4 Things To look For When Choosing An Online Learning Platform
Most organizations and individuals understand the need for continuous lifelong learning to stay relevant in the changing job market. We need to stay up to date with the latest business skills and continuously enhance our existing ones. But how do we choose the right online learning platform?
In the not so distant past, online learning platforms weren’t available, so most companies would choose to put their employees in offsite corporate training programs. These programs could run for a few days at a time and they were expensive, inefficient and in many cases ineffective since most people forget 90% of what they learned in the first month after taking the course.
Companies then shifted their attention to elearning, but these clunky, slow and boring learning platforms didn’t do well. Employees didn’t like them and companies weren’t seeing the return on investment by using such platform.
In the past few years, a large number of online learning platforms were launched and acquired a huge following as individuals started to take their learning and development into their own hands. Through these MOOCs (Massive Online Open Course-ware) you and I could get the courses from the best universities in the world for free from the comfort of our home.
However, even though there are thousands of them around, most of these MOOCs aren’t well suited for business skills development. So how do you choose the best online learning platform for yourself or your organization? Here are a few things to look out for:
- Make sure the elearning platform is based on short course formats where the content is put into chunks of 2-3 minutes and the courses don’t exceed 30 minutes in duration. This allows for much higher completion rates and better comprehension.
- You will need to confirm that the content is practical in nature and non-academic since business skills are best developed when you can immediately apply what you learned and there is no need to dwell on the theory behind the topic.
- The online learning platform needs to be designed and implemented to reflect a simple browsing experience since users don’t want to learn how to log in and use a new system. They want to be able to watch a video in the same way that they watch it on YouTube and fill online forms like they see it on any general website.
- You need to have access to a library of online business courses that covers the broad business skills so that you can develop the skills that are needed at the time that they are needed. This “just in time learning” allows for the content to be accessed when the business need comes up and the learning is applied immediately after that lesson.
Short, Practical, Accessible and Easy to use platforms are best for Business Skills Development.
There is no lack of business resources these days, as we live in this age of information overload, but it takes time to sift through it all and distill it for our needs. We need to find the best online learning platform that is a reflection of the real world. It needs to be relevant, easy to access and simple to apply.
This is what we call Real World Education.
The above 4 considerations are a key part of Potential.com’s online learning platform and content which we have been enhancing for over 12 years. If you are looking for a learning platform for your organization, we would be more than happy to provide you with a free trial of our system and request your coupon code here. If you are an individual browse through our library of online courses.
What is clear to all, is that the learning can’t stop as the business environment is changing faster than ever. Thanks to smart entrepreneurs and educators, the learning platforms are evolving to provide you with the business skills that you need when you need them.
Enjoy the journey and keep learning.
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