words Al Woods
Ongoing learning and professional development is an essential part of keeping your healthcare organisation competitive. However, if you are still managing your learning initiatives with pencil and paper, achieving upskilling goals and executing advanced training programs may seem like a long shot.
More organisations are realising that eLearning is a viable solution to the training problems. At the same time, the new solution comes with its own adaptation challenges that organisations must overcome.
In this blog post, we will talk about how you, as a learning administrator at a healthcare organisation, can ensure a seamless transition to eLearning within your organisation:
Find The Right LMS
An LMS (learning management system) is supposed to become a resource for everything training related within your organisation. It will be used to host course material, which will be accessed (through the LMS) by the learners. At the same time, it will be accessed by administrators, managers, and instructional designers to create and upload courses and track learner progress.
In other words, an LMS will perhaps be the most important component of your organisation’s training machine. For this reason, it is important to choose the right one.
Apart from looking at the usual metrics such as user-friendliness and cost, healthcare organisations must go the extra mile to search for healthcare LMS vendors that offer products that are designed to tackle the unique challenges of their industry.
Design Content And Build A Delivery Strategy
While you may already have course material in place, it will need to be updated to take full advantage of your LMS’s capabilities. For instance, a good LMS will allow you to create and deliver course material in the form of short videos. It is upon you, to figure out which part of a specific course will have better learning outcomes when delivered in a video format.
The challenges around course content don’t stop at just digitisation of course material, you must also think about delivery. You must figure out what content is best delivered through the LMS and which parts are best taught in a traditional classroom environment. Next, you must decide how the course content will be consumed within the organisation- which courses will be optional? Which courses will be only available to a certain hierarchy of employees?
Focus On Standardisation
Standardisation of course material and the overall training experience is one of the most noteworthy benefits of the eLearning training approach. However, in order to be able to reap the full advantages, the same attention needs to be paid to the standardisation of course formats, labelling, and layouts. Incorporating standards like elearning scorm can help ensure consistency across courses, as SCORM provides a unified framework that many Learning Management Systems follow.
Not only would this make for a better experience for your learners, but it will also ease the process of reporting. By following a set standard of labelling, obtaining systematic and detailed reports will become much more efficient.
Similarly, looking up the metrics of specific courses and individual students will also become much easier as standardisation will ensure the user knows exactly what they need to search for.
Conclusion
There is no denying that training employees are easier and more efficient with the help of eLearning. However, it is important to remember that mere digitisation cannot turn a new leaf for a poorly designed training strategy.
If you are expecting to improve the effectiveness of your training with eLearning, it is absolutely possible. However, it is first important to identify and eliminate the shortcomings of your existing training approach.
Moreover, when you adopt a new system for training, such as an LMS, it pays to spend time and invest efforts into ensuring your learners understand the ins and outs of the system, and can use it to its full potential.
