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The challenges in corporate training are rapidly increasing in number. Traditional training programs, whether they are classroom-based or e-learning, are simply not cutting it in the modern corporate training programs.  

One in three workers said their employer’s training is out-of-date.

As millennials and Gen Y employees enter the workspace, it is safe to say that the employees are becoming increasingly apathetic and have diverse learning styles.

While this increased the opportunity for individuals to learn new ways of thinking and to develop inter-cultural skills, it has made engagement in training programs challenging.

Sadly, at many organizations, the learning goals have reduced to: “get as many employees as possible to meet professionally acceptable levels of performance” with a set of resources.

But gamification has provided some hope for the corporate sector. Several studies and surveys  have proven the effectiveness of gamification in increasing motivation and productivity in training programs.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at other benefits of gamification in corporate training and how you can use this divergent technology to improve learning experiences at your organization.

1. Gamification Motivates Through Fun, Not Fear

The fear of failure and the ridicule that accompanies it prevents many employees from speaking out and asking questions in traditional training programs. This also prevents them from engaging with the training material.

In games and gamification, failure is never the reason to stop playing and participating; it is actually the reason to keep playing. Gamification engages employees in training by allowing them to fail, learn from their mistakes, and confront the challenges in better ways.

When training is made fun with the help of gamification, the ability of the employees to learn new skills increases by 40%.

2. Gamification Encourages Creative Thinking

By motivating through fun instead of fear, gamification helps foster creativity and creative thinking.

During a study at a national IT company, compared to its pre-gamification levels, the number of ideas proposed through the gamified system increased fourfold.

Two of the most important criteria for creative thinking are a big enough knowledge-base to come up with varying ideas and a criticism-free environment to try the various ideas.

By helping employees engage better with the training at hand, gamification motivates them to learn more and retain the knowledge. It also provides various scenarios in which they can implement their ideas and learn from their failures.

3. Gamification Provides Training in Real-World Context

With the help of gamification, you can recreate the real working environment in the training program. This allows employees to learn without any real damages, even though they can still make mistakes and learn from them.

Employees can re-enact a set of realistic scenarios several times, make different decisions, and explore the results of their decisions. All this can be done without comprising the customer service.

Domino’s training program is a successful example of this. They used a gamified course to train employees on how to prepare several food items while avoiding food wastage.

The staff doesn’t have to remember a monotonous, boring lesson that shows how to make a pizza. Instead, they remember what they have to do to score points and unlock badges. The progress bar moving after completing stages also delights them as they feel that they’re making real progress and getting more and more competent.

4. Friendly Competition in Gamification Leads to Better Learning Experiences

Competition is a useful intrinsic motivator. Using competition as a tool in the workplace to increase employee performance and productivity is nothing new. While competition exists in traditional training programs as well, gamification makes the competition even more interesting for the participants.

Instant feedback on individual performance with the help of leaderboards and rewarding the top performers activates the reward center in our brain. This motivates the employees to keep engaging with the gamified training in order to experience the satisfying stimulation more and more.   

More than 60% of learners agree that leaderboards and friendly competition would motivate them.

5. Feedback Loop in Gamification Promotes Competence

All humans have an innate need to feel competent when they’re handling a task or assignment. This competence usually refers to feelings of efficiency or skill mastery and success. Competence is the feeling that one has developed a skill and successfully utilized it.

Traditional learning programs have no clear way of providing employees this feeling of competence. In gamification, competence can be showcased with the help of points, levels, leaderboards, or badges, all of which allow the user to track how well they’re doing and gain a better sense of their accomplishments.

74% of employees said that a point system would increase their engagement with an e-learning application.

This helps in boosting intrinsic motivation in employees as they feel satisfied with their progress and can easily set new goals for improvement.

Motivational spectrum ranging from amotivation to intrinsic motivation

6. Gamification Also Provides Correctional Performance Feedback

The effectiveness of performance feedback in organizational settings is well-known.

According to research,  when feedback simply indicates that the response is correct or incorrect, it results in a lower effect than when the feedback in some way informs the learner of the correct answer.

Feedback in gamification accurately assesses the knowledge of the employee and efficiently provides advice for further study. This type of feedback can have a significant impact on learning performance as it allows for providing every employee with immediate, individualized and elaborate feedback regarding their performance.

Instead of just telling them if they’re right/wrong or how many times they’ve been right/wrong, gamification feedback gives them a learning path which helps them improve over time.

7. Gamification can Boost Employee Morale

In gamification, the training material is divided into small, digestible chunks. The level of difficulty increases as the employees progress through the training.

The smaller, simpler, early levels allow employees to breeze through as they slowly get comfortable with the interface, story, and other game mechanics and the training at hand.

This boosts their confidence as they gain momentum. This motivates them to continue through the training, collect more points for themselves, and win badges.

The boost in confidence doesn’t disappear when a challenging problem is encountered either. The challenge is considered a more rewarding experience and employees give their best.

Psychological needs matching with game-design elements

8. Gamification Enhances Employee Autonomy and Curiosity

Traditional e-learning is usually composed of modules that are linear in nature. Not only is the progress set from start to finish but the problem-solving is also rigid.

Autonomy here means that the employees are free to explore the training material as they want. Studies have shown that if:

• there is a room for choice,
• rewards are used as informational feedback rather than to control behavior, and
• non-controlling instructions are used

employee autonomy and, in turn, intrinsic motivation are enhanced.

