The organisational factors that prevent employees from converting e-Learning into business achievement can be boiled down to five key principles. We call these principles the 5As, and together they make up the 5As Framework.

Elearning can have a transformational impact on small business, not-for-profit and other fragmented groups sharing common interests, challenges or opportunities.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.

Now, more than ever, industry has an opportunity to develop the people they already have in a way that is cost effective, and highly customised. E-learning provides an ideal means of addressing specific skill shortages. Employers who are serious about taking charge of their own future, and proactively addressing the barriers which are preventing profitability and growth without waiting for others to act, should be grabbing e-learning with both hands.

Recommended reading, this webpage from the Ministry of Education (New Zealand) summarises key issues and findings from the full report (also available for download). The content is succinct and includes some excellent graphics clearly depicting the process of elearning industry, elearning as it occurs in large companies, and in small or medium businesses, and a model for examining elearning effectiveness. This is an excellent summary of key e-learning issues in the New Zealand workplace, but many of these factors have wider relevance. It also glances towards the future…

When planning for e-life, empower trainers and learners to engage in e-life. Concepts and methodologies of elearning will have to take into account the needs of the small business environment and its learners in order to achieve a wider learning application. A learner driven pedagogy rather than a product driven one could be experienced as the real challenge as it may confront equal opportunities and the democratisation of learning environments, be it blended learning approaches or others.

Executives today know that business depends on well-skilled and knowledgeable employees who make the right decisions, work effectively and efficiently, and keep their skills up-to-date. Especially in today’s economy, executives want to make successful financial investments when deciding what methods to use to keep staff well trained. Therefore, they demand to know the data and case studies that support new learning approaches like eLearning. This document addresses five key questions that senior executives ask about eLearning benefits and challenges.

Recommended reading, this is part one of a two part post suggesting some ways to use elearning to enhance relationships with your customers. In some ways it would be better titled “12 ways to use an LMS…” as some of the ideas – particularly in part two of this post have very little to do with e-learning as such.

This brief research report looks at e-learning in small and medium enterprises in Canada to provide an overview which hints at some key factors in utilising this effectively.Though this report was published in 2004, the findings are pertinent, particularly in New Zealand where SME adoption of e-learning is lagging behind the North American experience. The report also outlines very succinctly some of the perceived advantages of elearning – both in theory and in the experience of the SME’s which participated in the research.

Learning is critical to organisation and people development in any organisation. 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

The Benchmarking and Research business activity of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework has released An investigation of the enablers and barriers to industry uptake of e-learning: Small business which examines the current status of e-learning in small business, barriers to the increased use of e-learning solutions and the potential for increased uptake of e-learning by small businesses.