Tag Archives: LMS
4 most effective corporate applications of micro-learning
Everyone knows what microlearning is, it a more focused bite-sized learning to achieve specific objectives. But often, micro-learning is incorrectly implemented leading to undesirable outcomes for the course. The best fit cases for microlearning in a corporate environment are
Product Training: Product manuals are very large and typically contain too much information. The learner will find it hard recognize key take ways and forget them in days following his learning session. No one really wants to go through the entire document or video to recollect a few key features. Micro-learning can help break cumbersome courses in smaller portions, each containing 5-10 key take ways that you want the learner to remember. This will increase retention and easy recollection for the learner.
Compliance Training: Given the integrated and fast-changing world we live in, the legal, compliance and regulatory policies are changing all the time. You need to ensure the relevant stakeholders are regularly trained. Micro-learning will help deliver the key content in a continuous and easy to assimilate fashion.
Induction and HR Policy training: Ok, so you hold a weeklong Induction training for new joinees running through your company history, ethos, and HR policy. You can be assured that they would have forgotten most of it within two weeks of the course completion. HR policies regarding Sexual Harassment, Employee benefits, and Whistle Blower policies need to be delivered on a regular frequency to reinforce appropriate behavior from your employees.
Negotiation and Objection Handling: You can only organize and run so many case studies, live demonstration or use cases in a two-day workshop. You will have to keep sending short new use cases or simulations to all your learners throughout the year to maximize learning.
By Venkataraman Ananthakrishnan, Head- Online and Global Business at QuoDeck
How should team-leaders use Micro-learning to train their team?
Why micro-learning?
Research says that assimilation of content is higher when it is presented in a concise and interactive manner. Traditionally, learning comprises of long classroom sessions and large documents or videos in their online avatar. As a team leads, your aim of training your team should be keeping your learners engaged, emphasizing on key take ways of the course rather than the entire course and making it fun for them to improve adoption. Therefore, micro-learning proves to be an effective way of imparting learning to your team.
“As a team lead, your aim of training your team should be keeping your learners engaged.”
Case Study
Let’s look at a case study and understand how you as a FMCG team lead can use micro-learning for your team.
You are a team leader and want to train your sales team of 350 people spread across various regions. You have an option of doing classroom training and have a couple of videos, documents, and PDFs. You have used various options, but you see that the learners are not engaged and do not retain what they have studied. You recently learned about micro-learning and want to apply its principles to training. How will micro-learning help you?
How can micro-learning help you?
Micro-learning comes in many forms and has elements of short to-the-point videos, interactive interface, quizzes and assessments, gamification and infographic representation of information. These help in knowledge retention and skill development. As these elements are short and concise, reviewing information is an easier task for the learners.
Elements of micro-learning and explanation in brief
Videos: Traditionally, long videos of recorded sessions were used in training courses. However, with the advent of micro-learning, the approach to video-based e-Learning has changed. Short videos of not more than 3 to 6 minutes with the relevant information focused on the subject matter can help better retention and save time. Whether your training content is regulatory, on-boarding and induction related or new policies, videos can engage your employees and can be interactive as well.
Interactive Interface: We always think that a lot of content means a lot of information. However, large chunks of content in the form of long PDFs just become too frustrating for the learners to read also leading them disconnected with the material. One of the easiest ways to train your learners with engaging content is an interactive interface which can consist of small and short learning modules. It becomes self-satisfying for the learners as completing smaller modules but too many of them give a sense of accomplishment to them.
Quizzes and Assessments: You always want your learners to learn more along with higher retention. It is a great idea to use quizzes and assessments at the end of each topic or course. This helps learners retain better and gives you an idea of how much the learners have retained for designing your further courses. You can also use quizzes and assessments as contests while you launch content courses and give rewards to your learners. This suffices both your aims – retention and reward.
Gamification: It is important for your learners to come back to your courses and use them as refreshers to the topic. Gamification will help you do this. With games, your storyline becomes engaging for them and playing small games instead of going through plain quizzes keeps them on their toes. Your customized learning module can allow your learners to collect points, atop the leaderboard and level up continuously. Giving them a feeling of accomplishment helps keep them engaged.
