Blindside Networks (www.blindsidenetworks.com) is hosting a monthly Moodle user group in Ottawa. The meetings are held on the 4th Thursday of each month. The next event will be on January 28 , 2010, from 6:00 - 8:00 PM at the Code Factory (246 Queen street).

This meeting will have Steven Muegge, Associate Professor, Carleton University, giving a talk entitled "Use of Moodle for distance education within the Technology Innovation Management program at Carleton University".

There is no cost for this event, but the Code Factory asks that attendees make a $5 donation at the end of the meeting. Please register at Eventbrite (http://ottawamoodle.eventbrite.com/).

You can't teach someone who doesn't want to learn. To help your employees get the most from your training program, try the following:

• Before: When enrolling an employee in a course, tell him/her specifically which skills he/she needs to learn and why. Provide concrete examples and real-life situations where certain skills would have helped improve his/her performance.
• During: Make sure the timing is convenient. Many employees do not want to learn if it means they're going to have to stay late and work overtime to make up for the time "lost" spent learning.
• After: Put the employee in a situation where he/she can immediately apply the newly acquired skills. Showing them how the stuff they just learned helped them perform better sets the tone for the next training session.
  

These concepts are not new, but many organizations tend to forget these steps.

E-Learning provides franchisors many benefits. Notably:

·         E-Learning strengthens a franchisor's brand by standardizing their training program across the franchise system and ensuring the message is consistent for all learners, regardless of their location.

·         E-Learning eliminates logistical problems associated with conventional, face-to-face training by allowing participants to learn at their convenience, without the presence of an instructor.

E-Learning also provides franchisors with another major benefit: it saves them money! To be precise, it saves franchise systems anywhere between 40% and 80% on their annual training budget.

How exactly does eLearning save money for a small to medium size franchisor?

Reduce the Time Managers Spend Training Employees

Thanks to pre-recorded online training courses, employees can learn at their convenience, without the presence of an instructor. This means that managers can spend less time training employees and more time on other revenue-generating activities. Considering that your managers are your best-paid employees, freeing up their time can have a significant impact on your bottom line.

Reduce the Time Employees Spend Learning

E-Learning is proven to shorten training sessions by 20% to 60%. Because a lot more instructional design goes into each and every online training course, the student gets to maximize his/her time and learn much faster.  This, once again, means employees can spend less time learning and more time focusing on the activities they were hired to do.

Increase Productivity

A new hire cannot be effective until he/she has learned a basic set of skills. Unfortunately, managers don't always have time to train new hires as soon as they walk in the door. This leads to remunerated, yet non-productive employees. Worst however is the fact that these employees who are eager to learn end up sucking other people's time, which temporarily leads to a decrease in the productivity of the entire team.

Online training allows new hires to learn at their own pace, without the presence of an instructor (or other peers). It enables them to become as productive as possible, as quickly as possible, and contribute to the productivity of the team from day 1.

Enable Learning During Downtime

Every retail business has peak hours followed by downtime. What do you employees do in between rushes?

Instead of having them read a magazine or go 3 cigarette breaks in a row, why not take this opportunity to train them on your latest products, services, equipment or operational procedures?

Thanks to the anytime, anywhere nature of eLearning, employees can learn at their convenience in small chunks, say 10 to 20 minute increments. And because courses can be paused at the click of a button, employees can briefly suspend their learning to attend clients or more pressing activities should they arise.

Eliminate Travel and Living Expenses

Many franchisors spend countless hours visiting their locations on a regular basis. Others fly their store owners and managers to head office for week-long training. How else are you going to ensure that your franchises operate in a consistent manner?

E-Learning allows you to standardize your training program across the franchise system and ensure the message is consistent for all employees, regardless of their location. It also allows you to track your employees’ participation and progress in your program. A centralized, online Corporate University eliminates, or at least significantly reduces, the need to physically travel to each and every franchised location to check up on your franchisors. It allows you to significantly reduce travel and living expenses, which for most franchise systems, represent 40% to 60% of their annual training budget.

Eliminate Printing & Mailing Costs

All instructor-led courses I've ever attended included training manuals. That's because once the instructor is gone, the information is gone - with the exception of course of what you managed to retain following a marathon cramming session, which is typically very little! In the franchise world, those training manuals are sometimes referred to as Operation Manuals.

