Enterprise e- Learning
Enterprise e-learning is emerging as the corporate preference to public education and traditional enterprise training. Enterprise e-learning takes complete responsibility and ownership for training and educating people who must work together to accomplish business objectives, both within and without the organization. Importantly, Enterprise e-learning extracts what is best about the traditional teacher-training methods and synthesizes them through cutting-edge technologies.
It serves to create a new learning paradigm based on the any knowledge worker associated with the value chain, whether a professional, manager, employee, business partner, supplier or customer. Inherent in this is the necessity of acquiring an understanding about the ways in which your firm does business. This often involves a learning process translates into routine business procedures. In more complex situations, it means learning how to perform a detailed procedure or a new reporting function. More often than not, it is not necessary to send an employee to a three-day, off-site training seminar to learn every nuance of the application. Indeed, the more common scenario is incremental skills development on an as-needed basis.
In Enterprise e-learning, static information is transformed into dynamic knowledge: the information or knowledge the learner acquires can be captured and stored for reuse by others within the organization. Not only is the instruction manipulated by the learner based upon their learning style but the learner's new knowledge becomes available in a wider and more easily accessible manner because Enterprise e-learning incorporates an enterprise-wide Learning Management System (LMS) to track individuals and the enterprise overtime. Oftentimes it becomes an integral component of the performance appraisal system.
The Quantum Learning Curve (More Interactivity = More Retention = More Productive Employee)
E-Learning and Knowledge Management
The greatest payback from e-learning technology can be found in accelerating the transfer rate of critical knowledge to specific constituents up and down the value chain. Taking the next step from information acquisition to knowledge management distinguishes real business viability; otherwise, companies find often find themselves with information overload and knowledge displacement. e-learning fits into knowledge management by providing multiple inputs to the knowledge management system, informing it with the results of many more minds and processes. The knowledge management system (KMS) can be enlightened with information from specific learning events, as well as with vast amounts of information concerning the value chain and business processes within it. By informing the KMS in so many ways at so many levels, we are in effect creating and continually enhancing the corporate knowledge repository, or, the corporate mind.
e-learning can proffer the tools to critically dissect, organize and repurpose learning knowledge so that it can serve more than one audience. It does so by interfacing with the KMS, building knowledge objects from both structured and unstructured learning and making it available on a JIT, JE basis. A number of e- learning vendors recognize this and are integrating knowledge management functionality into their solutions.
