Social learning is becoming an increasingly popular element of organizations’ learning strategies, as it supports the 20% of the 70:20:10 model focused on learning through relationships with others. However, many businesses aren’t making the most of this valuable approach to learning. Our easy recipe will help you focus your efforts in the right way to ensure your social learning initiative is a success.

Ingredients

• Enterprise social network

• Internal marketing campaign

• Engaged learner community

• Leaders to demonstrate best practice

• Social learning ambassadors

• Integration with other systems

• Stakeholder buy-in

Preparation

• Research how your learners already use social media

• Create materials to promote the social platform internally

• Ensure the platform fully integrates with all other relevant systems (including your Totara Learn LMS and/or HR systems)

Method

• Set up accounts for everyone on the new social platform

• Ensure everyone has the information and training they need to use it effectively

• Create groups and set up custom streams for more targeted, personalized learning experiences

• Reward active users with badges, a special status on the platform (e.g. ‘top contributor’) and recognition from managers

Serve and enjoy!

• An informal learning experience fully embedded into working life

• More efficient learning as employees share expertise for faster, more targeted answers to their questions

• A cost-effective way to ensure information is distributed throughout the organization despite geographical and practical constraints

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Onboarding employees can be time consuming and difficult. We’ve created a simple recipe that runs from the team introduction all the way through to the new hire’s first day. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to employee onboarding, but here are a few ingredients that can help.

Ingredients

• Onboarding plan

• Awareness: culture & values of the business

• Team introductions

• Compliance training

• Mentor in the process

• Access to systems

• Open mind and inquisitive attitude

• Social inclusion

• Reporting mechanism

Preparation

• Build out the onboarding process with HR/L&D stakeholders

• Share your video on company vision and values

• Setup compliance training LMS prior to start date

Method

• Meet the team

• Migrate valuable data/content over to your new LMS, whether this is Totara Learn or similar solution

• Training at the point of need

• Use gamification with badges, rewards or other fun ways of motivating your learners.

Serve and enjoy!

• Instant productivity as your workforce knows how to perform the first exchange right after they onboard.

• Efficiency as employees and partners to start to own tasks quickly or complete sales successfully.

• Increased revenue as once your workforce is onboarded you will have more employees, working with you for longer, doing a better job.

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It can be a nightmare ensuring that your employees are up to date with their mandatory compliance training. Poor take-up can be down to inconvenience, time constraints, irrelevant or poorly delivered modules, and even lack of interest. Following this recipe should help to improve your organization’s mandatory compliance statistics, which should afford you greater peace of mind.

Ingredients

• Flexible and scalable LMS platform

• Instructional Designer

• Compliance Officer

• Reference materials on managing risks

Preparation

Carry out a risk assessment to understand, identify and manage risks within your organization. Publish policies for handling these risks. Send out a survey to the workforce to ascertain current compliance knowledge.

Method

• Create compliance modules detailing risks specific for each team or job role. These can include employee health & safety, environmental, regulatory, and esafety.

• Add video or storyboard real-life scenarios for more effective immersion. This allows employees to use skills and knowledge quickly.

• Branching scenarios allow learners to make decisions and see the impact of their choices.

• Make the modules engaging by including interactive elements such as quizzes and surveys.

• To motivate the learner, add gamification components such as leader boards, badges and rewards.

• Where appropriate, require online assessment.

• Set up tracking to show an employee’s progress.

• Schedule reminders when it’s time to refresh a module.

Serve & Enjoy!

By making compliance training relevant and engaging using an LMS like Totara, more employees should take up the modules, particularly when automatic reminders let them know when more learning is required.

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Shoppers are savvier than ever, coming into your stores knowing more about your products than your associates do. According to a report by AdWeek, 81% of shoppers conduct online research on a product before a purchase. It is essential that you support your associates with training and digital tools to become product gurus so that they can drive more in-store sales.

