I've Got that Yearning for eLearning

With gas at $4+ per gallon, commuting to school and work is becoming a burden.  But you have to do it.  Or so you think. What if you could wake up in the morning, drink a cup of coffee, and learn all of your company’s new policies and procedures while never changing out of your Lone Ranger footy pajamas?  What if you could go home from work and simply turn on the computer rather than fight another round of traffic to get to a college campus?

You can, thanks to the development of eLearning – the most innovative tool in education.  With the software available today, you can create interactive user manuals, seminars, and classroom simulations.

New Learning Experiences

The goal of eLearning software is to simulate a physical learning experience through the use of images, video, audio, and interactive tools and assessments through an electronic course.  A typical eLearning experience might consist of a slideshow of written information paired with pictures and video.  While reading and viewing the information, you hear the sound of narration synced to the slideshow.  The narrator enlightens you to ideas that are not expressed in the writing and expounds upon existing text and images.  Sounds like last week’s seminar, right?  Not quite. 

What makes eLearning so unique is that it offers a hands-on approach to learning experiences.  As you click through a course, you can discover embedded windows that contain additional information that is specific to the subject you are studying.

Imagine you are learning how to repair a washing machine.  You see the washing machine as a whole, but you need to know what the timing unit looks like.  You click on a button over the timing unit, and a secondary window pops up with a detailed image of the timing unit complete with a definition and other vital information.  The designer might even include a video of a technician explaining the wiring of a timing unit in the secondary window—all without leaving the page.

Simplified Evaluation Processes  

One of the greatest features of eLearning is the ability to assess users’ comprehension.  When creating an eLearning course, the designer can include a variety of interactive assessments.  When users complete an assessment, they can view their own scores, but if a designer includes the course in a Learning Management System (LMS), then administrators or instructors can also view users’ scores. 

An LMS can contain entire curricula for universities, seminars, and tutorials for businesses, or even user manuals for individual distributors.  The days of distance restraints keeping students from learning or businesses from reaching customers are over!

Cost-Effective Solutions

Typical seminars and workshops can be costly and time-consuming.  First, you have to hire an expert. Then, you have to cut production time in order to bring everyone together so you don’t have to pay the expert for multiple sessions.  Not only does that decrease efficiency, but that missed time has to be made up somewhere. And if you were to conduct a comprehension assessment, you would have to pay extra for supplies and the added time.

Why not skip all the hassle and implement eLearning solutions instead?  It’s efficient, affordable, and most importantly, effective. 

Written by: Johnathan Cunningham, ProEdit

Contact us and let ProEdit's experts help implement an eLearning solution for your company.