Benefits of e-Learning Part 4 – Easy to update Training Content

Recently I visited one of my neighbors, whose son, an electronics engineer, had recently joined an electronics manufacturing company in Bangalore. He was excited about his job. Out of curiosity, I asked him about his training, and he showed me his training material. While browsing through the material, I found that the publishing date on the training material was almost 3 years past.

I asked him why his company was using such old training material which might even be outdated. He told me that the same question had been raised by some students in the class. The trainer had replied that the training content had not changed much and said that whatever updates there are will be told to the students during the practical trainings. Moreover, the company had printed a large stock of manuals and booklets and new updated material will be printed after the existing stock exhausts.

This is not a new phenomenon in the training industry. But the impact of this on the quality training can be observed by supervisors in operational areas because employees are sent to work with insufficient knowledge, causing loss of productivity and quality.

The big IDEAS blog by Omnipress has listed “Managing Frequent Updates and Changes to Training Materials” as the Number 2 challenge of the training industry in 2012. Blogger Sara Olbrantz says, “if your content isn’t up-to-date, members may not see your association as relevant.”

It is difficult to refresh the content in printed training material because if you want to reprint you have to scrap the existing content and incur printing and distribution costs even though the reprint may get outdated soon.

e-Learning to Rescue

On the contrary, if an organization relies on e-Learning, it can not only quickly refresh the information but also dissipate it throughout the organization.

• Quickly refresh content: An e-Learning course which is in electronic format can be refreshed at any time without much effort by your e-Learning vendors. All you have to do is to open the source files, make the changes, and repackage the course. Because the base material is always ready, such updates do not cost much.
• Notify using LMS: Organizations can quickly update the courses on their Learning Management Systems and notify all the users at the fly. They can also track how many users have gone through the updated content, thus keeping the organization’s knowledge refreshed.
• Printable Course Formats: e-Learning courses can also be quickly reproduced in a printable format. This is useful for learners who still require a printed version of the course.

Updating information in your training can positively impact the productivity of your organization. If you are looking to start e-Learning in your organization, please contact us for a free trial of our LMS or to get a free report on how you can implement e-Learning in your organization.