Infographic Representation of Information: We all know about infographics. They just make your content look simpler, engaging and effective at the same time. Data in the form of graphics and charts make a unique experience for the learners. With infographic information, you can focus on key takeaways of data and statistics that a learner needs to know.
Start using micro-learning and help your team retain better!
By Shruti Shinde, Head- Enterprise Origination at QuoDeck
Which Learning Management Systems (LMS) are easiest and most affordable for a small company to utilize?
QuoDeck is a game based mobile learning management system. It is designed specifically for corporate learning and priced at a level that makes it particularly suitable for small businesses and startups. We have focused on making it easy for non-instructional designers to get started with team training in 10 minutes flat with your existing content.
That being said, it is powering team trainings in large Fortune 500 companies, so it’s not skimpy on features either.
Do give it a spin and tell us what you think of it…
And if you are looking for a larger alternative, you should look no further than Moodle. Just get a cpanel based hosting solution and you would get a one-click deployment option embedded within. Cost wise this should not exceed $100 a year, but it is a complex to configure and manage the system.
By Arijit Lahiri, Co-Founder of QuoDeck
What are the advantages of SaaS LMS?
Software as a service (SaaS) LMS is hosted on a cloud, requiring no installation on the customer’s end saving space and infrastructure. The payment is on a subscription model which can be chosen as per the customer’s need, which is more fungible compared to traditional LMS.
- Cost Effective: You can choose your plan based on a number of users, term of subscription and usage and requires no capex.
- Short Implementation time: SaaS LMS’ are plug and play which do not require any significant time in deployment and since they are cloud-based, do not require multiple stakeholder approvals.
- Offer Free Trails: Unlike full-fledged LMS’, the SaaS counterparts offer free trial periods. This time can be used to evaluate them and gather feedback from the actual users, helping you decide the LMS best fit for your organization.
- Access Courses remotely via multiple devices including mobiles: As all data is stored securely on the cloud, your team can access it across geographies with content rendered for the device they are using.
- Regular Updates and No maintenance: Your LMS will be regularly updated with all the new features added by the developer. In addition, you will not have any maintenance as the LMS is maintained by the technology provider.
By Venkataraman Ananthakrishnan, Head- Online and Global Business at QuoDeck
5 Benefits of a Learning Management System for Businesses
With a growing need to foster effective learning and cater to the training needs of a global workforce, organizations across the world are implementing learning management systems for corporate training.
A learning management system (LMS) is a software application that can deliver course material to learners, administer assignments and tests, track the performance of participants, manage records, and offer continuous support.
When your business’s corporate training requirements start to become more complex, an LMS is likely to be the best solution that can meet your needs. With that in mind, here are five benefits of a learning management system for businesses:
1. All the eLearning content is accessible from one location
With a cloud-based LMS, your organization’s eLearning content is not stored on different offline hard drives or devices. Instead, its securely saved on the cloud which allows your employees to access eLearning courses wherever and whenever they want. This also greatly reduces the risk of losing data, since all the information is saved on a secured remote server.
The easy accessibility of an online LMS makes it the right fit for organizations that have a global or a remote workforce and it also ends up saving time for your employees.
2. Mobile readiness
Over 99% of the mobile users believe that mobile learning has enhanced their overall learning experience. That is why, with mobile-ready learning management systems, you are able to offer a great user experience to your employees and in turn get increased overall productivity.
Your employees are no longer required to stay at their desk to access and complete online courses. Instead, they can log into the LMS app on their mobile phones and view eLearning content while they are on the move. This is one of the main reasons why 67% of the organizations are already implementing mobile learning in some form or the other.
3. A more engaging learning experience
There was a time when corporate training was all about spending hours listening to an instructor in a conference room. But today, learning is more personalized with LMSes that offer interactive lessons, fun quizzes and games, video conferencing, and forums to discuss the courses.
