Blog
Onboard & Upskill Your Remote Workforce with an LMS
11 August 2023
The rise of remote work, accelerated by unforeseen circumstances like the global pandemic, has been fueled by a desire for flexibility, autonomy, and a better work-life balance. E-learning and learning management systems (LMS) provide critical solutions to help facilitate the transition to a remote workforce, onboard new talent, and upskill your teams.
This post will explore how a well-designed e-learning platform can ensure effective training for new remote employees and provide continuous learning opportunities. We will delve into how E-Learning Development is not just a response to the rise of remote work, but a pioneering force in shaping the future of work.
Rise in Remote Work
In an increasingly connected world, the traditional confines of the office have begun to melt away, replaced by the limitless expanse of the digital workplace. The once novel concept of remote work has burgeoned into a global trend, transforming how organizations operate and employees engage.
The landscape of traditional work has been significantly reshaped, with remote work becoming a dominant trend, particularly in the wake of the Covid pandemic, when the work-from-home job share rose from 4% to 62%. According to WFHResearch, as of 2023, this has begun to balance out and now sits around 27.
Now, 13% of full-time employees work from home, and another 28% operate under a hybrid work model. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, as of January 2023, the remote work share exceeds 10% of job postings in Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the U.S., and it appears to be on an upward trajectory in all five countries.
Typical Pain Points for Online Workforce E-Learning
While it is the popular trend and a growing expectation for job places, transitioning to a workforce presents unique challenges in employee training and skill management that organizations must navigate in order to ensure they are continuously able to acquire the talent they need — whether that be onboarding or developing skills among its current workforce.
In this section, we’ll explore three pivotal obstacles in online training: selecting the appropriate tools, maintaining worker engagement, and implementing effective skill assessment and corrective measures. Unpacking these issues will allow us to strategize solutions, paving the way for optimized e-learning experiences.
Finding the Right Tools
Navigating the remote work landscape can be a daunting task for many organizations, particularly when it comes to finding the right tools and systems for your industry. Making this decision alone can feel like a second full-time job.
The market for online training is full of different e-learning platforms and providers, each with their own unique features, strengths, and weaknesses. For organizations, the challenge lies in identifying the right platform that best aligns with their training needs, budget, technical capacity, and organizational culture. Additionally, considerations such as user-friendliness, scalability, integration with existing systems, and the ability to provide a personalized learning experience are also important.
Keeping Workers Engaged
Engaging learners is a key concern in online training. Maintaining learner interest and motivation can be difficult without the physical presence of a trainer or the social dynamics of a traditional classroom. Factors such as isolation from social motivators, digital fatigue, distractions at home, and the lack of real-time feedback can lead to disengagement, reduced participation, and lower retention rates.
Therefore, e-learning platforms must incorporate strategies to enhance engagement, such as interactive elements, gamification, peer interaction, real-world application of knowledge, and prompt feedback.
Skill Assessment & Corrective Action
Assessing learner progress and identifying areas that require remediation is another common challenge in online training. For one, remote learners may miss out on informal feedback and mentoring opportunities that are common in physical workplaces.
Consequently, e-learning platforms must have robust assessment tools that provide detailed insights into learners’ strengths and weaknesses. These tools should allow for real-time learner progress tracking, offer personalized feedback, and have mechanisms to implement corrective and rebalancing actions.
End-to-End Guide for Launching an LMS
Choosing and implementing an LMS for your organization can almost be like a second full-time job. As we delve into the step-by-step guide on choosing, launching, and managing an LMS, it’s important to consider a holistic approach that aligns with your organization’s needs, from the assessment phase to the continuous improvement process.
This guide will provide a comprehensive roadmap that ensures your investment in an LMS is well-founded, effective, and yields a significant return on employee development.
Needs Assessment
Begin by clearly defining what your organization’s learning needs are. Understand the gaps in your current training program and identify the skills you want to develop in your workforce. This process should involve key stakeholders, including management, HR, and learners.
Prompts:
- What are the key skills and competencies that our employees need to perform their roles successfully?
- What are our business objectives, and what will an LMS need to have to align with these objectives?
- What literature is our training program currently based on? Is it up-to-date? Is it accessible to share with a third-party developer?
- What feedback do we have from current employees on their onboarding/training experience under our traditional training? How can an online training platform build on or improve those areas?
- How will we measure the success of our training program? What metrics and KPIs are most important to us?
- What resources (time, budget, personnel) are available for new training and development?
