Making the Business Case for E-Learning

Organizations are adopting e-learning at an exponential rate. There are lots of reasons companies choose to add e-learning to their training offerings or even switch completely from classroom training to online training, but they might not be obvious to everyone. 

If your organization hasn’t embraced e-learning yet or you’re struggling to get stakeholders to see the value online training can add, look no further. We’ll review some key talking points you can use to make the business case for e-learning and get the buy-in you need. Let’s dive in!

1. Create once, train endlessly

A big advantage of e-learning is the ability to create a course once and deliver it many times over without any additional expenses or time. And by giving instructional designers and trainers that time back, they can focus on creating new training content. So instead of having a small handful of courses delivered via classroom training, you can offer an expansive library of e-learning to your staff. 

2. Train anywhere

One of the more obvious advantages of e-learning is that it can be taken anywhere. This is a huge plus when compared to classroom training, which has to be offered at a location that works for everyone. Finding a central location can be especially challenging for organizations that offer hybrid or remote work, or for business units with staff spread out across multiple offices. With e-learning, learners can participate in training no matter where they’re located—simplifying the logistics considerably.

3. Train anytime

And even if your staff is all in one place, trying to find a time that works for everyone’s schedules can be difficult. It often results in team members having to miss parts of training in order to step out and take a call or sacrifice attending a meeting that’s important to their role in order to be at the training. Offering e-learning allows learning to occur without interfering with or distracting from staff’s day-to-day responsibilities. And because time away from their main duties impacts the bottom line, it’s a great point to include in your conversation with stakeholders about making the shift to e-learning.

4. Evaluate course effectiveness

Another advantage of e-learning is the ability to collect data on the learning experience to measure the effectiveness of your course. If you’re sharing your course with learners using an all-in-one training system, a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Learning Record Store (LRS), you can take advantage of the reporting features these platforms include. 

Many of them allow you to quickly report on things like how many learners enrolled in and completed a course or how much time they spent in a course. These metrics can help you identify which courses your learners are finding the most helpful or where they’re getting tripped up. 

5. Provide just-in-time resources

How many times have you read the instructions to something, only to need to go back and reference them again later? The same thing happens with training—learners often need to revisit key concepts or lessons after completing a course. With e-learning, learners don’t have to dig through binders or notes to find the information they learned in a meeting. 

Instead, they can simply refer back to their online training—which is more readily available when they need it. For example, when an employee is processing a customer call or performing a task and can’t remember how to do it correctly, they can pull up the link to their training course and find the information on the spot.

6. Avoid disruptions

E-learning also helps avoid potential issues that can derail your training. For example, with e-learning you don’t need to have a backup plan in case your trainer suddenly falls ill and can’t be there. And if a learner’s schedule suddenly changes and they can’t attend the training session anymore, you don’t have to try to squeeze them into another session. Eliminating these potential problems makes everyone’s lives easier and ensures that training happens when it needs to—no matter what. 

7. Provide a consistent experience

With in-person training, the learning experience can vary widely from trainer to trainer and from session to session. That’s because different trainers have different teaching styles and often ad-lib their presentations instead of sticking to a script—resulting in different learning experiences.

With e-learning, all your learners take the exact same course. This means everyone learns the same information and skills in the same way. By ensuring a consistent experience, you can be confident that the key messages and skills are being delivered to everyone equally.

Wrap-Up

By emphasizing how scalable, flexible, measurable, and available e-learning is, you’ll be able to help stakeholders understand why it’s the right choice for your company’s training needs. 

To learn more about the advantages and value of e-learning, check out these helpful articles:

• What Are the Advantages and Potential Challenges of E-Learning?
• How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Online Course
• 2 Ways to Show the Value of Online Training
• Measure the Effectiveness of Your E-Learning Course with Kirkpatrick’s 4 Levels of Evaluation

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