Author: Zsófia Dali, instructional designer

E-learning as a form of training has been present in the lives of companies for a long time. When it emerged, it was predicted that this option would displace face-to-face education, but today there is a well-established balance between face-to-face and online training.

In a corporate context, e-learning is always understood as a curriculum that can be completed by the learner on his/her own, without the help of an instructor. The learner is free to organise his/her time, may return to the curriculum at any time and may even complete it in parts. The knowledge check is also part of the e-learning curriculum and does not require the assistance of an instructor. The flexibility of the format has made e-learning popular.

Companies benefit from not having to take their workers out of the workflow all at once, or from being able to provide training to larger groups by developing a single training course. Workers benefit from being able to progress at their own pace, returning to previous curriculum modules, which helps individual understanding.

However, despite its advantages, e-learning cannot be used universally for transferring all types of knowledge.

Which topics are suitable for being processed within the framework of e-learning?

In particular, it is worth looking for areas that can be delimited effectively, describe relatively clear processes, use well-defined definitions and cover mainly lexical knowledge. It is also possible to present practical questions through e-learning courses, but it may be worthwhile to provide some follow-up to bring learners closer to the topics also in real-life situations.

The presentation of company-level processes, software, legal frameworks are typical topics that are suitable to be presented as online curriculum. Other classic e-learning courses include training on health and safety at work and fire safety, data and information security. The latter are particularly popular as they need to be taught regularly to large audiences.

Another new area of online training courses is the online delivery of different types of awareness-raising training. Internationally, there is a growing focus on the education of diversity and inclusion and unconscious bias.

In summary, popular knowledge areas are those where a relatively broad target group needs to be equipped with an easy-to-use, practical basis for understanding a topic. The development of e-learning courses is also a practical choice for presenting processes that can be easily standardised and rules that can be easily described.

For what purposes e-learning is not suitable?

The most popular answer to this question is addressing “soft skills”. However, this is only partly true. A short e-learning course can also provide a good theoretical basis for the acquisition of various social, communication and leadership skills; however, it is true that face-to-face exercises and joint discussions provide a much more effective and complex learning experience.

The emergence of virtual reality glasses could be a game changer in this area. Indeed, more and more companies are addressing the use of such tools at the workplace, its focal area partly covers the provision of training in a virtual space.

Coming back to the topics that are not suitable for being addressed through e-learning: overall, it can be stated that for areas that cannot be clearly described and are based on individual experiences and skills, it is worth using e-learning as a complementary tool in combination with face-to-face education. In addition to soft skills training, this also means training in areas requiring the coverage of complex processes and individual decision-making.

The method of e-learning development

Once the topic to be covered is identified, the most important first step is to identify the target group and the learning objectives.

• Who is the target audience of the curricula?
• Do the participants have prior knowledge of the topic or is it completely new to them?
• When will they apply the knowledge they have acquired?
• What motivates them to learn?
• What changes do we expect from participants after completing the training?

The answers to the above questions will determine the entire curriculum development process. The training must meet these needs. A target group composed of new entrants requires a completely different methodology and content than a company-wide curriculum. A different amount of curriculum needs to be covered if we want to impart general knowledge or if we want to train experts. Just as customer-orientation is paramount among business objectives, corporate e-learning development focuses on the needs of the target group. It determines the language, the length, the proportion of text and audiovisual material, virtually everything.

Once the groundwork has been done, the subject experts can start compiling the curriculum. They work on a raw learning material based on which the instructional designer (also known as the curriculum developer) and the e-learning development team develop the online course according to pre-defined targets.

During the joint work, the e-learning development team and the experts collaborate. The task of an instructional designer is to structure the raw learning material, to simplify the text, to make it understandable for the target group, to create visualisations that help the understanding of the text content and to design knowledge assessment exercises. E-learning developers implement these drafts and ideas using e-learning editing applications (e.g. Articulate, Adobe Captivate, Lectora software). In the meantime, experts help the development teams by clarifying the texts and checking the visual content.

E-learning will be successful if it is easy to use for the target group. This usability is important both at technical and content level. The task of curriculum developers is to organise the learning material into the simplest possible structure, to draw attention to the links between the content elements and to transform complex content formulated by experts into understandable, simple text and graphics.