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!

Related posts:

1. E-learning for organisation and people development
2. Why not-for-profits should embrace elearning
3. Organisation culture and E-learning

Learning is critical to organisation and people development in any sector. Elearning provides improved and innovative ways to contribute to this vital function. This is a broad and complicated subject, but let’s consider it in simple terms and link elearning with organisation development in plain english.

Thorn and Mackey proposed the following checklist for developing people and organisations: 

1. Examine very critically the current roles and skill sets within your team.
2. Identify the overall direction of your organisation. What are its mission or  vision, values and  business objectives? 
3. Have standards of performance been set?  How are these standards being measured? 
4. Hw are people being encouraged to develop these standards? 
5. What learning processes are in place?
6. What are the blockages? What is stopping the organisation from developing? 
7. Who are the competitors? What role does their HR/OD/L&D/Training function perform? 
8. Network with other training professionals. Find out how different organisations are approaching their current business issues. 
9. Meet with other functions in your organisation. Identify what they want from HR/OD/L&D/Training. Put yourself in their shoes. How well are you meeting their needs? 
10. Identify the important measures, for example: speed of response, quality of advice, trainer knowledge, creativity and innovation, will work in partnership, value for money when  benchmarked. 
11. Critically evaluate the performance of your HR/OD/L&D/Training. 
12. Set standards and establish an ongoing method of measuring the achievement of standards. 
13. Constantly update within the function, encourage visits, secondmentsm and the exchange of information. 
14. Work towards training excellence, to be the organisation that acts as a benchmark for others. 
15. Ask yourself and your team, ‘How effective are we as a business partner?’

You will see that this list bundles together a range of topics including business case, return on investment, benchmarking, needs analysis and the like, but  we’ll keep it simple by linking each of those points to e-learning ideas and applications. 

1. Examine very critically the current roles and skill sets within your team.

Use elearning to develop the skills and capability of your management to analyse skill sets. Elearning providers can conduct this examination for you and customise solutions. Collaborative elearning can be used to enable effective self evalaution.

2. Identify the overall direction of your organisation.What are its mission or vision, values and business objectives?

Use elearning to develop the ability to do this and learn how to develop this strategic alignment. Induction through elearning can ensure that all staff understand and apply these critical elements of your business. Elearning can be crafted to be consistent with and therefore contribute directly to vision, mission, values and business objectives.

3. Have standards of performance been set? How are these standards being measured?

Develop people management skills through elearning and better understand performance management techniques. Collaboratively develop effective responses to performance issues by working together on challenging scenarios and team tasks in elearning programmes.

4. How are people being encouraged to develop these standards?

Elearning helps develop skills in collaboration. E-learning programmes can encourage development of real-world appraoches to achieveing results and meeting other perofrmance standards. This can occur through developing both managers and the personnel they lead.

5. What learning processes are in place?

Learning processes need to fully integrate elearning for maximum efficacy. Contracting in elearning expertise can ensure best practise appraoches are fully integrated from strategy through to implementation in practise. E-learning also offers learning processes that differ considerabley from conventional appraoches, and can add considerable benefits while reducing costs. Innovative approaches are able to be explored as a result.

6.What are the blockages? What is stopping the organisation from developing?

Use elearning to develop the ability of your organisation to identify and elininate bloackges to development. Elearning is also an ideal way to embed a culture throughout the organisation which will encourage development. Elearning can also reduce development limitations through lower cost, greater flexibility and more pertinent training provision.

7. Who are the competitors? What role does their HR/OD/L&D/Training function perform?

Pay particular attention to  your competitors use of technology. Look for elearning use both in-house and contracted in expertise, be aware of web 2.0 elements, informal learning and personal learning environments. There can be a lot going on without it being readily apparent if you restrict yourself to analysing conventional functions.

8. Network with other training professionals. Find out how different organisations are approaching their current business issues.

Participate in elearning with personnel from other organisations that are not direct competitors, but perhaps providing the same product or service in geographic locations other than your own. Champion elearning in your industry and create opportunities through collaborative online programmes to learn from others. Elearning scenarios designed around current business issues let’s you share the expertise of others and foster effective solutions.

9. Meet with other functions in your organisation. Identify what they want from HR/OD/L&D/Training. Put yourself in their shoes. How well are you meeting their needs?

Best practise elearning will help to ensure those needs are better met. Sound instructional design prinicples will keep learning opportunities on target. E-learning also enables flexible and rapid responses which provide a service more responsive to the needs of other functions in your organisation.

10. Identify the important measures, for example: speed of response, quality of advice, trainer knowledge, creativity and innovation, will work in partnership, value for money when benchmarked.