Printing manuals with hundreds of pages isn't only bad for the environment; it's bad for your wallet. The printing and shipping costs especially add up when errors or omissions are found in the pre-printed copies, requiring you to throw them all out and print a new batch. Thanks to your learning environment however, you can easily update training courses or PDF operation manuals and make them immediately available to all of your employees. You'll very quickly realize that employees no longer need printed material now that it is available anytime, anywhere, at the click of a mouse.

Eliminate Facilities and Equipment

Most franchised locations don't have separate training facilities to train their employees, but some do in fact rent facilities to train a large group of employees all at once. By offering courses over the Web, you no longer need such classrooms, projectors, etc. Students can learn anytime, anywhere, including from home. And because learning environments allows you to track the amount of time students spend learning, it's easy to tell whether or not your employees are being productive or simply surfing the net.

The owners of private schools in Egypt are developing their own measures to prevent the spread of H1N1 flu, also known as swine flu, when the academic year resumes on October 3rd. Possible courses of action include, amongst other things, shortening the time spent in classrooms and replacing it with eLearning, thereby allowing students to learn from home.

The full article can be read online on the Egypt News Web site.

Dual Code has just released a white paper titled "Online Training for Technology Companies". This white paper presents best practices and "how to" information to help technology companies develop a successful online training program.

Although this paper focuses on training your employees, many of the principles such as the benefits of an online Corporate University and characteristics of adult learners also apply to training other stakeholders such as your clients and partners.

This eLearning white paper is available as a free download here:  www.dualcode.com/whitepaper.htm. No registration or email address is required!

There is constant buzz of how beneficial eLearning can be and the advantages it has over conventional learning. This type of learning has many attractive features for companies as it saves time and money as well as gives the most flexibility for learning as it can be done almost anywhere, anytime! There have been many articles and options from the pros on this kind of technology however this article deals with a student’s perspective of eLearning. Recently I was able to sit down with a fellow named Robert who was utilizing a corporate university in order to train for a new employment position.

Robert gained a position with a company in Ottawa which manages client care for other companies. AT&T is one of the many contracts that it handles. Representatives in Ottawa deal with billing issues as well as technical ones that the customers may have. To learn how to deal with these issues and how to best resolve them, employees undergo five weeks of training through AT&T’s Corporate University. Prior to his training through AT&T, Robert only had basic knowledge of what eLearning was and how it could be applied.  Here are the questions we had for Robert and his experience:


Did you have any knowledge of eLearning prior to dealing with AT&T’s Corporate University?

I was aware of eLearning but I had never experienced it firsthand. I didn’t really know anything too specific about the technology or how it was really used but I understood the idea behind it. I thought that it sounded like an interesting way to have people learning.

Were you apprehensive to take such an innovate approach to learning?

Honestly, I wasn't too sure about it.  I'm more of a pen, paper and textbook kind of guy so I wasn't positive that reading materials on a computer screen was going to be effective in helping me learn what I needed to for my job. I sometimes find that computers can be a distraction when I am trying to really concentrate on something and focus.

After completing the training through the corporate university did you still have reservations about eLearning?

Actually, it was the best way to learn the materials that we needed to know. The material that we were dealing with was rather dry, however it was nice to be able to have the interactive online quizzes and scenarios to help understand and learn the material.  There were a few chalkboard lessons along with what we did but it was only to reinforce what we had previously learned, more of a review than actually learning new material.

Were you engaged with the learning?

As I said before, the material was rather dry, however there were many mediums used to relay the information. PowerPoint’s, online quizzes, mock scenarios, program tutorials as well as the conventional handouts were used to teach the methods and techniques that we were going to have to utilize once we were taking calls and dealing with clients. Because there were so many ways that we were able to learn about the information it made it more interesting than if we would have been reading from handouts and chalkboards and textbooks while in training.

What did you enjoy the most about the online learning experience?

I enjoyed the fact that I was able to go at my own pace, that things were explained clearly in the tutorials and that I was able to follow along with them as I completed the sections. The modules also allowed you the ability to go back and look over something if you were not able to grasp it the first time. It was nice knowing that I wasn’t holding any of my colleagues back with a question. It was a very comfortable way of learning.

The tutorials were also nice because it was nice to have it explained and then be able to put it into practice. The online quizzes were also beneficial as it allowed you to track your progress and informed you of where you would be able to make improvements. The learning was organized in modules which flowed logically from one section to the next. Sometimes I find that learning from a textbook and lectures can be unorganized, jumping from one topic to the next and not connecting the two together.

How would you rate your corporate university experience?

Overall I was extremely satisfied with the corporate university experience and the eLearning involved with it. I was sceptical at first but it was the best way that I would have been able to learn the material that I needed for my job. It is a great way to teach many people at one time. It allows all students to learn at their own pace which seemed to really work for the other employees who were in the same training group as I was.