The new learner-centered approach has not only led to a more engaging experience during the learning process but also helped achieve better results at the end of the course.
Since the LMS is already accessible online, it is possible to integrate social learning into your eLearning strategy. You can create eLearning exercises that are centered around peer collaboration and even add online forums where your workforce can discuss and help each other.
Games augmented reality, and virtual reality can also be leveraged to incorporate interactive simulations and scenarios that can easily explain and highlight complex tasks or processes.
4. Reduced time and costs
With an LMS, you no longer have to worry about instructor costs, printing course material, or setting up a conference room for training sessions. Your employees can carry out all the training online and your business is able to save a sizable sum on your learning and development budget.
Since LMS gives online learners only the information that they need in a more direct and organized manner, you are also able to reduce training time. Instead of sitting through a 3-hour seminar, your employees can just access the online modules on the LMS that they need to learn. With the flexibility that LMS provides, your employees are able to take these courses according to their own time, which doesn’t disrupt their important everyday work as well.
5. Driving compliances is easier
Compliance rules and regulations get regularly modified, but updating your traditional offline course to reflect these changes can be a rather time-consuming task.
With an LMS, it becomes possible to update your learning content according to the new compliance standards in just a matter of a few minutes. This is in stark contrast to the traditional courses where you would have to send the updated courses to every employee separately and different versions of the same course could create even more confusion.
LMS can ensure that all of your employees are on the same page about the company policies and the compliances are always followed.
In conclusion
A learning management system clearly has numerous benefits. You are able to create a more skilled, productive, and engaging workforce in your organization while saving time and costs. It’s also possible to track the training progress of all of your employees and generate reports in real-time.
That is why it is no surprise that more and more organizations are implementing LMSes for their workforce. When are you incorporating an LMS in your organization?
Discomfort is the Route to Entrepreneurial Success
So why is Discomfort so essential for entrepreneurial success and how to embrace it?
Entrepreneurship has always been about seeking out the new, in uncharted waters. Across ages, be it explorers or individuals, who have made a mark in their chosen fields or Entrepreneurs who have sought to change the world, have stepped out of their comfort zones. In an age when comfort is the buzzword for consumers, Discomfort is the mantra with which Entrepreneurs need to live by. Discomfort is not about putting oneself in a tough spot. It is stepping out from what you know, to the unknown. Exploring new opportunities, new areas of interest and nurturing a vision. An Entrepreneur seeks of problems and makes solutions for those problems while tackling the new-world questions which arise with these solutions. And that is where discomfort stems from. From seeking the unknown, from seeing problems in a new lens and attempting new paths. So why is Discomfort so essential for entrepreneurial success and how to embrace it?
Embracing Change
Discomfort comes from a change in what you have been doing. Change requires moving forward by going beyond what is holding you. Be it a safety net of certainty, an appraisal plan or just comfort with your work. To make yourself the next success, you need to embrace change as an integral part of your life. Start small but stay steady. A little change, one day at a time can bring success your way.
Say Goodbye to the Comfort Zone
Comfort zones are places which we are used to. We know how they will behave in any given situation. Coming out of this comfort zone is very important for an individual, especially for entrepreneurial successes because that is the only time when your mind is open to new opportunities and solutions where none existed. Discomfort is not just a punchline here, it is a way of life.
Nurture the Unconventional
Great ideas come from unconventional thoughts. The first wheel came because someone wanted to break the convention of walking. Discomfort makes you explore ideas and solutions which are unconventional and gives you the ability to experiment with varied combinations. It is the one thing which makes you think beyond what you think are your limits.
Calculated Risks
Risk taking is second nature to an Entrepreneur. But that doesn’t mean that you dive head straight into it. Study the problem, understand it, appreciate its presence and then find the solutions. Its okay not to have the perfect solution in the first go. Every failed attempt brings you one step closer to success. You may not have all the cards in your favour but a calculated risk towards your goals can get you there a lot faster, along with all the learnings.