Ingredients

• Flexible and scalable LMS (choose open source, such as Totara Learn, for the best quality)

• Instructional Designer (ID)

• Product details: components, materials, usage

Preparation

Compile a list of everyone in your extended enterprise network, from original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to potential customers. Everyone on the list needs to become a product guru.

Method

• Assign someone to compile in-depth knowledge of all products and share with the ID

• Ensure learning is engaging through using:

  • Interactive videos and other visually rich media to aid retention

  • Quizzes to consolidate learning

  • Social learning platforms such as forums for collaboration

• Enable access to product modules anytime, anywhere, using mobile devices

• (optional) Provide a phone app that allows learning to continue even when offline.

• Make the product modules available to your entire extended enterprise network: OEM, channel partners, suppliers, distributors, dealers, customer experience operatives, and customers.

Serve & Enjoy!

By ensuring that your associates understand a product inside and out, shoppers will have more confidence in your products and brand.

We want nothing more than to see individuals succeed by implementing the right learning options. Contact us for a free consultation on how to improve your soft skills and product knowledge training. 

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Commenting on the new version in a press release for v2.6, Richard Wyles, Chief Executive of Totara Learning Solutions, said “We’ve reached the point where, in terms of feature-set, Totara LMS has caught up or surpassed the previously more fancied platforms. Our mission to offer better value and freedom may sound simple but we believe it’s really important. ”

As one of the newer learning management systems on the market, Totara LMS was made in line with the needs of modern business and on-the-go learning from the outset. The frequent and numerous improvements to Totara are enhancing what was already a great LMS. An excellent core platform, plus this commitment to continuous improvement of it is the reason why at Webanywhere we chose Totara LMS as one of our preferred solutions for corporate clients.

As a Totara LMS platinum partner, we have helped clients across diverse industries to enhance training, CPD and talent management for tens of thousands of staff.

Please contact us if you would like to learn more about how we can help you to improve staff training and talent management within your organization.

Further reading:

More information and case studies for Totara LMS solutions from Webanywhere.

The full press release for v2.6 of Totara LMS Enterprise edition.

Visit the Webanywhere Workplace Learning main page for the full range of staff training, CPD and talent management solutions offered by Webanywhere.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Having your employees undergo an extremely dull compliance training elearning course can put them off online learning forever, especially if it’s their first elearning experience.

To prevent this from happening, you can improve your compliance training program to make it shorter and less yawn-inducing. The faster employees get through the compliance training program, the sooner they can get started with the more fun and interesting stuff – being productive and enhancing their skills.

So how do you go about creating a better compliance training program?

Make it short, but sweet

Making all your employees take the same compliance program will mean they have to go through a ton of material that is irrelevant to their specific job roles. Not only will this bore them immensely, but it will also mean it will take them longer to finish the program. This wasted time could instead be spent on productive tasks that benefit your organization. Reduce, reduce, reduce!

You should create different (shorter) compliance training courses that focus on the issues that can arise in certain roles and at certain levels. If your organization is international, you should also localize the use of language and make sure that you only include material that is geographically relevant.

Make it fun, but not too much fun

Many compliance training topics are not very interesting – there is not much you can do about that. That doesn’t mean you can’t make compliance training a bit more fun though.

Including a touch of humor within content can go a long way to get learners more engaged during the more tedious parts of the training.

Make sure you don’t overdo it, however. You still need the learners to be focused on the actual subject matter, so you don’t want them to be distracted too much.

Make it effective – use relatable scenarios and debate gray areas

Compliance issues are not black and white. There is often a big gray area in between the regulations and laws, which make up the most interesting part of compliance training.

Don’t just teach the black and white rules, but also talk about the gray areas in your training, using real-world scenarios that your students can relate to.

This will make your training more interesting and much more useful to your employees. It will also help your organization better avoid compliance issues.

A social learning element delivered through elearning can facilitate discussion of the gray areas, and lively debate that can make the experience memorable.

Make it separate from other learning

If your compliance training does have a real limit to how interesting you can make it or how much budget you have to make the content more engaging, make it clear that it is distinct from your ongoing skills development opportunities. Don’t place regulatory and legal compliance in amongst your other training – even brand it differently. This way, when your staff won’t subconsciously engage with future training and elearning opportunities with less enthusiasm than they deserve.

