How To Create An Effective Online Training Strategy For Your Employees?
It has often been noticed that even the corporate learning strategies that have been planned with utmost care and consideration fall flat because they have not been appropriately measured or evaluated. In such cases, how would you come up with an effective online training strategy that would work wonders for your employees? Let us know more about it:
- Define or outline your goals.
Yes, this is the most important task of all if you want to engage your employees in the online training. Irrespective of whether you are doing it yourself or using any service provider to design the content, having a thorough understanding of the organizational goals and priorities always helps. - Understand the needs of your target audience.
This is another crucial factor to be considered when you want to bring in that engaging factor in your eLearning. You must be aware that the organizational structure is constantly changing and with that the needs of your audience. Ask yourself some of these questions: Who are your learners? What is their job profile? How do they prefer to spend their time? How do they communicate? What experience do they come with? What is their educational background? And so on… - Keep it really simple.
At the time of developing your online training, you must ensure that not only it is simple in terms of its accessibility, but also the subject matter or content are simple from a comprehension point of view. Of course, you would not like your learners to lose their interest in the middle of the course. - Keep it structured and organized.
The content or the subject matter that you plan to include in the online training course should be structured in a way that it is relevant to the topic of the course and not to any specific learner. For better user experience and the best performance, content must be in structured and organised manner. While designing the course, make sure that the headings and sub headings are written in a way that it is easier for the learners to understand what they can expect from that particular slide/page or topic. - Ensure that you know and understand the subject matter well.
For your learners or target audience, it will not be very difficult to understand if they find that the course they are taking contains irrelevant content. While designing, make sure that you only consult the people who have first-hand knowledge of the topic and will help you create original content. - Make it engaging.
Ensure that your online training includes as many interactive elements as possible. Few ways to make your content more engaging involves communicating and connecting on various social networking sites, using video and audio resources, providing your learners with greater control so that they create their own learning path and decide how they could best use the material provided to them. Another way could be to share the knowledge that you gained with a wider audience base through different online platforms, such as forums, blogs, wikis, Google Docs, etc. It would be also good if you could implement a few elements of gamification in your course, so that your learners find it easier to grasp the content in a more fun way. - Ensure that the course is relevant to the learner needs.
Learner engagement is another crucial factor for an effective online training strategy. To achieve this objective, explain your employees how after taking this training they should be able to perform their regular job roles and responsibilities. As discussed in one of the previous points, when you keep the content organized, it will help your learners figure out what is relevant for them. - Provide flexibility to your learners.
When we talk about flexibility in eLearning, we think of mobile or tablets which support learning-on-the-go. Since they can be accessed easily and from any location, it helps engage the learners and affect their learning outcomes. - Provide feedback and other forms of support to the learners.
Feedback is crucial for the learners’ development, and providing it at the right time will only ensure that they have been able to meet all their learning gaps and improve their learning outcomes.
Follow these tips for an effective online training strategy and ensure that you offer your employees a powerful learning experience.