Anyone who uses e-Learning is likely to tell you how impactful and easy it is.
In today’s “always-on” environment, e-Learning provides both learners and organizations with many advantages. So what exactly is e-Learning?
If you’re an e-Learning professional or a novice, over the past decade, there’s no denying its popularity has skyrocketed. It provides an affordable, time-efficient way for employers to train workers. Employees, in return, benefit from easy preparation that strengthens their abilities and knowledge.
Organizations often use it to educate their partners and clients to improve adoption, retention, and eventually, sales. No signs of waning are shown by the demand for e-Learning solutions, with the market forecast to hit $275 billion by 2022.
The delivery of learning and training that digital tools are e-Learning or electronic learning. While e-Learning is based on formalized learning, it is delivered via internet-connected electronic devices such as computers, tablets, and even cellular phones. This makes it easy for consumers, with few, if any, constraints, to learn anytime, anywhere.
Training, learning, or education delivered electronically through a computer or some other digital device is essentially e-Learning.
It’s important to look at its history to better understand how e-Learning supports organizations today. In 1999, Elliott Maisie coined the word “e-Learning”, marking the first professional use of the expression. The credibility of e-Learning has gone from strength to strength in the years since. But what factors made it easier for e-Learning to become the most common way to provide training today?
Some of these considerations include:
- The Internet – Many relied on handwritten books, CD-ROMS, and other restrictive learning and training methods before the advent of the internet. The growth of the internet has encouraged organizations to abandon one-dimensional practices and make use of eLearning’s versatility.
- Multimedia Creation – The ability to combine elements such as images, videos, audio, and graphics proved to be a more effective way of keeping learners engaged compared to conventional learning as e-Learning progressed.
- Affordable Digital Devices – Understandably, the popularity of e-Learning grew as digital devices became more affordable, provided the first IBM computer cost the equivalent of nearly $5000 today. Mobile learning has also greatly facilitated eLearning’s growth.
- LMSs have become more complex, switching from locally deployed to cloud-based systems, with companies increasingly applying them to perform many types of training. When selecting an LMS, there are many things to consider; at least make sure it has the features and help you need to achieve your goals and those of your learners.
A software framework that is used to provide online training is a learning management system (LMS). By supplying you with the functionality and resources you need to perfectly execute your eLearning plan, a great LMS would go beyond this.
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Choosing an LMS can be overwhelming at first, but it can narrow your quest significantly by assessing your training needs and identifying your requirements. You can choose from many different types of LMSs, such as cloud-based, open-source, commercial, and installation-based.
Cloud-based LMSs have become the norm for online learning, allowing you to quickly build classes, easily register users, and reliably report on the progress of learners.
A good cloud-based LMS can allow you to easily scale up the delivery of your training and be assisted by a great customer success team whose sole aim is to make sure you succeed.
SCORM seems like a daunting term to anyone new to the world of eLearning. But to help you better understand what it is, we’ll break it down here.
The good news is that using SCORM offers a more immersive, engaging experience for the learner and helps you to have more control over the time spent on your courses.
SCORM is an acronym that stands for Object Reference Model of Shareable Content. But let that not bewilder you!
SCORM is a set of technical specifications designed to provide a standard guide to how content for eLearning is produced and used. How eLearning courses are developed and released is standardized. Using common authoring software, most SCORM courses are built and thus follow a similar framework.
You need to make sure you have a SCORM-compliant LMS to use SCORM in your eLearning. Be mindful, however, that due to the expense of using an authoring method, SCORM introduces additional costs to eLearning delivery.
The benefits of using SCORM inside your eLearning courses, however, make the investment worthwhile.
xAPI has become the famous new standard for providing online training over the past couple of years.
As it has redefined some of the basic practices of monitoring learning experiences, xAPI is often identified as SCORM’s next evolution. This brings extra efficiency to SCORM and eliminates a lot of the drawbacks of older requirements.
It provides a degree of versatility that fits the fast-paced world of today. Modern learners want to learn while commuting to work or getting a coffee on-the-go.
xAPI can monitor these learning experiences in one simple, consistent format, whether they occur inside an LMS or not. In essence, xAPI will give you a holistic view of the experience of your learners.
