Hi everyone,

Can e-learning be used as an effective training tool for employees?

For some employees, depending on the design and the purpose of the learning and whether or not it's clear what the purpose is, it can be. But...what is "effective" really? What are your criteria?

Of course, it depends on design (most of us have also been to ineffective classroom training). Design determines effectiveness, not medium.

To that end, I did want to note a strategy that works effectively with many skills that aren't ideal for online learning (i.e. Sales, Management...). In the end, I truly believe sales skills development only truly effective with mentoring/shadowing with experienced folks observing and coaching real interactions.

However, the online component can teach the basics (sales cycles, tactics), which optimizes the time spent mentoring (coaching/mentoring). Online can teach tactics, but only live mentoring can check tact

Although online might not be able to get the skill set to 100%, it can lay the foundation so the time of a productive resource (manager, experienced salesperson) is optimized and focused on where a live resource is needed versus using that resource to deliver basics.

Home Depot is getting ready to roll this kind of Hr program out. Depending on accesibility, it would seems like it would be useful. That's because most managers can't answer associates benefit questions, so they refer them to the HR mgr. That person not always be there.

I recently took an online marketing class offered by our company and followed it up with the live marketing class version of the same material. I was researching to see if I saw a significant difference in effectiveness. I have to say that from a content perspective, both classes covered the same material and my personal learning style is very comfortable with online learning, my own pace, thorough ability to reivew the content until I'm comfortable, but I really thought this content was much better live as the dialog and participation from the attendees really added a depth to the expereince that I didn't get in the online course. Overall, I would say online is good for structured mastery of content, policies, procedure, laws, technical mastery, etc. but sales, marketing, communication, leadership, soft people skills are better taught where you can read the responses of your audience and where participants can gain as much from the other attendees and their interaction as from the leader.