If you’re new to creating eLearning content, there’s something you absolutely need to know before you get started – and that’s the importance of storyboarding. Good eLearning courses have one thing in common. They all use effective storyboarding in the development phase.

In fact, many eLearning professionals consider storyboards to be the most important element of online course creation. Why are they so important? Let’s take a look.

Storyboards give you a map of your content

Think of a storyboard as the foundation of your eLearning course, a map that illustrates your ideas and design elements. The storyboard document will clearly show all the visual, text and audio elements of every screen in an online course. The learning objectives of your online course can also be added to this document.

In this way, you use your storyboard to communicate your ideas and objectives to clients and developers. Diving straight into the development phase, without this solid foundation, makes production more difficult for everyone involved.

Storyboarding helps your development team

Having a strong storyboard for your development team to work from will make this phase far more efficient and also make your content flow more easily. The storyboard document will clearly show your programmer, graphic designer, illustrator and narrator exactly what they need to do.

For example, your storyboard may contain notes to developers like what media to be used, what elements get synched with which part of the audio narration, which elements would be clickable, and the resultant reaction. If you have a lot of people working together on your eLearning course, a storyboard will greatly help the collaboration process and keep things in order. As Denielle Richards writes, “the more people involved in the eLearning development process, the more important the storyboarding process becomes.”

“If you are developing courses as a team effort (rather than as a one-man band), then eLearning storyboards are crucial to the process, and I’m not clear exactly how a quality eLearning product could be developed without this important step,” she says.

With this, it’s also a lot easier to see if a concept will come together well – or not! When you show a storyboard to clients, they can easily approve or pass on your concept at this stage, meaning you won’t waste any further time or money in development if the idea isn’t hitting the mark. In the case of complex animations, where it takes a lot of time and budget to develop the final product, it is a good idea to have an approved storyboard from the client first.

You’ll also be improving quality control, as your storyboard will allow you to pick up on any errors and make sure everything flows well, screen by screen. Any dialogue and media elements can be tested in this stage of development. You might even decide to use a pilot, or test, group to see how your concept works with a relevant audience.

Storyboarding allows you to make changes to content

Because your storyboard is like a blueprint of your course materials, it makes it very easy to update content at any time. You can simply edit and update your storyboard document whenever you like, as your one central file. This means you don’t have to worry about different versions or any confusion.

This is also very useful if you want to easily translate your eLearning course into another language at some point in the future.

How to create a storyboard for your eLearning course

Now you know the benefits of using a storyboard when creating your course, you might be wondering how to get started.

Connie Malamed, writing for The eLearning Coach, outlines the four main ways to go about creating a visual storyboard:

Create a template in Word (in landscape mode) and let each page represent one screen

Create a template in PowerPoint and let each slide represent one screen

Create a template in a commercial storyboarding application

For the rapid development approach, begin writing the course directly in the authoring tool, such as Storyline, Captivate, Articulate Presenter, iSpring Presenter or any of the other hundred tools. In some tools, you can write the script and other notes in the Notes section below the slide. This integrates storyboarding with actual development.

You then choose the multimedia elements you will incorporate into your eLearning course, such as videos, audio clips and graphics, and describe each element in the corresponding part of your storyboard. Make sure you leave room on each screen for these elements – simply note their position on the page with a quick sketch or text description.

As you can see, storyboarding is a very powerful development tool for creating online content. Using storyboards in eLearning production will save you time, money and potential stress later down the track.

Want to discover more about what storyboarding can do for your eLearning? Enroll in this free online course, Instructional Design Essentials: Storyboarding, for more best practice tips on using text, mockups, and rapid-prototyping tools for storyboarding. You’ll learn how to publish your project, incorporate feedback and share storyboards with others.

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Why storyboarding is important for eLearning development

As organizational leaders, it’s important for CEOs to support and champion employee training programs, and getting them on board with your plan is critical for success. Knowing how to talk to your CEO about training could be the difference between implementing a successful program, or being stuck with sub par development.