Some compliance training will never be exciting, but using the tips outlined above, you can at least make it tolerable, and maybe even fun! Make sure that your employees are aware that there is a lot more interesting and career-enhancing content available on your LMS learning management system and create a culture of learning within your organization. 

Can we help you?

Webanywhere have helped hundreds of organizations worldwide to implement elearning that delivers fast, engaging and highly effective compliance training. Why not contact us at Webanywhere for a no-obligations discussion of your needs?

Learn more about our online compliance training solutions within the Workplace Learning section of our website.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Make sure your goals are clear

It’s impossible to choose the right LMS if you are not fully clear about what your organization’s short- and long-term learning goals are. Once you have determined these goals and a clear organization-wide learning strategy has been developed, you can start looking for an LMS that will help you achieve your goals.

Talk to your learning and development team

Your learning and development team will have to work with your new LMS day in and day out, so make sure that you involve them in the selection process. Ask them about their needs and goals. If they are very technical, they may want an LMS that allows them a lot of flexibility in customising courses and learning portals. If they are non-technical, a simple user interface and good documentation will be important aspects to look for in the new LMS.

Talk to the users

The implementation of a new LMS can become a massive failure if your employees hate using it. Talk to your employees about their learning and development needs. Let them try demos of the platforms you are considering and take surveys about what they liked and disliked about them.

A user-friendly LMS that helps create an enjoyable learning experience is crucial for the success of your learning strategy.

Consider the vendor’s specific experience

A new LMS vendor may offer a range of unique functionalities that sound very exciting, but if they have no experience in your industry and/or do not have any clients that are a similar size to your organization, you may want to steer clear for now.

Practical experience in setting up an LMS at a similarly sized organization in your industry can be invaluable when encountering specific issues.

You should also do some research about how satisfied past clients of the vendor are. You can search for reviews of the proposed learning platform online or ask the vendor cor customer case studies and testimonials.

Consider the support that is offered by the LMS vendor

You will need ample support during and after your LMS implementation, especially if you are rolling out a new LMS in a large organization. Research the support that is included and additional support options that the LMS vendor provides and how much they cost.

Consider freedom and flexibility

You may think that you have identified the best LMS provider and the perfect learning management system (LMS) based on your checklist. However, what about if you’re not satisfied 1 year, 3 years or more down the line? A proprietary LMS means that you are buying into both the provider AND the learning management system, so if you want to change one, you need to change BOTH. This is where an open source LMS, such as Totara, can be a great choice, because with this comes a multitude of providers who can work with and further develop the system. The move to a new LMS provider should be quite seamless.

Finally – don’t compromise

Ideally, at the end of your internal consultation and needs analysis process, you will have come up with an LMS checklist, with features and requirements that you can then tick off as you talk with a shortlist of elearning companies.

Make sure that all of your current, future and possible needs are able to be met by your choice of both learning management system and provider.

Related Pages and Posts

Open source elearning with Totara LMS.

Webanywhere Named as a Top LMS Provider for Corporate Training

Please contact us at Webanywhere if you would like to discuss your current and future learning needs.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Intro to open source

What is open source? In essence, it means that you are able to edit the source code as much as you want. You have control over the code, and can change it to fit your particular needs. This gives you unlimited freedom, provided you know what you’re doing.

Is open source free? Many open source solutions are completely free, while others offer a free license but have a small charge for support or other services, and some open source solution providers charge a small licensing fee. Essentially, open source isn’t necessarily “no cost”, but it is free in the sense that you are free to do what you want with the source code.

On the other hand, proprietary software means you are not allowed to make changes to or even access the code. In some cases the software might be free and may charge for support or upgraded versions, a sort of “freemium” package, but in most they have licensing fees just to install the software.

