Online Compliance Training is the New Black

With today's economy not looking so hot, classroom-based (or face-to-face) training is not always the most cost-effective or feasible option for many companies. More recently it is compliance training that's moved online for a number of reasons, one of the most persuasive being the ability to maintain an accurate record of employee training completion and results.

Compliance training is put in place to educate employees about laws, regulations and general company standards. It will hopefully reduce the risk of legal issues resulting from wrong-doing by an employee. Evidence that your trainees have completed this training is often imperative to maintaining a defense against legal action and it can ensure that legal responsibility sits squarely on the shoulders of your employee, not the company.

A large percentage of Litmos customers use our online training platform to deliver compliance training messages to employees, as well as other more specialized courses. Compliance training can be anything from sexual harassment to Occupational Health and Safety, in the office, or on a construction site.

Required online training does not have to be synonymous with 'boring' either. Online training courses can always be made more exciting by incorporating varied media like videos, Flash, PowerPoint presentations, audio, surveys and assessments. There is a wealth of information on here to help you design interesting courses, create engaging training videos, and build PowerPoint presentations that won't put your trainees to sleep. Take a little time to check out some of our blog topics listed on the right side of this page.

@Schnicker

Share Your Litmos Courses with the World

You'll notice on your personal course listing page that we've provided a "Share" button at the bottom of your course listings.

When you click on this button you can instantly share a link to your courses via Facebook, Twitter, Digg, MySpace and a number of other social destinations which means you can spread the word about your courses even further across the globe! This is the perfect tool for everyone selling courses online.

Here at Litmos this is just one more way that we're working to help our customers publicize, advertise and monetize their hard work and course creations!

@Schnicker

Litmos Course Listing Widget

As a follow on from yesterday's post which introduced our latest new customer feature - personal course listing pages - here's some further detail on how to incorporate your personal course listing page in to a website or blog.

Can I insert my course listing page in to my blog or website?
You can! Check our Help Guide for all the instructions you need to get your Litmos course listing widget up on your site or blog.

• Course Listing Widget for your Website
  
• Customizing the Litmos Course Listing Widget

Easy!

@Schnicker

Advertise and Publicize Courses in Litmos

Until now the only way to advertise the courses Litmos customers had created and wanted to sell was via their own website.

But things have changed.

Today, we've released a feature which now gives each and every one of our customers their own personal course listing page! But it doesn't end there. Each page is Search Engine Optimized (SEO), which means it has been built in the best possible way to be found by potential students and trainees that use search engines like Google.

How do I set it up?
No need! If you're a Litmos customer with eCommerce enabled on your account, then your course listing page is automatically generated and populated with those eCommerce enabled courses in your account. To take a look at your personal course listing page just go to:

http://your-unique-web-address.litmos.com/courses/

('your unique web address' is the unique login url you chose on sign up i.e. your company name)

Litmos customers who do not have eCommerce enabled on their accounts yet will need to take a quick look at our Help Guide to set it up, then you too will have a course listing page.

The reason why we've built this new feature is to provide our Litmos customers with an effective way to advertise and publicize the courses that they spend so much time and effort creating. It's often just about getting the word out there to potential students, and this is just one way to do it.

The next few blog posts will outline more ways to make the course listing page work for you..

@Schnicker

5 Things I Learned from Edward de Bono

Last week, in a stroke of luck, I won a ticket from Flokka (online blog community for women in business) to see Edward de Bono speak at a half-day seminar.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Edward de Bono is a very well-known 'Maltese physician, author, inventor and consultant who's the originator of the term 'lateral thinking'' (Wikipedia). He is best known for coming up with creative ways to approach the same problem and tricks to sharpen your thinking.

Now, there's only so much he could cover in a few hours, so really I felt he just scratched the surface of a bunch of his ideas. Probably the most useful part was all the exercises he had us do as a group on each table, which really worked to emphasize the different ways to view and think about a topic or problem.

I've skimmed over my notes and these are the 5 main points that I took away from his seminar:

1. Creative thinking is a learned skill, not a talent
   
   
2. Always sell the benefits - not the novelty - of your idea
   
   
3. Understand the values of the people already buying your product and you're ahead of the market (In response to my question - what question should a small but solid brand be asking itself to draw out the characteristic that makes it exceptional in a competitive market?)
   
   
4. 90% of the mistakes in thinking - outside technical matters - are mistakes of perception. The rest are mistakes of logic. (David Perkins)
   
   
5. If you're looking for creative recession ideas go to www.debonopost.com
   

The final participant question of the day was:

"What do you see as the next phase for us i.e. agricultural, industrial and so forth?"

To which Dr de Bono's response was:

"Complete robotization - but we'd have to teach them some manners..."

@schnicker

How SaaS is Changing the Franchise Industry

The most successful businesses invest a lot of time and money in achieving brand consistency, whether it be in their marketing or sales message, or in how their employees actually represent and embody the company's values.

Geographically disperse organizations have more of a challenge maintaining brand consistency because although the offices all share the same brand, it is generally managed centrally from a head office. Franchise businesses and retail chains suffer this exact problem by their very nature with many outlets spread out across a city, a country or internationally, often with each one owned by a different person.