If you’ve been tasked with developing a training strategy, as a manager or HR professional, it’s important that you seek direct input from your CEO. You might think that chief executives are too busy to bother with these kinds of conversations, but it’s in the company’s best interest to have a CEO that provides input and feedback on this area.

By being directly involved in the company’s learning and development strategy, your organizational leaders can help to ensure that staff are equipped with the right skills and being supported in their professional development. To help you feel more comfortable discussing with your CEO about training, here are some points you may like to consider.

Discussing the organizational benefits of training

Before you approach the subject with your CEO, put some time into thinking about the benefits of training for both employees and the organization as a whole. What are the company’s priorities and goals? How will training help to actively support these goals?

CEOs will want to know that they’re getting a good return on investment for the money that is invested in training, so you should be able to identify and outline these benefits. If you’re not sure how to start the ball rolling, take this suggestion from Forbes in 5 Things You Should Be Talking To Your Boss About. You could say something like, “I’ve noticed that our new hires aren’t picking up on the new CRM program very easily. I’d love to put together some training documentation to help them learn it a little quicker. Here’s a quick outline I threw together—what do you think?”.

Eoghan Quigley, writing for eLearning Industry, agrees that for CEOs “prioritizing the development of their employees provides one of the biggest returns. Making sure that the culture is strong, that people are learning, and that they know we’re investing in them every day is always ROI positive”. Keep referring back to the organizational benefits of training when meeting with your CEO.

Talk to your CEO about bridging the skills gap

You can also discuss the importance of training in helping to bridge the skills gap in your organization. The skills gap is a challenge and concern for many modern companies, with a mismatch between the skills that employers want and need, and the skills that workers actually have. This mismatch, or gap, can be addressed through ongoing training.

Quigley looks at telecommunications giant AT&T as an example of a CEO who recognizes that ongoing training is essential for the success of a company and its employees. Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chairman and chief executive, is reported to have said that employees who do not spend five to ten hours a week in online learning “will obsolete themselves with the technology”.

With ongoing training, leaders can make sure staff are equipped to deal with any changes in technology and the industry, while continually improving their skill sets and contributing to the success of the company. As Quigley says, while CEOs are responsible for setting long-term strategy and short-term goals for a company, “it will be employees that will execute against this strategy and these goals”.

Encourage your CEO to invest in eLearning

Telling your CEO that company staff need more training will go down a lot better if you can also offer a solution at the same time. What training tools and methods can you include in your strategy, that are up-to-date, effective, and provide good value for money?

One of the best ways for employees to learn new skills, or improve existing ones, is through online courses and eLearning. In fact, eLearning has become the most popular way to perform workplace training these days, with online training courses proving to be a very successful and effective way for staff to receive ongoing learning and development. A massive 77% of American companies are already offering online corporate training to their staff, with this figure likely to continue to grow throughout 2017.

With eLearning, you can significantly reduce the costs of training by removing the need for room hire, travel, trainers and facilitators, and other associated costs of traditional training methods. Outline these facts in your discussion, to show the potential benefits of online training for the company. By being prepared with some clear statistics, facts, and viable training solutions, you can have a far more open and productive conversation with your CEO.

This article was originally published on elearningindustry.com

Whether you’re a professional looking to enhance your coaching skills or an expert leader who wants a refreshing approach to helping others, the Coaching Skills course is the one for you. This course takes a unique attitude to coaching and turns traditional ideas on their heads, giving a whole new viewpoint on how we can make the most of our coaching experience.

Traditional ideas of coaching may work in some areas, but the long-term results from this type of friendly and sometimes over-supportive mentoring aren’t always clear. The Coaching Skills approach gives you a completely unique take on how to be the best coach possible so that you get the full potential from your employees.

When you think about coaches you’ve experienced in the past, whether it was someone at work in a supervisory role or a football coach during college sports, you’ll likely remember straight away if they were effective or not. A good coach should have a lifelong impact on us, and not necessarily with a friendship formed, but with the valuable lessons taught.

