One you have your curriculum to educate your(s) target(s), use the technology to get competitive advantage. How may e-learning help your business?

Doing it cheaper. Can be cheaper for you… and for your customers, you provide greater value.

Doing it broader. You can reach some customers that are difficult by other channels.

Doing it better. You can measure much better, so you can improve it and do it more effecttive.

Do it faster. Allows you to reach more customers in less time.

benefits · customer · e-learning · e-marketing

Informal learning is what we do every day: learn from other, from the interaction with the environment. Not structured but embedded in the daily life.

I found recently this presentation about informal learning. I thought it is useful, so I wanted to share it with the readers.

e-learning · informal · knowledge management · LMS · social networks · student · technology

In the learning arena, we usually split abilities in three types: skills, or how to use tools or techniques (“hands”); capabilities, or concept abilities, like planning, designing, analysing, synthetising (“head”);  and attitudes, willing (“heart”).

In this three fields are the opportunities to use education as a tool to build loyalty with your customers, dealers, franchises, prescriptors, customers or consumers.

The “hands” side is the natural territory for complex products: machinery, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, information technology and communication. If your customer knows how to use your product easily and safely, it is more likely to buy your it. Look at Microsoft: most users prefer it because they don’t want to invest (or waste) time in learning new operating systems or desktop applications.

The “head” side is the field for new products. This could be called “awareness”. Sometimes a new product is also a new category. So you must teach your customer how to locate it in its mind framework.

Finally the “heart” is usually the target for advertising. Obviously advertising is trying to change customers’ minds, and so does education. The main difference may be that advertising is mainly focused in short-term and education is mainly focused in mid-long term. Although big brands spend a lot of money in build a long-term awareness (see for example Coca-Cola).

Trying not to mix advertising and education, I see the following differences:

• Education approach is more a mid-long term activity, it must not be thought as a “campaign”
• Training must be much more “neutral” and credible
• It must be a “service” to the customer, feedback is essential
• Measuring should be more detailed, and improving continous

This post is trying to be education. Your feedback is welcome.

customer · e-learning · learning · measurement

Surely anyone might write this post, since it is a question of using the common sense. Or probably a few years of experience fighting with technology and users are needed. In any case, it has seemed to me to be interesting to expose these simple ideas in order that anyone can distinguish at least a good course from the regular, bad or very bad one.

1. A motivated pupil will learn with anything, one demotivated will not learn anything. Nobody can force us to learn. It is necessary to assume that a perfect course will not work if the content does not interest the target.

2. Less is more. Yes, yes, the advertising professionals say it. It is necessary to think about the hearing. If we can tell something on 1 screen or in a line, let’s not use 10. Or at least give the opportunity to the pupil to go out at any time having learned something.

3. If the content has to be like that of length, at least let’s avoid the embarrassment. In pills it is better digested.

4. USABILITY! The pupil cannot pass hours learning how the course runs.

5. Think about the learning process of the student, not in the content. A dictionary is not a resource to learn a language, it is an instrument of reference. Better examples and cases to illustrate and to think, stories. From there to general case.

6. Action! The user has to take decisions, interact. Once in minute at least.

7. Feedback! Whenever the student answers to a question, he or she has to receive a letter of congratulation or an advice.

8. Rich and different resources helps. If we combine text, audio, video, animations, etc., the course will be much more attractive. Sometimes the budget does not give for many production, then add imagination.

9. Support the student. Anyway, technology is not 100 % problem-free. Give them a way to ask (a forum, a chat, …). A solved problem is always a grateful customer.

10. Everything is improvable. Let’s ask for feedback. Listen your customers (students). This way is the only to really produce high quality training.

assessment · e-learning · learning · motivation · student · success · technology · usability

I just participated in a thread of messages from a Spanish blog. There we commented how often we go through situations where salesmen promise features and services of their products, that don’t exist or can not be provided on time or at all. In the majority of cases we agreed that it is completely non purpose and cause is just lack of knowledge.

The overal problem is due to the difficulties to implement an efficient sales channel, people is not available when product education was delivered, products are announced without appropriate education packages, instruction manuals are plaged of mistakes, etc.

There is where e-learning comes to the spot, and could be of help to implement efficient sales channels.

Just a product description, product FAQs in e-learning format will ensure a robust sales channel.

best practices · e-learning · knowledge management · learning · sales

Yesterday I was watching TV and Eduardo Punset, a well known Spanish researcher, was ending his program highlighting that education to children should be an environment where they understand that learning must be accomplished globally.

That conclusion leads me to the idea of how we manage knowledge in enterprises. Something deep must change in the world. We should not only reward the one who knows more, but also the one who shares more knowledge to the others. Internet is the first attempt to share knowledge within the humanity, but still there is a long way to go.

e-Learning can contribute enormously to rise the education level of big amounts of people homogeneously.

knowledge management · school · social networks

Companies invest lot of money in new applications, reasons can be multiple but most frequent ones, can be:

• To implement a new business process
• To automate and refine an already existing business process

In both cases you may expect end user resistance due to the changes produced in their regular activities.

Well planned and good quality e-learning has been proven to mitigate resistance to change and get the buy in from the end user.

Full adoption of new applications and systems is the final target of the solution sponsor as it will leverage investment. A successful deployment will require an education plan that can be closer to the end user, if done with e-learning ingredients.

A well designed education path will cover activity process steps, application interactions, organizational changes and compliance controls. Solution adoption requires and end-to-end coverage of the end user needs to perform his job effectively.

adoption · e-learning · learning · measurement · motivation · student

Second stage in our travel to educate the market: designing an effective and appealing curriculum for your customers. This is maybe the most difficult point.

You should know your customers very well to have a clear idea on what must be attractive for them. Do you have enough information? If so, congratulations. If not, maybe you need some research.

Then let’s balance your marketing objectives with the customer needs: you have the most powerful weapon. Put objectives together, prioritize them and then let’s use all the online and offline resources. Each target, its own curriculum. From events, face-to-face, traditional advertising, until video, podcasting, games, interactive education, blogs, forums, … and put them in pills. Your customer, prescriptor, reseller, doesn’t want to spend a lot of time with you. Be pedagogical… and spend in quality, don’t give them garbage.

And last, but not least, define how to m-e-a-s-u-r-e. Education programs use a model to relate students satisfaction, knowledge adquisition with behavior changes and business results. Maybe you cannot measure everything, but try al least to the basics. When you measure you can have feedback and improve. Don’t rely on opinions, get facts.

New? Of course not.

blog · customer · e-learning · e-marketing · measurement · social networks

How can I choose the best actions for my education plan (marketing plan)? Prioritizing. Simple… or not.

Consultants like to use two by two matrixes to represent concepts. In this case, the axis are value vs cost (plus risk). Consider as a business value not only income increase or cost decrease, but also broaden reach or time-to-market. In the x-axis, consider development cost, content availability or target user profile. Score each criteria, give them a weight, sum everything and put them in a graph. And… magic! In your left upper quadrant you can see the first things to do.

Easy? What do you think? Maybe I am too simple.

benefits · e-learning · e-marketing · learning · strategy

In my way to connect different disciplines, I have recently readen the expression “Educating the Market”. Eureka! This is a new application of learning.

Customers are most saturated of receiving a lot of  ads. They would like to receive useful information, not only product promotion. Isn’t it education? Should we rethink communication as education? Does education have method to create “brand education” programs? Is measuring in education developed assess messages effectiveness?

assessment · e-learning · e-marketing · learning · measurement