Coming back to brand management, you can imagine that the chance of a franchise brand becoming diluted or distorted along the way is actually quite high because of the number of people involved and the geographic distance. Yet the promise behind the franchise business is to provide customers with a consistent experience no matter which store they may enter. Therefore, brand consistency is paramount.

Lately we're noticing an increase in interest from franchise businesses in our product. It turns out that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products are proving to be just the solution that Franchisers have been looking for whether it be a CRM, accounting package or online training system. Basically any system that centralizes data and facilitates fast communication helps franchisers to manage the many franchisees and their staff.

On further discussions we're finding that their interest in SaaS products is for the following reasons which all make a lot of sense:

• Ease of account set up and maintenance
  
• Low cost - pay for what you use each month
• Scalable system
• Connectivity between all levels
  
• Accessible from any Internet connection
• Zero infrastructure

Look out for more franchises making the switch to SaaS products as they drive brand consistency and improve team collaboration.

Are Your Trainees Logging in to their Online Training?

Have you ever wondered whether a trainee is logging in to their online training account, but just avoiding doing their courses? Or maybe you're curious to know if they have ever actually logged in? In this case there may be a valid reason why they haven't - maybe their login activation email is stuck in a spam filter or maybe their email address was entered incorrectly.

Today we've released a new feature which identifies those trainees that have never logged in to your training system, so that Trainers can follow them up and find out why.


This screen shot shows the Trainers view of the People tab, with a list of users that have been set up in a training account. Now note the red circular icon on the right side of the lines associated with John Paul and Karen Smith. In your account this icon will actually be flashing on and off to draw your attention and notify you that this trainee has never logged in to their account.

At this point you have the choice of re-sending the same login information out to the trainee again (with one simple click on the red icon), or you can follow up with the trainee to find out why they have not logged on.

Easy!

@schnicker

Social Learning Poll Results

I just want to share some interesting results I found from a Social Learning poll, designed by participants in the Masie Center Social Learning Lab and Seminar and done March 12th, 2009. It was sent out to Learning TRENDS readers - Global Learning Professionals, to which they received 1069 responses.

It's a great snapshot of where organizations are at with feelings on social learning and plans for implementation. Here's a link to the results, complete with comments from Elliott Masie:

Social Learning Survey Results

Learning Management Systems Turn Social

It looks like Web 2.0 online training and eLearning systems have reached another plateau and they're in need of the next stage of development: the integration of social and collaborative tools to enhance the learning process.

From a technical point of view I find this very exciting because historically Learning Management Systems (LMS) offer a relatively static one-way learning experience from content --> learner. The bundling together of what I consider to be more 'fun' social concepts like wikis, blogs, social networks and microblogs in with an LMS not only transforms it in to a more dynamic offering for teacher/learner, it also gives the learner a voice to contribute, share their knowledge and become part of a collaborative learning program. It's that idea of 'transforming people from content readers into publishers'(Wikipedia).

A recent study I read, which I can't seem to find again for the life of me, (will update this post when I find it again) showed that people using social media enjoy sharing knowledge and answering people's questions, not because they selfishly enjoy knowing the answer, but because in sharing they help educate and raise the level of knowledge of their connections. I find that to be a very hopeful message because it supports the notion that people will happily and actively engage in knowledge sharing if given the opportunity. Maybe people won't have to hate training?

Now all of this resulted in the team at Litmos having a long, hard brainstorming session a wee while back to nail down the next steps in development for our LMS. It's like the barriers have come down and a new era is unfolding where online learning can become a two-way process because the concept of social, collaborative learning is now being endorsed by many learning professionals such as Harold Jarche here in this quote "Successful collaborative efforts are the measure of a successful organization."

We've got some exciting developments on the way to compliment our current formula for course delivery, so watch this space as we prepare to incorporate ideas of knowledge sharing and collaborative learning.

@schnicker

Picture courtesy of cartoonstock.com

5 Great Social Learning Resources

It's been talked about for years, but 'Social Learning' is more recently becoming the big buzz word in learning, and you should probably pay attention because it's being pegged as the next generation of eLearning (heavily debated of course, as is everything in learning).

My definition of 'social learning' as I understand it is learning that takes place through the use of a collection of web-based tools like wikis, blogs, and social networks which build community and conversation around a topic encouraging a collaborative knowledge sharing environment. There's a fair amount of literature coming out regarding what it actually means for learning, how effective it is and will be, security considerations and many other interesting arguments for and against.

I've just chosen 5 recent social learning resources /articles to share that I've found really interesting of late (in no particular order):

1. Jane Hart of C4LPT on Social Learning


2. SLQOTD - Social Learning Question of the Day (read how it works here on the Engaged Learning blog)


3. ASDT ISPI Social Learning Workshop - Dave Wilkins
   Overcoming the Top10 Objections to Social Learning - Dave Wilkins /Kevin Jones
   


4. Effective Knowledge Sharing - Harold Jarche
   
   
5. A Practical Guide to Implementing Web 2.0 (AKA Social Networking Tools) in Your Organization - Dave Pollard (also What's Next After Knowledge Management for some background on the 'problem' social tools solve)
   

That's not really 5, it's more like 7, and then there's such an amazing web of links within these articles that you really could be busy reading for days on end. Enjoy!

@schnicker