Coaching can be extremely effective, but maybe not necessarily in the traditional sense you might be thinking. This course helps you become a memorable leader to someone, giving you the skills and knowledge to get their absolute best from them. In turn, you’ll be able to witness sustained performance improvement in the workplace.

But what does the process entail and how is it different?

The Coaching Skills course focuses on a modern approach to coaching, called FACTS. This approach was developed by Ian Day and John Blakey in their book, “Challenging Coaching: Going beyond traditional coaching to face FACTS.” The book explains how most forms of coaching used in the workplace are outdated and shows you a new and improved way of coaching others.

So, what is the FACT approach to coaching?

F – Feedback - This course shows you how to overcome your fear of giving feedback, which can often hold managers back from getting real results and seeing a change from their employees.

A – Accountability – How being held accountable in the workplace can make you far more likely to succeed in your goals.

C – Courageous Goal Setting – Rather than setting easy goals that you know you’ll be able to accomplish with ease, the FACTS approach teaches you to be courageous so that you work even harder to achieve them.

T – Tension  - You’ll learn how to create healthy tension so that you keep employees on their toes at all time and ready for anything.

S – Systems Thinking – The FACTS approach gets you to look at coaching process from a systemic and holistic point of view.

There’s really no limit to who can benefit from this course, so whether you’re an absolute beginner in the world of management and coaching or a seasoned professional, you’ll receive tons of value. As the course challenges traditional styles and methods of coaching, it’s especially ideal for those seasoned professionals who are looking for a more effective way to get things done.

The FACTS coaching approach is intended for those at management and board levels, however, there’s nothing stopping an ambitious worker from learning what they can to be an effective leader in the near future.

If you feel that your coaching could do with improvement, or just aren’t getting the results you had hoped from your employees, it’s time for a new approach. FACTS could be exactly what you are looking for to light a fire under your staff and improve your business out of sight.

Some might say that great leaders are born, the truth is that great coaches must be taught. Although the traditional sense of the word “coach” often leads us to think of a friendly and supportive mentor who teaches us various valuable skills and knowledge in a very specific way, the modern version may look a little different.

If we hope to stay ahead in the world of business or need a boost in our personal lives, our best strategy is to educate ourselves on a continuous basis. It’s impossible to stay on top of innovative and changing approaches to training in the workplace without a constant education, and this course can provide just that.

The FACTS approach to coaching will completely revolutionize the way you look at how you get results from others and will guarantee you an exceptional improvement in those you coach. Think about it: when we learn how to give constructive feedback and create a healthy tension in others, we can truly harness their full potential.

This course is delivered in an enjoyable and interactive format, full of animated videos, stories, activities, and takeaways. This method of content delivery harnesses what we have found to be the most effective form of online learning, and ensures a far higher success and retention rate than traditional classroom learning.

When you become a truly effective coach at work, your managerial skills grow exponentially. If you are looking for better solutions to engage, inspire, and lead your teams, this course might be right for you.

Move beyond the limits of traditional coaching

In today’s competitive workforce, it’s vital to stay ahead of the game when it comes to employee training. Many companies, both small businesses and large organizations, have switched to eLearning for staff training, as an alternative to traditional teaching methods.

eLearning tools and online courses bring a number of benefits to your business, being flexible, engaging and cost-effective. A good learning management system will also allow you to create custom content, specific to your business and learning audience.

Interested to learn more? Here are 5 benefits of using eLearning for staff training.

The best thing about eLearning is that training is no longer confined to the classroom or conference. With eLearning, individuals can log into online training courses and modules whenever they like, wherever they like.

This offers employees a form of training that is far more flexible and convenient, and that works with their busy schedules, not against it. With many modern workers operating remotely or across different time zones, training materials that are available 24/7 provide employers with an effective solution for accessible staff training.

Many online courses are also able to be accessed through mobile-friendly apps and devices, making eLearning even more convenient for users.


2. Better knowledge retention for learners

Whatever the reasons, these employees will inevitably fail to apply what they’ve learned in training sessions to their role back in the office or worksite. In contrast, eLearning offers a very effective method that improves employee knowledge retention. In fact, studies have shown that using apps for training can greatly improve knowledge retention, with students reaching a competent level nearly four times faster than by using traditional training methods.