Growing with Discomfort
There is only one thing for you to do- Get Up, Get Out & Get Moving. This is what will let you grow, explore opportunities and get a closer understanding of the world around you. You will start seeing things, you never did before. Go ahead to seek the new, forge your tools, mark your own paths and try your hands at everything that you can. It is Discomfort which will test you to the limits and will give you the experience to set on the right path.
By Kamalika Bhattacharya, CEO & Co-Founder at QuoDeck
This article was first published on Entrepreneur India
Fun and games to upgrade your skills
Arijit Lahiri and Kamalika Bhattacharya, who spent over a decade in organisations like ABN Amro Bank and Intellecap, saw learning department heads begging, bullying and even bribing their learners to stick to their learning agenda.
So they put on their marketing hats to understand what would catch learners’ attention. “Game-based learning pretty much screamed itself up,” says Bhattacharya. Games allow for more engaging learning experiences while also making the learner behaviour more measurable and analysable. Today, their company, QuoDeck (earlier Ptotem), uses board games, murder mysteries and treasure hunts as learning methods, and these have been used by organisations like PepsiCo, Unilever, Aditya Birla Group and Tata Group.
To read the full article, click here
5 ways to leverage AR and VR for training your employees
According to IDC, the estimated market opportunity of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) solutions by 2020 will be $143 billion. Companies of all sizes are increasingly using AR and VR for corporate training and to acclimatize their new employees to the work environment.
In fact, according to STRIVR, learning retention rates with AR/VR can be as high as 75 percent as compared to just 10 percent retention rate through reading or lecture. Whether its management, customer services, or seasonal situations, businesses are successfully using AR and VR for numerous purposes.
For your company, that means if you are still not incorporating AR and VR in corporate training, then you are missing out on a lot. Here are some of the ways you can take advantage of AR and VR for training your employees.
1- VR workplace tours for new employees
With a virtual tour of the workplace, your new employees can familiarise with their new work environment, even before actually coming to the office. For you, it means your employees will be ready to get started with their work right from the first day since their learning curve will reduce greatly.
They would already know the breakrooms, bulletin boards, their team leader’s office, and their own cubicle when they arrive. You could also design the entire onboarding training module for new employees as a VR tour to make it more engaging and interactive.
2- Emergency drills
Emergency drills are a necessity for every company, and they have to make sure those drills are being conducted from time to time. But just getting a safety expert to explain the different scenarios to your employees is not enough. Most people find emergency drills boring as it interrupts their work, and they often don’t even pay attention to it.
However, you can create emergency drills using AR/VR technologies to check if the employees can handle stress and identify the correct security protocols through simulations. The biggest advantage of this is that employees can take these courses according to their own time.
3- Task walkthroughs
To help your employees get a better understanding of the tasks that they need to perform on a daily basis, you can create online training simulations which would allow them to learn in a virtual environment.
With these simulations, they can determine the skills and steps they need to follow to complete a task, and it would also give them the opportunity to learn from their mistakes without any consequences.
Bear in mind, it’s important to make sure that the simulations are as realistic as possible to provide your employees with a fully immersive experience that they can implement in the real world.
4- Compliance training
For companies, compliance training is one of the most important and mandatory processes, and they have to make sure their employees are well accustomed to it. But handing out a large document to every employee and hoping that they would read every line of it is not enough and it may not even help your organisation in the long run.
Instead, you can use AR/VR to create virtual workplace environments where employees can get a better idea about the compliances they need to adhere to through online simulations. You can also create game-based lessons where employees are given different situations to see how they would respond to it, whether its accepting gifts from a client or a workplace injury.
5 – Virtual case studies
There is no better way to understand the business and skills, than by going through previous case studies which had successful results. But most case studies are text-based and they aren’t as engaging. With AR/VR technology, your employees can understand these case studies in a more interactive way, as they will be able to see those examples in action.
By adding simulations, activities, and fun quizzes, the otherwise boring case studies become more life-like and allow your employees to retain more knowledge.
