow" guides worked nicely on a smartphone. Since the videos are delivered via YouTube, they worked well too. Visit Adwords Online Classroom 4. Salesforce University Salesforce makes web-based software designed to generate leads, get new customers, and close deals faster. They also help their customers to sell, service, and market smarter. In addition to the certifications and virtual and live events that Salesforce University offers, Salesforce provides free training under its Trailhead banner. Trailhead is a very engaging environment that provides "trails"—or, related modules of content—for you to follow. These "trails" are specific to your role and skill level. Why I like it: Trails can be filtered by role and by experience level to direct individuals to useful content. Modules can be selected independently of a trail for a completely customized experience. Bite-sized learning: each module may take hours to complete, but their sub-units are granular and could probably be done in 10 to 20 minute chunks. Visit Salesforce University 5. Xero U Xero is a modern web-based business accounting platform that handles quoting, invoicing, payroll, inventory, and more. Xero U is Xero’s learning portal. Their videos are well produced, but beautifully produced videos are not necessarily good learning opportunities. Why I like it: The content is categorized nicely by role and by function to help locate meaningful titles. Xero certification counts towards professional CPD hours and could be used as a marketing lever for clients. Webinars have a quiz to gain XU credit points. The site and content played well on a smartphone. Visit Xero U In conclusion Each of these vendors put forward trainings to better serve their customers, and they each have their strengths and weaknesses. You might find it useful to go onto sites like the ones listed here and look at them through your customers’ eyes. What would they find useful? What would frustrate them? Why? Armed with this information, you can begin to plan and build a learning portal that will engage your customers and differentiate your business. Related: Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. The post 5 examples of useful customer training appeared first on Elucidat Blog.