Through short, engaging and goal-oriented content, staff will be able to move through training modules at their own pace, and in an environment that’s conducive to learning. As we’ve said before, the freedom and flexibility of eLearning also encourages full focus, helping individuals to become more engaged with the materials and retain more of what they’re absorbing.


3. Custom content for more effective learning

Using Go1’s course creation tools, for example, you can quickly and easily compile your own custom content for staff training. The eLearning tool also allows you to upload existing training materials, supporting a wide range of files and making course creation even easier.

With such easy-to-use online course creation, you can have fully branded, customized training materials ready to roll out to your staff in no time.


4. Consistent, high quality training materials

In addition to this, eLearning content can easily be updated at any time. You’ll save time and money on updates to training content, as you simply make any changes online and publish immediately across the system.


5. Cost-effective training for your business

As well as removing the need for printing, eLearning will save you considerable amounts of money in comparison to traditional training methods. By using online materials to train your staff, you’ll eliminate costs such as trainer and speaker rates, conference or room hire, staff transport and catering. When you start saving money on all these costs, you’ll see a significant reduction in your bottom line.

If you’ve enjoyed reading about the benefits of eLearning, you’ll find many more articles about this topic here on the Go1 Blog.

Learn how to build an effective eLearning course

Find out more about how eLearning improves knowledge retention

Read up on informal learning and why it’s so important for staff

The benefits of using eLearning for staff training

Many companies rely on seasonal workers to reinforce their staff during busy times. In the manufacturing, distribution and retail industries, for example, additional workers will be hired during peak times of the year, to cope with increased demand.

While these workers should receive the same standard of training and development as regular employees, often this isn’t the case. Unfortunately, some employers choose not to invest in onboarding or training for temporary staff, in an effort to save time and money. But if you’re an employer or manager, you have a responsibility to ensure each team member is fully trained for the work they’ll be doing – regardless of how long their contract is.

Here are some things you need to know about providing seasonal workers with the right onboarding and training methods.

Each individual who enters your organization has an impact on your company culture – even temporary staff who are only employed for a short period of time.

For seasonal workers, the way you bring people on board is just as important as it is for any other employee. Paying attention to onboarding helps them feel welcomed into their new workplace, and says a lot about your professionalism as an employer.

There’s no reason why all new hires shouldn’t be provided with a short orientation that covers workplace safety, company policies and procedures, and details of human resources contacts. Throughout the onboarding process, employers can also set guidelines for what’s expected from employees in their role, which will be appreciated by most workers.

The Benefits of Training Seasonal Workers

Proper training methods are also often bypassed when it comes to seasonal workers. Many employers leave these new hires to fend for themselves and learn “on the job.” But starting a new job without knowing exactly what’s expected of you, or where to get the tools or resources you need for your job, is very frustrating.

While you may think that you’re saving time and money in skipping training, this can soon lead to increased errors and safety risks, unskilled employees and a poor work culture. Is it worth the risk? It’s far smarter to invest in proper training for seasonal workers, to make sure all team members can perform their work duties safely and efficiently.

Having an effective training system also helps build your engagement with new hires. Staff will know that you’re invested in (and investing in) their professional development, which is important for developing a culture of high-performing, satisfied employees.

Kevin Kruse, bestselling author of Employee Engagement 2.0, says the engagement of seasonal workers is critical: “Engaged workers—those who are emotionally committed to their employers—are more productive, provide better customer service, have few accidents and will be more likely to return the following year.”

Using eLearning to Train Seasonal Workers

When companies do deliver training to seasonal workers, it’s often in one upfront block of training, such as a two-hour workshop or half-day orientation. Matt Heller, an employee performance consultant, believes this is the wrong approach for seasonal workers. “Rarely do employees truly learn and absorb all of the material covered in a few days or hours of orientation,” he says, recommending employers provide training in “small nuggets – this way the material sticks better, and they have a chance to actually put it into practice.”