Getting the most out of AR/VR training
By implementing VR and AR technologies, you are also able to measure the performance of your employees accurately. Heat maps make it possible to see exactly where users look during their 360-degree experience and the instructors can monitor trainees in real-time. You can create VR/AR applications that can be easily integrated with your Learning Management Systems (LMS) as well.
In conclusion
Augmented and virtual reality training provides an innovative and new way to increase employee engagement, improve productivity, and save costs while offering a cutting-edge learning experience. With the latest advancements that have happened in the AR and VR technologies, the barriers are quickly fading away making it a viable option for immersive training for any industry.
6 must have apps for every HR professional
One of the most crucial functions in any organization is the Human Resources.
The HR function drives the organization, its culture, future growth possibilities and is also the first point of contact for prospective employees for the organization’s brand value.
It is interesting that HR teams witness an average 22 percent cost savings when they move to automated and digital solutions for process-jobs. There are other numbers which prove that an app backed HR function is much smoother, with transparent employee interactions.
To help with that, these are the six must have apps which every HR professional should have:
Workbright
One of the most primary functions for HR is the employee on-boarding process. Once the employee joins the organization, there is paperwork and one-to-one sessions required with the HR teams to help set the employee into the system & the job role. Workbright makes this process simpler by taking it online & doing it even before the employee has joined the organization. Workbright helps with all the process functions of the on-boarding journey and can also be made to have primary sessions for the employee-to-be on what to expect in the new role. Once joined, the employee already has an exposure to his role, saving up on time-costs for the HR team as well.
QuoDeck
Human Resources lead the Learning and Development functions for any organization. Very important everywhere, conventional learning mechanisms involve a set theory which needs to be read over and tested for a score. This has become a mundane process and generally, employees treat it as just another test which they forget about later. QuoDeck solves this problem by making games out of the tests required. Instead of repeating what was read, QuoDeck turns the entire session into a game where people win points, can compete within teams or outside of teams, etc. This helps take the learning process in the right spirit as the retention and participation levels are much higher.
Hiring today is an online process and taking up the game notches is LinkedIn. A social media platform where professionals have well-crafted profiles detailing all their achievements is the perfect way for HR functions and recruiters to know more about prospective candidates. The chat & mail features also help both sides reach out to each other and have a meaningful conversation before they decide on functional meetings. For the HR functions, LinkedIn is an indispensable tool which helps them know a prospect better before they take the next steps. LinkedIn works better than so many other ‘job’ apps because it is about building meaningful careers with the right fitment and not just getting a job.
WorkStyle
Hiring is a very chance-based process. Despite all possible checks & attempts, there is a gut factor which comes into play. At times one lets go of great assets, or at times brings on-board undeserving candidates. In either case, it is a mistake which is realized late and costs the organization dear in terms of intra-relationships and any other means. WorkStyle helps the HR teams because it comes with testing an employee’s personality traits. Technical skill-sets help do a job, but personality traits make an employee gel with the teams and contribute for both personal & organization growth. WorkStyle comes here with a variety of models and tests helping the HR team to take an informed decision.
Zenefits
Human Resources work on two ends of the spectrum- the procedure-oriented and the emotional and human-oriented. The processes and formalities-based systems take up a lot of time, leaving them with limited scope to help employees with the ‘Human’ aspect of their profiles. Zenefits helps here by taking up all the roles of employee records, hierarchy structures, payroll management and any other function which can be done via a procedure. This leaves the HR team to devote time for better employee engagement, interactions and developing the general work culture of the organization.
Yammer
An organization is an ecosystem with its own sub-groups, job descriptions, work titles, assignments, line & cross-line reporting, etc. In such a world it is the HR’s responsibility that all communication channels are open for employees so that impromptu groupings can be made, everybody in a group knows about updates happening simultaneously and much more. Yammer makes it possible to engage in fruitful intra-office and inter-office conversations and coordinate for better personal relationships. For the HR team, Yammer is helpful as it comes with a dashboard with features for tracking, recording and maintaining effective communication channels.
This article was first published on Business Standard
QuoDeck 