- Which c-suite sponsor can be ultimately responsible for this project, its execution, and its continual performance? Who will manage it, what authorizations will they need, and which departments will they need to work with closely?
- Do your teams have the skills and bandwidth to build this training in-house to adequately meet your goals? Or will you need to bring in a service provider?
Find the Right Solution or Service
Once you’ve identified your needs, it’s time to find the proper e-learning solution that best fits your organization. Online training strategies can range from learners progressing through a library of instructional videos or manuals, social learning platforms, learning experience platforms, interactive courses, and video conference providers.
Online Video
This type of e-learning is often used for real-time, instructor-led training sessions. It facilitates live interaction between the instructor and learners, replicating a physical classroom experience in a virtual environment. It’s ideal for delivering lectures, presentations, or conducting group discussions, allowing instant feedback and clarifying doubts.
Social Learning Platforms
These platforms facilitate learning through social interaction, often incorporating features like discussion forums, collaborative projects, and peer feedback. They leverage the power of community and peer-to-peer learning.
Learning Experience Platforms (LXP)
LXPs provide a personalized, Netflix-style interface where learners can discover, consume, and share content. They often integrate with other systems and provide analytics to track learning progress.
Video Conference Provider
These providers support live-streamed communication for instructors to meet with learners, whether in a one-on-one setting or a group environment. Depending on the platform, these systems can offer features like screen sharing, comment feeds, speaker video focus, and video feed effects.
Learning Management Systems (LMS)
A Learning Management System (LMS) is a comprehensive platform that manages, tracks, and delivers online courses. It supports creating and delivering content, tracking learner progress, administering assessments, and generating reports. LMSs are suitable for both self-paced learning and instructor-led courses. They are widely used by organizations for employee training, as well as educational institutions for distance learning. An LMS can provide a suite of the above features and platforms, making it a dynamic and all-in-one system.
An ideal choice would be a provider that offers a comprehensive and adaptable solution, such as Techinnov. They offer a scalable e-learning and training platform that can be personalized to your organization’s training needs. With a cloud-based learning management system, reliable infrastructure, secure storage, and innovative solutions, Techinnov is designed to streamline the remote learning experience and solve your learning and training challenges.
Identify Current Course Materials
After choosing the right LMS, the next step is to make sure you have collected and organized all relevant training resources and literature. These materials should be curated in a way that makes them deliverable, accessible, and easily searchable for your provider’s content engineer and design teams.
At this stage, you should also have team members and subject-matter experts available and connected with your provider to ensure accurate information is shared across teams and learning modules are built and designed according to expectations.
Pick Presentation & Delivery Strategy
The mode of presentation and delivery of the course content is crucial in engaging the learners. Incorporating methods like gamification, dynamic learning paths, and AI-powered solutions can enhance the learning experience. A quality LMS provider will have knowledgeable content designers who can assist in strategizing the simplest and most effective delivery for your training.
Techinnov offers these solutions along with an engaging user experience, which is a key element in an effective learning strategy.
Troubleshoot/User Test
Once your LMS is set up and modules have been developed, it’s crucial to test it thoroughly to ensure everything works as intended. This includes testing the user experience, course delivery, and the functionality of various features. Any issues identified during this phase should be promptly addressed.
Track & Assess LMS Metrics
Finally, continuously track and assess the effectiveness of your LMS by using the analytics and reporting features that many platforms offer. Techinnov, for instance, allows you to track learner progress and generate performance reports in real-time, providing data-backed insights to improve your strategies.
Content Features for High-Impact Online Training
Implementing an LMS and designing effective online training is as much an art as it is a science. While cutting-edge features and fancy interfaces can be impressive, it’s often the simpler solutions that deliver the most value. At the heart of any successful LMS strategy is a focus on the learner and the learning objectives.
To start, training content must be relevant, engaging, and presented in a way that meets the needs of diverse learners if organizations are to get the impacts they expect out of their e-learning platform.This could mean incorporating multimedia elements, interactive activities, or offering content in bite-sized modules for ease of consumption.
The key is to avoid overcomplicating things – clarity and accessibility are paramount. If a feature enhances user experience and ease, it’s a tool, if it distracts or overwhelms the object of your training, it’s extra weight that shouldn’t be bothered with.
A quality provider will be able to identify what features will benefit your training and work with your subject-matter experts during the wireframing process to identify potential media and methods that could enhance training outcomes.
