We are looking to implement "E-Learning Labs" in our corporate culture and would appreciate hearing what's worked/not worked for others.

Our plan is to host structured "E-Learning Labs" for employees to complete on-line learning in an environment cohesive for optimal learning. The sessions would be facilitated by a Corporate Trainer available for any & all questions.

Your insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you, in advance.

I have some experience with this. I find that if learners have the option of completing eLearning in their own environments (at their own desks or home computers), most of them will. However, there are great benefits to having an instructor present while students are working on eLearning. Not only can the instructor answer student questions, he or she can take note of things that tend to cause difficulty (e.g., students tend to get stuck on a particular screen). This information can then be used to improve the eLearning programs.

In some cases you can discover surprising things this way. For example, at a previous workplace, we discovered that some students were taking a long time to complete eLearning because they were taking handwritten notes on the content. It had never occurred to us that the eLearning would be used in this way.

You'd probably want to research LMS options first to determine which meets your needs and what initial costs are involved. An LMS is the best way to track users' performance, course registration, and management of your content.

Then you have to develop the content - which you can do yourself with a variety of SCORM-complaint authoring tools, or purchase generic pre-packaged content from a number of vendors, or hire someone to create the custom courseware for you.

When you say 'facilitated by a Corporate Trainer', in what sense? If everyone is shuffled into a classroom where the trainer is present to sit at a computer to take these courses, well, that's not a very efficient use of eLearning (IMO).

A more effective approach would be to assign the trainer as the expert for a given course and ensure there is contact information and tools available to the learner; email at least, perhaps an IM address, perhaps a built-in IM component to the LMS (though that requires the facilitator to be logged-into the LMS at the same time for real-time chatting), maybe an integrated Twitter tool, maybe access to a Wiki that the facilitator maintains...
HTH
CM