Transform with elearning: What do you wish your community, organisation or industry did better?
Elearning can have a transformational impact on small business, not-for-profit and other fragmented groups sharing common interests, challenges or opportunities.
Leaders who champion these approaches, and buy-in from participants, is key – but once people are on-board a widespread and consistent improvement in performance can occur in a rapid and substantial fashion.
Social networking and related services have taken elearning beyond self-contained training that offered little more than traditional distance learning. It now offers an important level of interaction that brings real people together.
The opportunity for interaction between participants promotes collaboration. This can lead to superior, and often creative, solutions which can benefit every member. Small business, for example, will only get so far working with local competitors, but can interact freely with similar businesses in other parts of the country. Innovative product or service ideas, marketing approaches, and sources of suppliers can all be freely discussed when businesses are not in direct competition.
The benefits are not solely commercial. I am constantly amazed at how much ‘cash-strapped’ government agenices and not-for-profit groups will spend to get members to centralised training, or to bring training opportunities to geographically spread groups. The travel, accommodation and venue costs alone are often substantial, and the reach limited as a result.
Take a typical sporting organisation for example. They might have national, regional, club and school based administration nationwide from the largest centres to the smallest rural communities. They probably share common issues – perhaps they all seek greater levels of grant funding.
One well designed elearning programme in which the participants learn how to submit winning funding applications would address this need. It would involve many members and be delivered simultaneously nationwide, with valuable collaboration between participants sharing experiences and looking for solutions. This would immediately lift performance across the board, and impact nationwide through many members. An initiative like this could generate thousands of dollars of additional revenue and great benefits as a result.
Complement that with programmes in strategic planning, financial practise, volunteer management, and recruitment and suddenly you have strengthened and advanced the capability of your organisation in a very practical way – further and faster than you ever thought possible.
Put simply, this is about flexibility of time and place. This phrase is often used from the learner’s perspective, but it also applies to the delivery of training. Being able to provide training to a disjointed group spread over thousands of kilometres on a flexible schedule enables you to capture more people, more quickly, and more effectively.
What do you wish your community, organisation or industry did better? Tell us and we will show you how elearning can make it happen!
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