LMS Features

So if you can get some open source solutions for free and proprietary software has licensing fees, why would you ever buy proprietary? For the most part, proprietary software has many more features available out of the box. LMS vendors spend millions of dollars trying to make their LMS the best on the market. All that money being invested needs to be earned back via subscriptions from you the customer. With open source you get all the basic functionality and all those extras can be installed as plugins. Plugins are created by a community of users so there is no need to charge subscriptions to support the cost of development. For example, Totara has over a thousand plugins available to easily enhance your LMS, and you only need to install the ones you need.

Cherry-picking the functionality you need by choosing appropriate plugins can often make the LMS more streamlined.

Let’s say you are trying to setup an ecommerce site to sell some great online courses you are developing. Does it matter that they have great modules to track face to face training, or have performance appraisals or talent management? What if your focus is training internal employees – do you need all of the different ecommerce features? Maybe the way they designed the registration process doesn’t fit the way you want your site to work; too bad, that’s the way it is because their top clients want it like that. Is there a feature you really do like? Guess what – it is getting an overhaul next month to meet the needs of the majority of clients that don’t use the system the way you do and you will need to rethink how you use the system.

This is why open source always wins in my book. In most cases, the system is free and does not have per-user license costs. It doesn’t have all the features a proprietary system has out of the box, but since it is open source that is easy to change by installing plugins or creating new features. You have the ability to make the system do exactly what you want. You only pay for the development you need – not all the extra bells and whistles you are never going to use.

There is also typically a community of users making changes to the system, who share their new features for you to download and add to the system.

Not a programmer? Not sure where to start? Not a problem. This is where Webanywhere comes in – we can take that out of the box open source software and make it do exactly what you need it to with our bespoke development services.

Stability

What happens when your LMS vendor goes belly up? What if you are not getting the customer service you deserve and pay for? Well, with proprietary software you are out of luck – it is now time to do a costly migration to another LMS.

With open source, all you need to do is pick up the phone and call another development firm to come in and help you out, and they can pick up right where you left off. One word of warning is when selecting a company to work on your open source software, make sure that they are developing plugins for you and are not changing the core code of the software. If the core code is being changed then you will have a hard time switching vendors and you will not be able to upgrade the base software without having to redo all those changes again.

In my experience, there are only a few rare cases where you need to change the core code and they come with a good amount of warning and sign offs before I would even consider it.

Price

Some people think that doing software development will be too costly and it will be cheaper to go with proprietary software. This might be true in year one, maybe even year two, but after that you should see the savings that come rolling in.

A typical LMS can cost between $20-$50 per user per year. The $20 ones will not meet all your needs and the $50 ones will have so many extras you don’t need it makes your head spin. Say you have 1,000 staff that you will be training, that is an annual cost of $20,000 – $50,000. For the same price as your year 1 subscription you can get a custom designed, open source LMS to meet your needs and that works the way you want it to.

Since there are no user license fees in the years to follow, you will be saving all that money you would have been throwing away on your proprietary subscription. Just imagine – if you have 10,000 users – how much you will save. We have created LMS solutions that host up to 1.4 million users; I don’t even want to think what a proprietary LMS would have cost for that one!

Summary

So why choose an open source LMS? With all of the above in mind, why would you ever go with a proprietary LMS if you are a large organization looking to minimize cost and future-proof your learning platform?

If you have less than a hundred users, it is probably more cost effective to go with an off the shelf solution. Compare prices and see for yourself – just keep in mind what will happen in year two and beyond. Maybe you have a short term training need. If you only need the LMS for a few months it is not worth building your own.

I have yet to see a convincing reason to go with a proprietary LMS over Open Source besides those two, but if you have one please give me a call or email, I would love to hear about it!

Related Webanywhere Pages

Our Workplace Learning Solutions – helping you make the most of the latest open source software to transform learning and development in your organization.