Online courses provide employers with the best way to deliver this kind of training for seasonal workers. Using this method, employees can log in and complete short modules at a time and place that’s convenient to them. There’s no need for employers to book large conference rooms, instructors or faciliators – eLearning courses provide everything you need to onboard and train staff, online.

You can keep your employee training courses short and concise, tailored to the exact needs of your seasonal workers, who may only need to know certain skills or a selection of company policies. Delivering training in this way also allows managers to monitor and gauge employee performance, with the results of training easily available to them online. Look through the Go1 marketplace, to find online courses that are relevant to the needs of your teams.

Save time and money when training seasonal workers

For those in the insurance industry, you’d be well aware that constant training is crucial for running your business successfully. Everything from the products you sell to how your staff deal with customers, even processes and regulations set by external bodies need to be taught and continually updated.

So when it comes time to implement training in the insurance industry, the most modern approach is with eLearning. When you consider the relevant and up to date information that eLearning can offer, it seems a perfect fit for this industry and those who work within it.

When dealing with a unique sector such as the insurance industry, you need to ensure your training has been perfected to meet the industry’s changing needs. Every aspect of your business, from the products you sell to how your staff deal with customers and how your business stays compliant with regulations set by external bodies, demands continual training. Your training must be able to adapt quickly so that your business can run successfully in the shifting industry landscape.

With its ease of delivery and speed of update, eLearning offers a variety of benefits that make it a perfect training solution for the insurance industry and those who work within it.

Considering the banking and finance industries were among the first to implement technology based learning, it’s no surprise that they still rely predominantly on this type of training today. When working with insurance specifically, the many government rules and regulations, as well as industry standards, are constantly updated.

Unlike traditional training methods which often teach outdated information in stuffy classroom scenarios, these technology-based industries can have recent and relevant information delivered straight to their staff with eLearning. So, what type of training can eLearning be used for in the insurance industry?

Like many companies in the banking and finance industries, businesses in the insurance industry can deliver almost all of their training and teaching through an eLearning system. Just a few examples of how eLearning can be useful for insurance companies include:

Considering all of the regulatory bodies that govern this industry, it’s crucial that staff stay updated with the latest information. With eLearning, you’re able to deliver the most recent and accurate information on both company compliance and national and international regulations. As an added bonus, staff can be automatically notified when they’re due to complete training to maintain their certification.

Software is a huge part of the insurance industry, as different companies incorporate unique tech solutions throughout their operations. eLearning makes it easy to provide initial software training during employee onboarding as well as deliver any ongoing training needed to upskill staff in order to keep up with software updates.

An insurance company is only as good as its best salespeople. Luckily, eLearning is able to deliver modern and relevant sales training that can allow your staff to work to the best of their ability. Other soft skills relevant to the role can also be taught with eLearning, and staff are often appreciative for the chance to expand their knowledge base.

Insurance companies generate most of their revenue from their products, making it critical that employees fully understand their company’s business offerings. eLearning allows you to deliver employee training at any level, all from the same system. New recruits can be taught about your full range of products during their orientation and existing staff can be updated whenever new products become available or new offers arise.

There is truly no limit to what you can achieve for your staff and company when you implement eLearning, whether you want to utilize just a few of its possibilities or all of them. By giving your staff access to the best training in the industry, you can ensure you’re competing just as strongly as the top players.

This Method of Training Keeps You Competitive

With thousands of companies offering insurance to meet all types of needs, it’s difficult to remain competitive in the US insurance market. By implementing eLearning and getting rid of tired, old training methods, you’re able to utilize innovative technologies to give your company the best chance for success in this overcrowded market. 

For example, eLearning allows businesses to use automation to keep a closer eye on how their staff may be performing administrative processes. Automatic auditing simplifies the process of evaluating your employee training to help you determine the ways you need to tailor your program to stay competitive in the insurance industry. 

With freedom to learn where and when it suits your employees best, eLearning is one of the simplest ways to increase employee engagement. Unlike traditional training methods, many eLearning platforms and courses allow employees to access training at any time, and in shorter spurts, to improve retention and enable successful training programs.

