Providing Sound eLearning and Marketing the Same to Get Employees Buy-in

Posted by Aruna Vayuvegula, Specialist - Marketing Content

Fri, Jan 20, 2012 @ 05:10 PM

Comments

A good eLearning course should market itself. It should be aligned with the business goal, it should be instructionally sound and enhance the learning experience. However, the rate of drop-outs among those who take up eLearning courses is very high. The reasons typically could be lack of personal motivation, poor instructional design of the course, conflicts between work and personal commitments and so on. If we need to overcome these barriers, the instructional material should be tailored in such a manner that the learner is motivated to complete the course.

Poorly-designed eLearning courseware will have no takers and might seriously affect your objectives of eLearning. The only way to ensure that this does not happen is to make sure that whatever courses you offer are well-designed. If you don’t have the expertise in house for robust courseware design and development, you could partner with a learning solutions organization to design and develop your eLearning courses. That way while you have control over the content of the courses, you will have the expertise of an eLearning courseware developer to repurpose the content in a manner that appeals to the learners.

Another major factor for failure of eLearning programs is lack of encouragement by the management. The completion of courses depends on reinforcement given for training by managers. If courses are not tracked and employees who have completed the course are not given due recognition, employees may not be motivated to take up the courses. However, managers are already overburdened with responsibilities and it is often not practical for them to oversee or maintain a Learning Management System where eLearning courses are hosted.

You could even check with the organization that is developing eLearning courses if they can partner with you to strategize and implement your marketing initiatives. This way, you have a package in which both aspects critical to your success are addressed in one go. This is to say that the responsibility of developing quality eLearning courseware and marketing the same among your employees will be taken up by the eLearning service provider. They could in fact, market, manage and monitor your eLearning initiative together with managing of the learner enrollment, evaluation and final assessment. With the responsibility of administrating eLearning off your shoulders, you could devote your time to your core functionalities.

Finally, before going all out in trying to create a big bang about our proposed launch, we need to remember that it’s not the glitz and glitter of marketing alone that sells. Our communication, marketing and promotion activities will yield the highest results if they demonstrate the benefits of eLearning clearly to all the stakeholders including the learners.

Tags: comprehensive solutions provider for eLearning, eLearning, eLearning Development, outsourcing elearning