4 Best Practices for Building Online Healthcare Learning Solutions

E-learning is being rapidly adopted by many corporate companies, and healthcare companies are not far behind. As the industry is focused on the health of people, employees need continuous training on different aspect such as regulations, safety, and compliance. But, what does it take to create a good online training course for healthcare professionals? Do you simply dump classroom PowerPoint decks and documents on the LMS and expect your learners to consume all the knowledge in them? That cannot be a pleasant training method for learners. So here are 4 best practices that will help you deliver top-notch training to your healthcare professionals.

1. Blend training methods

The job of a healthcare professional is not easy. They need to respond to emergencies quite often and so cannot guarantee their availability for lengthy classroom training programs. Moving all these training programs online would also mean they must dedicate time. So instead of going for any one exclusive training method, go for a blended training approach, which typically includes a combination of training methods. While certain topics can be better taught in a classroom, others can be completed online. They can attend a quick classroom session covering all the important points and can later access short online courses containing additional information on the topics. For example, the common treatment method for a disease can be taught in a classroom, and the other less used treatment methods of the same disease can be covered in short online learning modules.

2. Keep online training short

While online training courses can be convenient for learners as they can be completed irrespective of the location and time, they can be boring and overwhelming when they are too long and heavy with content. This is because online learning is self-paced and we are aware of the shrinking attention spans of humans. For those who always have to be prepared for emergencies, such long and heavy training programs might not be ideal. So keep the online training modules short, anywhere between 5-10 minutes each.

3. Check their prior knowledge

Before delivering training in any form, give learners a pretest. By this, you will know how much they already know. As classroom training cannot be personalized, offer online training modules to learners, based on the results of the pretest. This makes training personalized for learners as they can be trained only on the topics they have less or no knowledge of.

4. Demonstrate clinical application

Application of knowledge is quite essential for healthcare professionals. It is like a cycle where healthcare professionals learn, practice, and repeat. So, ensure you use scenarios in online courses which show them different cases of where and how the knowledge can be used. Such scenarios ensure learners avoid mistakes in real-life situations.

Effective training of healthcare professionals means that lives are saved because information is delivered, learned, and practiced. I know these are not the only best practices considered while designing training programs for healthcare professionals, but are quite important.