The usefulness of eLearning has also been proven in many other commercial and professional industries, not just the insurance industry. As the way we learn and communicate makes a shift towards more digital-based systems, it makes sense that our education and training does too.

According to Forbes, every dollar invested in eLearning results in a $30 increase in productivity. So, whether you want to use eLearning for your software, processes, compliance, there’s never been a better time to consider this modern approach to workplace training. 

What you need to know about training in the insurance industry

Delivering the most effective training for the workforce is a serious challenge for many companies today.

All too often we hear about companies who are experiencing dismal engagement rates and poor results from their current training methods—so that’s a great place to start looking. If you want to make the most of your workforce, you should always be looking for ways to improve the training experience for your learners.

One way to improve the learning experience for your people is to group them into small teams during the education process.

Here are a few reasons why this is still such an important thing to do:

When your employees work together in small groups then they have better opportunities to discuss the project at hand. This discussion will naturally create more opportunities for ideas to flow and to be shared between the group. Think about it: it's certainly easier to be creative when you have a few people around to bounce your ideas off of.

On the other hand, when you’re learning on your own then you are only getting exposure to your own ideas about the particular project. You don't have the advantage of additional perspectives from your teammates and this limits your ability to find solutions when confronted with learning-based problems.

When approaching a learning objective alone you can only evaluate things based on your own experience and limited exposure to that experience of others. However, when you are learning within a small group you are benefiting from the experience of those who you are working with as well.

These individuals may come from different backgrounds and they may have been exposed to business environments that you have never been a part of. This collection of varied experiences makes it much easier to find solutions to learning-based problems.

An organization is only as strong as its weakest link. When you train your personnel to work in small teams, then each individual is able to get support from those they are working with. This means that your learners can take more risks, gain more insight, and benefit from the support and encouragement of the rest of the team.

When you are working on something alone then you are like a castaway on a deserted island. It can be quite lonely and lead to self-doubt, which ultimately ends up with the employee staying within their safety zones.

This is a problem when you want to increase productivity. When you put people together in small groups then everyone is able to bring the group up to a higher level of accomplishment.

Working together in small teams means that ideas will be repeated within the group. Some individuals will grasp the concept quickly, while others will need to be exposed to the ideas multiple times before the process truly sinks in.

By asking your learners to work together in groups you are ensuring that ideas will be repeated within the group. This means that everyone will be better equipped to recall the information that they are learning.

You can identify potential leadership talent faster.

How often do you get the opportunity to identify potential leadership talent within your workforce? When you put your learners together into groups then you will be able to evaluate their performance and quickly identify those who have a talent for leadership. These individuals can be promoted and help you grow your business faster, without bringing in outside resources. We have discussed the advantages of promoting from within before, and this is an easy way to find candidates.

Simulations are one of the most powerful ways for you to reinforce the concepts that you have presented to your learners. While computer-based simulations are certainly efficient, there are several areas where real-life simulations might be more effective. Sales teams, for example, can practice their sales presentation skills within their groups and get real-time feedback on their strengths and weaknesses. The same goes for customer service departments and many other departments within your organization.

Learners gain valuable feedback from the other team members.

Feedback is critical when practicing something for the first time. While it’s certainly helpful to gain feedback from administrators and instructors, some of the most valuable feedback can come from others within the same or similar positions.

By placing these individuals into smaller groups you are giving them the opportunity to communicate with each other and help each other with feedback. Each individual may see different opportunities for improvement that may have been missed if you had someone working solo.

Your training strategy has a direct impact on your profits. If your workforce is not getting effective or engaging training then you are missing out on a key component of growing and maintaining your competitive edge.

There are several different proven strategies for improving your training processes, but a great place to start is by placing your learners into small groups.

If you are looking for resources to help you train your staff in everything from compliance to communication, visit the Go1 Marketplace today. We have thousands of free and paid resources to help you.

