Regardless of your personnel, business size, or even your specific industry, there is always an opportunity to grow, and that begins with web-based training.
Every business can benefit from enhancing its training programs, and the most innovative way to expand your team’s knowledge is through online training.
Web-based training or eLearning may have become more popular during the Coronavirus pandemic when the world shifted to a remote work environment. However, web-based learning has been heralded for years as the most effective way to fulfill training objectives.
In fact, a 2017 Forbes article detailed these benefits, noting that it takes employees approximately 40-60% less time to study material via eLearning than in a traditional in-person course. At the same time, retention rates in an eLearning environment soared to 25-60% versus 8-10% for an in-person setting.
The Increasing Demand for Online Training
It’s understandable why eLearning is the preferred training method across all industries. For one thing, the schematics of getting your team together at a specific place and date is time-consuming for all parties involved. Moreover, it’s time that could be spent on the job. For another, not all of your personnel work on the same schedule, or have the same flexibility, so a broad in-person training session might not align when your team is ready and able to learn.
Therefore, when you tally up the costs of travel, productivity, finding a physical conference room, and diverting your team from their day-to-day jobs, the cost of in-person training versus web-based training certainly adds up.
But how does web-based training work, and how can you ensure your types of eLearning tools are effective? How can you effectively transfer your own vast knowledge and skill sets to everyone on your team?
Start Creating Engaging eLearning Content
The first step is to craft a course that will resonate with your target audience – your employees, sales team, and other personnel. A few key components are the foundation of an effective web-based training program.
How to Design Effective eLearning Courses
Your exact course specifications will vary based on your business and ambitions, but there are a few evergreen guidelines to remember when designing your web-based training.
Identify the Goal Line
At the end of the course, what do you want to achieve? Do you want your team to have a better understanding of a certain area of your business? How about having a new understanding of the products or services you provide or having new tools to drive sales and find new customers? When answering these questions, keep your goals as detailed and specific as possible. For example, it’s much easier to achieve a specific goal like “Utilize social media tools to identify new customers” than a more general goal of “Increase sales.”
Consider Your Learners
It’s essential that your courses match the skill levels and expertise of your team, so keep your learners’ abilities in mind. Ensure that your course content isn’t rehashing information that your employees already know. Also, at the same time, be sure that any new information isn’t beyond their expertise, or the knowledge required for their job.
Create a Better Visual Experience
Consider online articles, social media posts, or other web-based content that grabs your attention. Chances are that these morsels of information do not comprise straightforward text and an image but instead consist of multiple visual stimulations. These include helpful graphs and charts that easily condense information to videos or gifs that capture your eye.
People tend to absorb and retain information in varying ways, and it can be easy to be distracted from course material that is dull or unstimulating. So, keep your learners engaged by using multiple tools and media that present the material in an engaging and easy-to-comprehend method. Also, it is important not to lose your team’s attention.
Make Your Course Interactive
Short quizzes or insightful questions are a great way to ensure engagement from your learners, and they can also help to drive home the most important points in your material. Create courses that your learners can engage with your training goals. For example, developing short, 60-second follow-up questions or tests can help maintain focus and interest throughout your web-based training.
How to Launch an Effective eLearning Course
Once you’ve accounted for the above guidelines, the tricky part is determining how to deliver all of this valuable course material to your team in the most effective way possible.
The first step is to create eye-catching verbiage, graphics, and course content. However, the difficult part is figuring out how to transform these essential materials into a quality web-based course that your team can easily access and utilize.
A Web-based Training Platform Makes the Difference
Simply put, web-based training platforms link your training goals and your execution. A web-based training platform takes these broad guidelines and instructional materials and creates a training delivery system that learners can access anywhere and anytime.
This can be as simple as converting an existing PowerPoint to a web-ready course. Alternatively, it can be a more extensive and hands-off venture, where a web-based training expert uses your insight and goals to create an effective multimedia course. In addition, creating complete quizzes and other forms of user engagement to track knowledge retention and reinforce concepts can enhance a learners’ online training experience.
Online Training Success with Udutu
At Udutu, we have found that the best way to help businesses enhance their web-based courses now and well into the future is to put the power into their own hands.
This is why we aim to give everyone the expertise to share the tools to teach quickly and efficiently. We use a multi-pronged and personalized approach to achieve this goal, allowing corporations the ability to create and control content, to allowing continual access to our free and easy-to-use authoring tool. This tool translates knowledge into a user-friendly course that will benefit learners.
As a leader in your business and industry, you have a vast knowledge base that deserves to be shared with your team to ensure the success of your company. The key to growth and better job performance is continual learning. Therefore, web-based training can be the stepping stone that launches your business to a new plateau of success.
Start Creating Engaging eLearning Content
Let’s start a conversation about your specific goals regarding training and advancing your team. From simple projects to a lifetime of learning objectives, we have the tools readily available to help you create a better, more effective, and more knowledgeable team from the inside out.