I would certainly be open to learning again through a corporate university or training for a new job with eLearning tools. I think that it is a positive move forward for any company that aligns themselves with this kind of technology. It makes training and learning so much more enjoyable and easier.

The Epoch Times has published an interesting article on eLearning in their early September edition. You can read the full article here, but I wanted to highlight a few key points I found interesting.

• (University) professors went from just posting a course syllabus to podcasting lectures and now 85 percent of students (at the University of Cincinnati) use it in at least one of their courses.
• The renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) offers 1900 courses on everything from Chinese to the Aerodynamics of Viscous Fluids through MIT Open Courseware.
• In the 2007-2008 school year, 23,000 (Ontario) students registered in online classes.
• Patricia MacNeil, a spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of Education which funds e-Learning Ontario, says the province will be investing $6 million in e-learning for K-12 in the 2009-2010 school year.
• Tanya Blazina, a spokesperson for the Ontario's Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities says the province will invest $2.5 million this year to open 12 new e-learning network centres and to support five centres already up and running in southern and eastern Ontario.

Another interesting comment was that "some software can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to license and support. [...] There are free, open-source alternatives like Moodle that can fill the role for a fraction of the price for schools willing to roll up their sleeves and read the self-help tech forums." Haven't these guys ever heard of Dual Code Inc.? 

I recently found an interesting article from Black Enterprise explaining that "lack of adequate training and ongoing support is the most common complaint among franchisees". I thought this article would be of high interest to franchisors or business owners considering franchising their business.

Long story short: invest in an online Corporate University. It could go a long way to convincing your potential franchisees that you invest in your most important resource: THEM!

Many organizations are torn between hosting their online Corporate University themselves, or getting someone else to host it for them.

A survey conducted by Gartner Inc. in late 2008 concluded that nearly 90 percent of organizations expect to maintain or grow their usage of software as a service (SaaS), citing cost-effectiveness and ease/speed of deployment as primary reasons for adoption. In fact, more than one-third of respondents indicated plans to transition from on-premises to SaaS, citing total cost of ownership (TCO) and unmet performance expectations with on-premises solutions as key decision factors.

“Use of SaaS has been evolving during the past decade and the SaaS model has become increasingly popular over the past three or four years,” said Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner. “Our survey indicates that more than 40 percent of organizations have used SaaS for more than three years, implying a growing fluency with the model within the end-user base. Users are demanding higher levels of functionality, sometimes prompting organizations to renegotiate their contracts early to opt for more feature-rich solutions, or to add more users as the organizational footprint expands.”

"SaaS especially makes sense in the eLearning market" stated Luc Richard, President & CEO of Dual Code Inc., a leading eLearning solutions provider that offers a turnkey Corporate University solution under a SaaS model. "There are so many changes taking place in the eLearning industry right now that trying to keep pace with change is nearly impossible for a small to medium size company's IT department. Letting an eLearning provider manage your Corporate University means you're solution will remain leading edge without you ever having to worry about it or invest large capital sums."

Additional information is available in the Gartner report “User Survey Analysis: Software as a Service, Enterprise Application Markets, Worldwide, 2008.” The report is available on Gartner’s Web site at www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=802221&subref=simplesearch.

Additional information is available on Dual Code's Corporate University solution by visiting http://www.dualcode.com/elearning/index.htm.

For those of you thinking about franchising your business, I wanted to point out a "Franchising 101" tutorial on the CFA (Canadian Franchise Association) Web site.

http://www.cfa.ca/Publications_Research/Tutorials/

From an online training perspective, this tutorial would probably get a 1 out of 10 - at best! It's basically 20 mini-chapters of text. No images, multimedia, or even the ability to search through it. That being said, if you can manage to read through the entire CFA tutorial, you can find some very valuable information.

Two sections of this "Franchising 101" tutorial are related to training. Section 7 is related to initial franchisor training and section 8 deals with ongoing training. Section 9 additionally provides you with an introduction to Operations Manuals.

I'm a bit disappointed that the Canadian Franchise Association barely touches on the subject of online training. An online Corporate University is such a great tool, especially for small to medium size franchisors, that it probably deserves an entire section in this tutorial.

A company trying to franchise has enough things to worry about. The more you can automate, the better. Especially if you can find a good, reliable service provider to outsource the administration of your Corporate University (e.g. hardware maintenance, software upgrades, network administration, etc.)