Further Reading

An open source definition – detailed by the Open Source Initiative.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Tech-savvy

As most sectors of industry now rely heavily on technology, it’s no surprise that the modern workforce needs to be technically proficient. And this doesn’t simply mean being able to use Word and Outlook. Most Generation Y and younger will be completely comfortable and proficient at finding information on Google, posting on social media and manipulating images and video. Many will have experience of blogging and setting up a website using a platform like WordPress. As they have typically grown up with notebook, tablet and smartphone, acquiring more in-depth technical knowledge should be straightforward. But being tech-savvy is not enough.

Learning Skills

Critical thinking is vital for today’s organizations. The ability to think logically and analytically about a problem then evaluate the outcome is one side of the coin. In addition, it’s important to combine this with creative thinking, which uses techniques like brainstorming to find a solution, however unconventional. It’s like using both sides of the brain or you could say it’s using both heart and head to solve a problem. Once a solution is found, an employee needs to be able to collaborate with others on strategies for implementation. It is crucial that each member of staff can actively listen and effectively communicate both orally and in writing. The value of this trio in the 21st century skills list cannot be overstated.

Life Skills

In today’s volatile market, being adaptable can keep you in a job. Many job descriptions now are quite open and ‘fuzzy’ to allow for new responsibilities to be absorbed, which may not necessarily involve higher remuneration. Companies are looking for people who are self-directing and display leadership skills; having entrepreneurial characteristics would be a definite bonus. Being a ‘people person’ is useful, as excellent social skills mean easier liaising with peers, superiors and customers. An intellectual curiosity and desire for lifelong learning should be high on the checklist for HR departments. Companies should draw up and agree a CPD plan with new starters, which should be tailored to their personal requirements and help them with career advancement. No one wants a job where there is zero chance for advancement.

Skill Development

Any shortfall in skills can be rectified by mentoring and effective training using a VLE to deliver relevant content such as problem solving, language skills, etc. The simplest and most effective way of delivering a customised training module is via an open source learning platform such as Totara. A flexible elearning program allows your workforce to train in their own time from home, using their own devices. An LMS learning management system is also important for CPD, so managers can see engagement and progress. As knowledge and skills are developed, this will raise self-esteem and motivate employees to be more ambitious and productive. The ultimate aim for all schools should be to provide adequate 21st century skills training for all students, however in the meantime, organizations may have to become more invested in bringing their workforce up to speed.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Mediation

Mediation is a process where a neutral third party will structure a process to facilitate a settlement between the participants. The mediator is impartial and shouldn’t give advice or offer opinion on what might happen if the issue went to court. He/She should help both sides realise that coming to a mutually acceptable solution is preferable to a protracted legal process. This should mean both sides walk away satisfied, with dignity intact. The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service in the UK (an independent and impartial organization) has seen the level of company disputes requiring legal or tribunal action has dropped significantly, as more companies are using dispute resolution. Because of these statistics, more firms are sending one or more members of staff to undergo accredited training courses, as the cost is more than recouped through resolving issues quickly.

Human Resources

As HR directors and managers are concerned with employee welfare, they are the most logical choice for becoming qualified mediators. Indeed many larger organizations are already seeing this as a ‘best practice’ choice. Mediation is most effective when it’s brought it at the early stages of a conflict, which requires effective communication and reporting from line managers to HR. Unfortunately, it’s possible for disputes to be overlooked in larger corporations, which is where skill training for the wider workforce would be advantageous.

Mediation Skills in the Workplace

Basic, key mediation skills are typically delivered as one-day training seminars, which could be conducted in-house or externally. If an organization has a qualified mediator, they could potentially create and deliver the content using a flexible learning management system such as Totara Learn. As part of the training requires students to take part in mock mediations where they assume the role of participant and mediator, the seminar must be interactive. If you have trainees on different sites, the mockups could take place via Skype, which removes the need for everyone to be physically present for training. It’s also important for employees who completed the training to keep up with CPD, as it’s easy for unused skills to become weak. This could be effectively delivered in micro-learning chunks, enabling employees to access content at a time and place convenient for them.

If more managers understand the benefits of using even rudimentary mediation skills to diffuse tense situations before they escalate, it should lead to an increased feeling of wellbeing, which in turn could lead to a more contented and productive workforce.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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