Here are some features you should look for:
Mobile Learning
Learning through mobile devices means high accessibility for your training. It supports learning on-the-go and is ideal for microlearning — short, focused learning nuggets designed for quick consumption. An app or mobile web alternative format can allow you to push training prompts and notifications to promote engagement and completion.
Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) Learning
VR and AR offer immersive learning experiences that can make complex concepts more understandable. They’re particularly useful for training in fields like healthcare, engineering, and provide safety where real-world practice might be risky or costly.
Gamification
Gamified learning, or gamification, incorporates game elements into the learning process to increase learner engagement and motivation. It often includes elements like points, levels, leaderboards, and rewards.
Adaptive Learning Systems
These systems use algorithms and data to personalize learning paths on a user’s knowledge, skills, and pace. Using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and ontology-based optimization, learning management systems can profile learners with a high amount of accuracy and rebalance a training curriculum, schedule, and type of content they are offered.
E-learning Support Capabilities
When considering an LMS, it’s important to look beyond just the basic content delivery capabilities. An effective LMS should provide a range of support, insight, and management features that allow you to administer, monitor, and optimize your training program. Here are some key capabilities to consider:
Comprehensive Analytic Reporting Interface
A robust LMS should provide a suite of analytic tools that enable you to track learner progress, assess performance, and measure the effectiveness of your training. This includes metrics like course completion rates, assessment scores, time spent on learning, and more. These insights can help you identify areas of struggle, track improvement over time, and make data-driven decisions to improve your training.
API Development
APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, allow your LMS to communicate and integrate with other software systems. This is crucial for creating a seamless learning experience and streamlining administrative tasks. For example, you might want your LMS to integrate with your HR system, CRM, or a third-party content library.
Cloud Solutions (IaaS)
A cloud-based LMS, or Infrastructure as a Service, offers several advantages. It allows for easy scalability, ensuring that your LMS can grow with your organization. It also provides access from anywhere, anytime, supporting remote and mobile learning. Plus, cloud solutions typically include automatic updates and backups, improving security and reducing the need for internal IT support.
Multi-System Architecture Deployment
This refers to the ability to deploy the LMS across various systems or platforms. It ensures that the LMS can function effectively in different environments and cater to diverse technological infrastructures within an organization.
Machine Learning and AI
AI and machine learning can significantly enhance an LMS’s capabilities. They can support adaptive learning, personalizing the learning experience based on each learner’s knowledge, skills, and pace. AI can also automate tasks like grading, provide intelligent recommendations for learners, and offer predictive analytics to identify trends and potential issues.
Remember, the key is to choose an LMS that aligns with your organization’s specific needs and goals. Not every feature will be essential for every organization. It’s crucial to assess your needs and select a solution that best meets them while providing a user-friendly, effective learning experience.
Techinnov’s End-to-End E-learning Development
Embracing the future of work means embracing e-learning, and Techinnov is your trusted partner in this journey. Techinnov’s team champions innovative development, offering secure and scalable, data-backed solutions tailored to your organization’s training needs. Our innovative solutions are powered by advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning, ensuring engaging, adaptive, and data-driven training for all learners in your organization.
The transformation of your workforce starts here. Don’t let your organization get left behind in the shift towards remote work and online learning. Visit our Training Solutions and E-Learning page to find out more about how Techinnov can help you rise to the challenges of e-learning and prepare your organization for the future.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are some common challenges organizations face with online training?
The traditional workspace has undergone a seismic shift due to the Covid pandemic, leading to a surge in remote work. As of 2023, 12.7% of full-time employees work from home, and 28.2% work a hybrid model. Furthermore, 98% of workers expressed a desire to work remotely, at least part of the time, highlighting a growing affinity towards the flexibility, autonomy, and work-life balance that remote work offers.
What are some common challenges organizations face with online training?
Organizations often need help with finding the right tools for their specific needs, keeping workers engaged throughout the training process, and accurately assessing skills and implementing corrective action.
What should organizations consider when choosing a Learning Management System (LMS)?
Organizations should assess their training needs and identify the type of e-learning solution that best meets those needs. When selecting an LMS, it’s essential to consider features like a comprehensive analytic reporting interface, API development, cloud solutions (IaaS), multi-system architecture deployment, machine learning, and AI. However, the most effective solutions are often simple and user-friendly, rather than the ones with the most impressive features.
Share
Creative Techinnov Software Solutions Inc.
Phone
+ 1-866-233-7154
info@techinnov.ca
Office
1407 Saint-Alexander St, Suite 300, Montréal, QC H3A 2G3