Profile @TrainingOnlineE
FREE online learning or e-Learning: What does it mean?
“e-Learning” is an expression used to describe the more and more common phenomenon of education making use of intelligent technologies and the Internet. There are lots of possibilities we can imagine under the term “online learning”: from multimedia training courses available online, through videoconferences, to electronic communication of the teachers and their students.
With the use of online training, you can save on many aspects, such as for example:
- the teachers' time,
- the money you would have to pay to rent a classroom,
- the students' money paid on travel expenses,
- the money you would have to pay to print the material.
Apart from that, you are giving your students the unique opportunity to set their own working pace.
Use online education to train your employees
At the first glance it may seem that the online learning method is only useful in terms of long-distance education of an individual. This deduction, however, would be quite misleading. Online Learning platforms are being used with huge success by companies to train their employees.It has proved especially advantageous and effective in cases when the employees are distributed far both from each other and from the company.
Reducing the costs related to training of newcomer employees
The online training method can also help you to reduce the costs related to training of newcomer employees, called Onboarding. This aspect is especially interesting for companies with high employee fluctuation, such as for example companies specialized in the IT area, which at the same time are the companies which are most likely to create the ideal environment for training their employees online. Thanks to the reasons listed above many e-learning systems have become an integral part of many important intranets and extranets.
Optimizing the onboarding process and other important advantages
Many researches and studies have confirmed the importance of the contribution of online eLearning software to various areas. Marketing results are being improved by testing and analyzing the employees' compulsory knowledge and hard skills. Analyzing and comparing the knowledge desired with the real knowledge of your employees may help you understand your employees' needs and knowing which areas you need to focus on during the training, and in this way you can increase the profitability by up to 30%. By optimizing the onboarding process of your employees, on the other hand, up to 40% of the costs related can be saved and, at the same time, thanks to well-organized HR onboarding your employees' productivity increases from the first day.
e-Learning itself brings general savings in education (regardless of the user or the topic).
Payback of ROI investments with FREE online training
The following paragraphs compare the costs invested with the financial outcome. ROI – Return On Investment – measures the amount of return on an investment relative to the investment's cost.
This is how eLearning ROI can be calculated:
ROI = ((Total income - costs)/costs) * 100
This formula is traditionally used to calculate the ROI by accountants in big companies, where the individual constituents of the equation can be defined easily. In case of online e-learning, though, things get more complicated.
As we can see in the formula, ROI can be influenced in two ways:
• by cutting down the costs,
• by increasing the income.
The costs are quite easy to determine, it is the incomes which cause complications. This, however, doesn't mean that ROI can't be used and calculated in the online e-training area.
ROI simply demonstrates the advantages of e-learning: the costs saved and the incomes increasing.
In Training-Online.eu we believe that there are four principal areas where online e-learning can reduce the costs and increase the incomes:
- By using the LMS – Learning Management System – significant savings can be achieved in administrative (from 20% to 50%) and content production (up to 40%).
- Saving money paid on travel expenses, printed material, renting the classroom and all the other costs related to the traditional way of training. With online education, there is no more need for any of them.
- Increasing your employees' productivity which is usually measured by calculating the cost per employee. Numerous studies have confirmed that employee productivity rose by up to 10% while using online teaching methods.
- Other non-quantifiable advantages, such as the satisfaction of your clients and employees, your employees' dedication to the company etc. These values are very hard to calculate and incorporate them to your ROI analysis. Their presence, though, is obvious in everyday life and business of the company.
