The Importance of Tracking in e-Learning Courses for Employees

How e-Learning’s Tracking Ability Can Benefit Your Company

Convert PPT or PDF documents to e-learning courses for tracking progress

Companies that already employ some type of e-learning platform for skills-enhancement courses, will know that tracking their employees’ scores is fundamental to determining whether learners sufficiently grasped the material.

Recently, however, more and more companies are also recognizing the benefits of using e-learning to present standardized in-house content such as onboarding documents, SOPs, guidelines, policies, and regulations — content that has traditionally been presented to employees as either a PowerPoint presentation or a digital or printed PDF or Word document. The tracking ability that e-learning can offer for this type of content is of great value, since disseminating information in a static form makes it almost impossible to guarantee that the content was thoroughly read and understood by all employees — even if you employ manual tracking techniques.

The problem with manual tracking

Imagine, for instance, that you’ve just updated your company’s Health and Safety protocol document to be in line with new company regulations. Manual tracking — for example, having employees sign a document to confirm that they have read and understood the relevant PPT, PDF, or Word document — is not only time-consuming, but also difficult to implement when companies employ a hybrid work system or have different offshore offices. It’s crucial that everyone in the company is on the same page when it comes to policies or guidelines such as these, but how can you be sure that employees across offices, departments, or continents, have all engaged with the same standardized material at a satisfactory level?

Track employees’ progress with interactive courses

The advantages of e-learning tracking

The tracking ability of online courses offers the perfect solution to this problem. A Learning Management System (LMS) lets you track employees’ progress and engagement with the e-learning content — in terms of how much time they spent interacting with the content in each section, whether they’ve accessed all the relevant material, and, through quiz or practice questions, assess how well they’ve understood the information provided.

Yet another important benefit to tracking is that it highlights whether the content of an organization’s documentation around procedures, policies, guidelines, or onboarding material is sufficient. By monitoring employees’ interaction with different sections and activities in an e-learning course, LMS tracking can alert companies to areas where information is lacking and can pinpoint the gaps in knowledge where extra training may be required.

How to convert from static documents to e-learning courses

To harness the power of tracking and the array of other benefits that e-learning can offer your company, you can approach companies such as Laragh, which offer services such as e-Learning Convert, a no-nonsense, cost-efficient offering that takes your existing PDF, DOCX and PPT files, and converts them into interactive and engaging online courses.

So why delay? Convert your SOPs, onboarding documents, company policies, or other in-house documentation to create a trackable e-learning experience.

Have a look at e-Learning Convert, and see which option suits your needs and pocket.

Embrace Efficient Solutions to Your e-Learning Needs

Document Conversion Made Easy with e-Learning Convert

If It’s Not Broken, Don’t Fix it

One of the main obstacles to e-learning is the hefty time and cost implications of creating and developing courseware from scratch – from concept development to course design and finally implementation and use, even a beginner course requires great effort and expertise.

Certainly, for many organizations, the idea of a lengthy e-learning development process – no matter the benefits – can be daunting. The outlook changes, however, if you have existing Word, PowerPoint, and PDF documents that have already been crafted, curated, and ready to go. If this is the case, it naturally won’t be feasible to expend a large amount of time and money re-writing content that already suits your needs. After all, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it!

Enter document conversion

Fortunately, there are e-learning companies such as Laragh that recognize the need for organizations to be able to quickly convert existing source material (gather your DOCX, PPT, and PDF files!) into engaging, interactive e-learning courses that can be tracked and routinely updated with ease. Offering services like e-Learning Convert that are readily available, it’s possible to transform your trusty (and likely dusty!) Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and PDF files into intuitive, accessible e-learning courses that will be professionally designed by a team of skilled and experienced learning designers.

Your ready-made content is bursting for a new lease on life – e-Learning Convert promises to deliver.

Converting SOPs to e-Learning

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are essential to the functioning of many enterprises. Some organizations – for example, in the pharma sector – have thousands of them floating around with employees receiving constant reminders of an ever-updating list of documents and PDFs that they must make themselves familiar with.

SOPs are written and promulgated to regulate and control processes. Yet, even in the largest enterprises, they represent a vulnerability – they come in so many shapes and sizes, via multiple media, that the control of their uptake is patchy at best. Some high-visibility SOPs already get converted to conventional full-blown e-learning.

But more than 80% remain in static or semi-static documents, PDFs, and PowerPoints. Yet, by definition, this is mission-critical information. It is essential that the relevant staff come to know the information that is in an SOP – otherwise it would not be in an SOP.

