Bridging The Gap – On Line Tutorial – Part Five

It is anticipated that the majority of your training will soon be delivered by e-learning.  This will allow your learners to work at their own pace and at times that best suit themselves.  Some of your learners will be very lucky and have an office they can keep locked and a phone they can leave off the hook for an hour a day, at lunch time or after office hours, where they can work undisturbed.  Some may have a computer at home in a separate room or study where they can work without being interrupted by their family or TV.  Unfortunately these luxuries will not be available for all your learners.

What will be important for your learners is a sanctuary where they know that can come to and work in peace without interruptions and distractions.  The best place for this is a Learning Centre.

As well as offering a place for your learners to work in peace these centres can offer additional services such as;

Mentoring services;

• To help your learning with technical issues; logging on, finding the correct course etc.
• Teaching basic computer skills to allow staff to use e-learning.
• Teaching your staff “how to learn”. It is possible that it may be many years since your staff attended any formal training and will have forgotten how to learn.
• Taking any questions raised from the content of the e-learning course and escalate it to the appropriate expert.

Teleconferencing;

If you want to run tutor led or blended learning courses it can be costly to have the instructor come to you site.  It is often undesirable to send your staff away for many days.  This is where teleconferencing can be useful.

Executive suites;

The learning centre will be most useful to those staff members who are not confident in using a computer and will have difficulty in finding and using basic e-learning courses. In many organisations it is the lower paid workers, who do not use computers in their daily working life, and executives, they often have secretarial staff to manage their e-mail and are of an age where computers where not a key part of their education.  You need to be sympathetic to their feelings and it can be embarrassing to everyone to have a senior manager sitting next to a manual worker both struggling to learn how to use a mouse.

The Learning Centre can also become or be linked with an accreditation centre.  An accreditation centre has to be a purpose built secure room, fitted with close circuit TV cameras, lockers for students to leave mobile phones etc. and certified overseers. This makes setting up accreditation centres quite expensive.

The next section of the guide will deal with monitoring and tracking your learners.