Recognise that e-learning which is designed and delivered to a high standard will almost always perform better than conventional training against all these measures and any others which have been identified as important.

11. Critically evaluate the performance of your HR/OD/L&D/Training.

Best practise appraoches to elearning pplace considerable emphasis on evaluation of programme design and delivery and improvement based on that evaluation. Where existing performance is lacking elearning can often provide the solution to your problems.

12. Set standards and establish an ongoing method of measuring the achievement of standards.

Many elearning systems integrate standard setting and ways of measuring achievement of identified standards through technology. Integrating elearning with your organisation development strategy ensures that appropriate standards are set and achieved. E-learning can ehance your ability to meet existing standards.

13. Constantly update within the function, encourage visits, secondmentsm and the exchange of information.

The advantages of elearning align well with this consideration. The integration of collaborative interaction within programme design, the ability to deliver over distance, and the ease with which elearning can be updated all contribute directly to this aspect.

14. Work towards training excellence, to be the organisation that acts as a benchmark for others.

In the current environment signs of excellence include adoption of best practise elearning and innovative design and delivery techniques. If e-learning has become standard in your part of the world then cutting edge approaches and specialised expertise help establish leadership. If e-learning is new in your sector , then widespread use of elearning will establish you as a leader in your field.

15. Ask yourself and your team, ‘How effective are we as a business partner?’

Your effectiveness is likely ot be directly tied to your efective use of e-learning. Development through participation in elearning will also add to the effectiveness of your team.

In conclusion, elearning has a role to play in all aspects of developing your organisation. Embrace the opportunities it provides to build capability. By bringing in a elearning specialist you can start on this immediately – the sooner you start, the sooner you reap the rewards!

Reference: Thorne K, and Mackey, D. Everything you needed to know about training, Kogan Page Ltd, 2007.

Related posts:

1. Transform with elearning: What do you wish your community, organisation or industry did better?
2. E-Learning and small business – lessons from the UK and Europe
3. Linking organisation culture and e-learning

Elearning provides a cost effective solution to some key issues affecting many not-for-profit organisations.

One example is how to successfully manage volunteers. Many community based organisations rely heavily on volunteers at some level. This might be people on the ground delivering service, or at governance level providing oversight as committee members or trustees.

Challenges can arise from the fact that volunteers typically come from diverse backgrounds and present with a range of skills and experience.

In these circumstance elearning can assist by:

• providing a consistent and cost-effective way to induct new volunteers to your organisation.
• educating your volunteers about the issues or cause your organisation addresses.
• teaching volunteers about internal policies and procedures unique to your organisation.
• addressing risk-management needs by ensuring your people understand health and safety and other compliance matters.
• training in governance and management skills such as strategic and business planning, financial management, or fundraising methods.
• teaching skills specific to your sector like managing sports teams, recognising abuse, or advocacy skills.

By developing your people you build the capacity of your organisation and achieve better results. You also improve consistency of delivery across member organisations at national, regional and local level. You can harness the power of having all workers on message and moving in the same direction.

Perhaps most importantly you can achieve consistently high standards of performance over time. As your people naturally come and go, this consistency allows efforts to build incrementally on the work that has gone before. The effectiveness of your organisation is then not tied to a rollercoaster of strengths and weaknesses of individual people. This is a common issue in many not-for-profits which do not enjoy paid administrators or management.

Finally it demonstrates that you recognise and value the work of your people across the organisation, by investing in their ability. This can aid morale, recruitment and retention.

All of this helps you achieve your goals, and can be achieved for a fraction of the cost of traditional training and development approaches in the not-for-profit sector, especially if your organisation and affiliate bodies operate from a variety of locations.

If you would like to know more about how elearning can greatly enhance your not-for-profit organisation please contact us.

Related posts:

1. Transform with elearning: What do you wish your community, organisation or industry did better?
2. Not-for-profit uses elearning to train 3000+ volunteers
3. E-learning for organisation and people development

This press release describes how elearning can be used in practise to achieve dramatic results in the not-for-profit sector. The Virtual College’s Safeguarding Children e-Academy has helped Bradford Safeguarding Children Board deliver child protection training to more than 3,000 people.

They say “e-learning was recognised as the way forward. It has helped us to reach many more people and introduce more varied topics than we could ever hoped to have done through face-to-face learning….e-learning can help train everyone who comes into contact with children across any number of different geographical locations and job descriptions quickly and simply.”

The full post can be found at http://www.trainingpressreleases.com/newsstory.asp?NewsID=4661

Related posts:

1. Why not-for-profits should embrace elearning
2. Transform with elearning: What do you wish your community, organisation or industry did better?
3. Download: E-Learning success stories in the not-for-profit sector