Why training for small teams is still important

Blended learning is one of the most powerful approaches to workplace education available today because it combines both online digital media and traditional learning methods to deliver a more effective and engaging solution for learners.

Here are a few reasons why blended learning is the new workplace learning solution:

When your instructors can incorporate digital solutions into their teaching programs then they have more tools in their arsenal. However, not only do they have more educational firepower, they also have a more efficient platform to educate your workforce as well.

In traditional learning environments, slower learners typically hold back the pace of the class. This means that you need to spend extra time educating a few people while others are forced to wait.

Blended learning, on the other hand, allows you to customize the experience so that those who are faster can complete various parts of the training while others are still coming up to speed.

You really can’t personalize the traditional learning model very much. The classroom approach has more of a one-size-fits-all methodology and that’s one reason why some students find themselves less engaged when they attend this type of training.

Blended learning allows you to serve up content that’s optimized for each individual learner. Some students may pick up on the material faster by being exposed to an online chat room, for example. Others might respond the best by watching streaming videos. You can still take the traditional approach and give lectures in a blended environment, and at the same time customize the experience so that your team is more invested in it.

Traditional models come with a lot of expenses. The instructors need to spend more time in the classroom, the materials need to be updated regularly, and you usually need to spend money renting out the space to train your learners.

Blended learning, on the other hand, allows you to spend much less on trainers and materials. Learners can study the material from anywhere that they have online access and it’s usually quite fast and easy to update digital content.

There’s not a lot of flexibility in a traditional corporate learning environment. The lecture cannot be paused or replayed when the learners are having trouble with a particular concept, for example.

However, in a blended learning environment you can incorporate a wide variety of multimedia options into the lecture to keep your learners engaged. This also gives them the ability to approach the material from multiple angles.

Making adjustments as you go is easy: if you need to pause the program and switch gears, you can do it easily when you are using online blended learning solutions.

Your employees are already accustomed to learning online.

We now have a workforce that has spent the past decade growing learning online. We search for facts on Wikipedia and we study languages by watching YouTube videos. We take online quizzes to see what Friends character we are, and we interact with people all over the world using our mobile devices.

It just makes sense to capitalize on this by delivering content in a way that your learners are used to it. This familiarity will help your learners stay focused on the material and prevent boredom from creeping in.

While there are some metrics that you can track in a traditional learning model, a blended learning environment gives you access to tools that can track many more important data points.

There are tons of online tools available to evaluate learner performance and this information is extremely important if you want to make the most of your training.

Using online tools you can now track things like:


The time it takes employees to respond to individual questions



Vocal inflection and quality on customer calls


All of these tracking solutions have a duel benefit as well: they keep the learners engaged. Engagement is a critical component to delivering high-quality training, and performance tracking simply helps keep your learners “in the game.”

The very nature of work itself has changed quite a bit over the past few years, and as we continue to integrate more tech solutions into our organizations it’s becoming more important than ever that we keep our training methods up to date and relevant.

Here are a few tips to help you implement your next Blended Learning teaching experience.

Decide early on how interactive you want your program.

Some blended learning programs still rely heavily on instructor-led classrooms, while others are 85% or more online. Before you set out to create your program, you should decide how much of it you want to be delivered over the Internet or via multimedia. 

Feedback is critical in a blended learning environment. If you want to optimize your program for results, then you should be looking for opportunities to improve it wherever you can. This might mean something as simply as improving the video narration to help keep the video modules interesting.

We are social animals and this means we are hard-wired to learn in a group environment. Online resources make this easy to implement: you can use forums, chat rooms, webinars, and a wide variety of additional options to inspire your learners to collaborate as they go through the material. 

If you’re interested in learning more about blended learning solutions for your organization, have a look at the Go1 Marketplace. 

You’ll find thousands of free and paid solutions to help you deliver an outstanding learning experience for your teams. 

Why blended learning is the future of workplace learning

eLearning has had a tremendous impact on workplace education over the past decade. Perhaps that's one reason why over 70% of all companies now utilize some form of learning management system. The pharmaceutical industry in particular is one that requires a heavy amount of multimedia instruction in order to train up their employees these days.

