I am working with a small organization that wants to offer online learning to about 250 users. They want to link the portal through their intranet and provide a catalog of soft-skills learning. Any ideas on solutions that might be a fit for them?

Hi Andrea... A few important questions that will hopefully raise questions for you to go back to your stakeholders and discuss...

1) Why e-learning? Are you users spread out all over the place? Is there a major difficulty with providing human interaction for their learning opportunities? etc...

2) Why softskills? Which soft skills? Are all of these people lacking these skills? If they're supposed to have them, why not hire people with them? If they're doing basic professional development...why e-learning for softskills?

3) What gap are they trying to address and what led them to believe that soft skills training delivered over their intranet was the appropriate solution?

To summarize...where's the analysis that led to this solution? Is it really a training issue and is the intranet the most appropriate delivery mode?

Your clients will appreciate being steered in the appropriate direction - particularly if it means saving resources and yielding results. Don't take another step towards their solution until you can see the analysis (or perform the analysis) that confirms it is the appropriate solution.

Hi Andrew,

You may want to try Metamorphosis. It is a simple to use product for subject matter experts.

www.easyauthoring.com

Andrea-

Listen carefully to the Fanatic.

Research conducted by the National Training Laboratories identified average training retention rates by method of training/teaching used:
Teach Others or Use Immediately 90%
Practice by doing 75%
Discussion Group 50%
Demonstration 30%
Audio-visual 20%
Reading Alone 10%
Lecture 5%

In many cases, on-line training is nothing more than "reading alone" delivered electronically. The ease of delivery makes it very attractive but that isn't what training is about.

How well can students apply what they have learned? Without a chance to discuss, get feedback, and practice the skill (all typically available in a live class), there will be very little learning ("changed behavior") in your students. Then, the execs will ask you why they spent all that money with so little results.

If your only answer is, "everybody's doing on-line training", it will not be a career enhancing experience.

**** Grimes

Grimes,

Be careful about stats like that. They've been largely shown to be unsupported and misleading.

In fact here's a full page of Will Thalheimer's findings on the subject (see the final/earliest post on the page for the most detail).