Online Learning Delivers The Flexibility Your Business Needs

Online Learning Delivers The Flexibility Your Business Needs

By Bill Harwood, Partner at New Level Partners

Business schedules are jammed and the line between work hours and personal hours continues to blur. Employers are building new solutions to trigger employees’ technical skill acquisition and professional development.  These changes to training strategy parallel the replacement of physical training materials with a wide range of online content.

‘Boomer’ workers recall offsite training sessions earlier in their careers – multiple days sequestered with experts to build technical knowledge, learn a new product or enhance business competencies. These sessions usually included pre-work reading, activities or assessments. However, the reality was that true knowledge transfer or behavior change was often difficult to measure. Despite the dominance of reading-based and instructor-led corporate education prior to this decade, those mechanisms failed to cause substantial learning for many participants. The exceptions were corporate programs managed by firms with strong Learning & Development practices to track learning objectives, assessments and post-session goals and participants who were highly motivated to acquire the knowledge and skills.

Research now shows how individuals optimize learning through alternate delivery mechanisms. In some cases, alternate mechanisms mean ‘preference’ – an individual prefers to learn in a self-paced environment, a group setting or after pre-reading and assessment. In other cases, alternate mechanisms means ‘multiple’ – an individual acquires knowledge when they’ve been exposed to content in multiple formats, such as pre-reading before a webinar or workshop.

As the time available for workplace education has declined, employers must deploy and manage targeted curriculums to deliver the ‘right’ content, in multiple formats for different learners to achieve a clear return-on-investment.

Enter the interactive learning design advancements of the past decade, accelerated by the explosion of available content on the web. Learners now engage with content in a variety of formats or media – onsite, e-learning tutorials, videos and live or recorded webinars just to name a few. A learner can choose format ‘A’ or ‘B’ as her preferred option or can view parallel/sequenced content in multiple formats for reinforcement. Just as advertisers claim we need to hear a message multiple times to absorb it, a learner obtaining content multiple ways, with variable examples matched to the delivery mechanism, can have a much faster – or at minimum, a more reliable – absorption rate.

Finally, the improved ‘measure-ability’ of online learning can achieve a very significant shift in the learner’s experience. The ability to sequence knowledge checks or assessments at multiple stages of the educational process is a huge advantage, whether an assessment is part of online course pre-work to an instructor session or as a scenario-based simulation between assignments. The learner can better register their progress in the knowledge-transfer process and the trainer or manager gains an accurate snapshot of training effectiveness with limited impact on workplace productivity.