As the pharmaceutical industry continues to evolve at an exponential rate, the demand for adequately trained personnel grows right with it. The old way of doing things when it comes to training simply does not work anymore, and taking a one-size-fits-all approach to training is flirting with disaster. There are simply far too many legal and safety issues that must be addressed on a company-by-company basis.

Today we are going to talk about one example of how modern eLearning made a huge impact on the pharmaceutical industry. 

James L. Vesper won the 2015 Dissertation Award for his design-based research study where he designed, developed, and refined an eLearning program for the World Health Organization (WHO). This program was developed to help train employees on handling vaccines and other pharmaceutical products—and to train employees on how to keep these products at the correct temperature through their life cycles.

Vesper started out by evaluated the WHO existing course, which was essentially a “Learning on Wheels” course where 15 individuals would follow three mentors on a bus trip through Turkey. As they crossed the country, they stopped at various healthcare sites and evaluate how these organizations handled their temperature sensitive pharmaceuticals.

This was obviously an expensive process, both in terms of time and financial resources, so there was a clear opportunity for capitalizing on an eLearning-based alternative that could be reused and tailored to the specific needs of employees.

Building The Course and Looking For Opportunities To Optimize

One important thing to keep in mind when building an eLearning course is that you should evaluate your technology and look for opportunities to improve content delivery and performance.

Once you have optimized for these factors in the beginning, then you will have created a course that can be used over and over again, rather than reinventing the wheel every time you try to perform the training manually.

For example, Vesper and his team learned that integrating YouTube clips into the program was a problem: they were actually being geo-blocked for some of the trainees depending on what country they were in.

Another valuable lesson that they learned when building the course was that it's important to keep your trainers and mentors involved during the process.

This is so that you can lead your trainees and help guide them through their training. Just because you are rolling out a technology-based solution, does not mean that you can abandon your people to learn everything on their own!

There were three different versions of the design and development phase of this program. The first phase included an expert review based on a Failure Mode Effects Analysis risk assessment tool.

The second phase revolved around a mentor review, which was what they used to develop their trainer/facilitator guidelines. This was also the phase where the developers were able to create specific learning expectations and eliminate risks.

The final development phase included a “field test” where various individuals from 11 different countries went through the eLearning course. Developers paid specific attention to keeping this test group as diverse as possible by including trainees with different backgrounds in nonprofit, government, and industry.

The reason for this approach is quite simple: this is what the learning population will look like in the pharmaceutical industry across the board, very, very soon. After all, we are living in an increasingly diverse and global workforce.

Vesper came away with 13 design principles once he finished this award-winning program, and one was that it’s important to look for “opportunities of articulation” when creating your course. The idea is that it’s paramount to have your learners demonstrate what they have learned from the program. In this particular case, for example, the learners had to evaluate the vaccine-handling processes of various healthcare organizations in Albania.

So let’s summarize what we can learn from Vesper’s case study:

When building an e-learning solution in the pharmaceutical industry it helps to have an existing program that you are improving on. Starting out from scratch can take more time and resources.

Creating multiple stages of evaluating and refining your training material is important, because this is the only way to identify risks and inefficiencies.

Look for opportunities for your learners to articulate what they have learned. Give them the opportunity to apply the concepts and present their findings to you.

When building your platform, look for opportunities to demonstrate the effectiveness of your processes by addressing existing real-world cases.

How online learning is impacting the pharmaceutical industry

Go1, the education technology startup I co-founded, recently announced a $4 million raise. Inevitably an announcement like this triggers a stream of congratulations and questions on how to fundraise.

I find it somewhat awkward to respond. Raising money should not be seen as an achievement in itself. Instead, hopefully, it is the means to achieve the real work that a business is setting out to do.

Our goal is to transform corporate learning by providing the world’s largest marketplace of courses. Raising investment helps fuel our growth faster than we could through free cash flow – no more, no less.

So rather than address misplaced congratulations, I want to respond to questions on how to fundraise and share some advice to Australian founders.