Everyone who creates an SOP would like better ways of transmitting the vital information it contains. Everyone would like to know that learners have engaged with the content and taken it on board. Everyone would like better ways of verifying this. Most organizations know that even when a PDF is uploaded into a learning management system (LMS) and laid out in attractively designed pages, learners struggle to get through the information, and only minimal shell-level tracking occurs. Timed PowerPoints are only marginally better. You cannot see which sections learners are struggling with or encourage them to interact with the material in a tangible way. Most organizations know that converting their SOP to an e-learning module would help resolve these problems. But until now, there has been no easy way to do this.

Addressing the obstacles to converting SOPs into e-learning

The main reasons more SOPs are not converted into e-learning courses that would assure engagement and knowledge transfer are:

  • Cost: It is traditionally quite expensive to commission an e-learning company to custom-build your content.
  • Time: Generally, when the need for a new SOP becomes apparent, you want it done in days, not in months.
  • Revisions: Some SOPs need to be revised every few months. It is not practicable to do this with a traditional custom-built e-learning module.
  • Organizational obstacles: There will be no enterprise-wide program of conversion because SOPs are found in multiple formats on multiple platforms, and are owned by people from a wide array of job functions. So, the individual SOP creator cannot wait for a company-wide initiative to roll out new information.

Using e-Learning Convert makes the conversion of SOPs into e-learning that much easier

Recognizing the real need for organizations to make their SOPs more accessible to employees, Laragh set up e-Learning Convert, a service offering designed to address this problem. e-Learning Convert is not aimed at getting enterprises signed up for a multiyear custom e-learning contract. It is aimed at helping learning managers and process owners within large or small organizations address a local conversion need quickly and cost-effectively.

We save on cost by streamlining the process and restricting the course layout to one of three formats that have been designed to address almost any need. Each conversion is supervised by experienced instructional designers, which ensures that the product’s cost-effectiveness does not sacrifice quality.

We save on time by streamlining the process. For this service, our assumption is that the creator of the SOP knows exactly what the course needs to communicate. We do not enter into a recursive series of development steps with you as we would when building e-learning from scratch. We simply convert what you have created into e-learning. We provide a clear and quick mechanism for revisions. Where the SOP we have converted to e-learning is subject to amendments, we offer a quick and reasonably priced revision service.

Because the e-Learning Convert service is modular, it means you do not have to wait for organization-wide changes in how SOPs and other information transfer is handled. You can do the best for the learners local to you. With a range of course file formats available, you can load the course on whatever platform is currently available to you. And because the cost is low, you can give the conversion service a test-drive without waiting for strategic direction changes.

E-learning for Organizations of Tomorrow

From passive learning to active engagement

In a dynamic world that is constantly shifting in line with digital changes, it should come as no surprise that more organizations are looking to technology for answers to their learning and development needs. According to Training Industry, e-learning is increasingly becoming the tool of choice for forward-looking organizations that are eager to upskill their staff and help them remain relevant in a swiftly-evolving business landscape. Indeed, organizations would be hard-pressed to deny the benefits that e-learning has to offer, especially when this learning model is contrasted against the more traditional methods of learning and development that are passive or often ineffective in ensuring long-term retention of information. Certainly, the advantages of using an e-learning model are undeniable – per NOSA, it is cost-effective, time efficient, and easily adaptable; helps boost morale and employee engagement; and offers employees the benefits of learning at their own pace and in their own time. When viewed in this light, adopting an e-learning solution should be the clear answer

An active approach to learning

Of course, there are other benefits as well, central to which is a shift away from passive learning – where information is merely distributed to employees via the organization’s intranet or lengthy PowerPoint presentations in the hope that they absorb something – toward a more active approach to learning, where employees engage with content in a meaningful manner via interactive e-learning courses that can be managed and fully tracked from an organization’s learning management system (LMS).

A win-win for everyone

The age of passive learning has passed. Today, organizations cannot simply distribute guidelines, regulations, mission statements, protocols, statements of procedure, and other essential work knowledge, in static PDFs, Word documents, or PowerPoint formats, expecting that they will be consumed. Why? To start, these formats are not interactive and are often boring or unrelatable to employees. In fact, the core principles of adult learning are grounded in the idea that active learning – where employees engage meaningfully with content – is key to helping employees absorb and utilize information going forward. In addition, the consumption of this information cannot be tracked or verified – even if a learning manager allocates material to staff, all they can ever show is that the files were downloaded and/or opened for a period of time.

However, if an organization converts its learning material into an e-learning format, it can easily verify engagement with each part of a document. The result? The ability to measure employee progress and development and identify areas of learning that are difficult, or confusing, via their LMS systems; enabling organizations to revise their content or institute remedial action based on this information accordingly. It’s a win-win for everyone.