Gamification promotes this decision freedom and curiosity with the help of avatars and characters. Avatars and characters influence the gameplay and can change how the employee interacts with the training material.

Avatars and characters don’t refer to just aesthetics, which is superficial. They refer to the different features, advantages, and qualities that your virtual identity has. These allow the employees to complete the training according to their preference, improving the perception of autonomy and learning outcomes.

9. Gamification Improves Employee Willingness to Participate in Training

Traditional training programs are usually something employees “have to” do. Most of the time employees reluctantly participate in training and voluntary participation rates are abysmal.

When activities are done for interest or personal value, perceived willingness to participate is high. If the task is considered meaningful and worthy of attention, employees are more motivated to engage with it.

Such intrinsic motivation (45%) helps employees participate better in training programs than any other external incentive (37%).  

The gamification mechanics responsible for this are narratives, meaningful stories, dialogues, and themes. Stories can help players experience their own actions as meaningful and volitionally engaging, regardless of whether or not choices are really available.

10. Gamification Increases Training Completion Rate

In traditional instructional methods, the employees earn their grades or scores based on their performance as they demonstrate achievement. But in gamification, the effort is rewarded, with badges or points even when the objective is not completed.

This is because the aim is to motivate the employees to exert effort in tackling different learning challenges. But this indirectly leads to better completion rates than training methodologies that are focused on getting employees to complete the training at hand.

In a 2013 study, gamification increased task completion rates from 73% to 97%.

11. Gamification of Training Helps with Knowledge Retention

The aim of all training programs is a sustained increase in knowledge. The substantive content should be fully understood and retained by the employees for as long as possible after the training event is complete.

According to the forgetting curve in learning and training, 58% knowledge is retained 20 minutes after training ends and 25% is retained after 2 weeks are over.

Hermann Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve

Studies with gamification suggest that gamification can trigger emotions which in turn exert positive effects on knowledge retention. Increased engagement due gamification leads to better knowledge retention as compared to non-gamified training, at least in the short-term.

12. Gamification Makes it Easy to Adopt New Processes and Technology

As we discussed earlier, gamification helps employees fulfill certain psychological needs. This completely transforms the training. Instead of motivating employees to achieve the organization’s goals, gamification motivates them to set and achieve their own, personal goals inside the training framework.

Gamification allows the gradual rollout of training material, which isn’t possible in traditional training programs. The gamification program can also be divided into levels of increasing difficulty or training time or both.

This allows employees to set their own pace, explore the training material, and interact with it without being explicitly told what to do. This increase in self-motivation leads to higher adoption rates when it comes to new processes and technology.

13. Gamification Satisfies our Need for Social Relatedness

As humans, we crave social relatedness and we want to know we belong somewhere or with someone. We have the basic desire to consistently blend with the social environment

It’s difficult to achieve this in a traditional instructional setting but gamification makes it very easy.

In gamification, a meaningful story can create a sense of social relatedness if it offers a narrative frame in which the employee is given a meaningful role. Together with teammates, employees can get a sense of relevance if the importance of their actions for the team’s performance is emphasized.

A meaningful story can also convey the sense of a shared goal, which can, in turn, foster experiences of social relatedness.

14. Gamification Increases Collaboration and Team Spirit

In corporate training, essential collaboration activities include:

• members sharing information and knowledge with each other,
• coordinating dependent activities,
• communicating in a timely fashion, and
• building trust

By designing a corporate gamification training program that requires employees to work in teams and achieve a goal together, you can increase collaboration and knowledge sharing. This will foster trust in the team and improve their communication.

The effect of this training will carry on to the daily lives of the employees where they will retain the increase in trust and better communication with each other.

15. Gamification Improves the Emotional Resilience of Employees

When employees are happy and feel good, the productivity will increase and they will take fewer leaves or sick days.

But, as you can imagine, doing this in a traditional training scenario is next to impossible. How do you even start to make employees feel happy about themselves?

It turns out that gamified training program can help employers achieve company-wide health goals by building psychological resilience. In gamification, you can break goals into smaller achievable tasks and wrap these into layers of narrative and social support.

Conclusion

As you can see, gamification can be a real boon when it comes to training and development of employees. Several learning challenges can be overcome by the long list of game mechanics that gamification comes with.

Are you using gamification at your organization? What kind of benefits have you seen with it?

Learning design is the description of the teaching-learning process that takes place in a unit of learning. A unit can be a single course, a lesson from the course or a topic from the lesson. Instructional designing can be defined as creating well instructed learning experiences. These make the understanding and acquisition of knowledge/ skill more efficient, effective, and appealing.

Learning happens through our experiences and through the things we see and hear. So we need to give the learner an experience that makes sense for him/her.

This can be achieved by designing the course with proper understanding of the expectation from the course/ content. Instructional designing defines clear goal from the learning and hence gives a focused experience. Also it compresses the learning process and saves time too.

Instructional designing should be done is such a way that it engages learner with clear and meaningful contents. The implementation of the concept made by learning design specifications. The most common model used for creating instructional materials is the ADDIE Model

The five phases involved

Analyze –

to gatherinformation about one’s audience, the tasks to be completed, how the learners will view the content, and the project’s overall goals.

Design –

to create the project.. For example, the design phase begins with writing a learningobjective. Tasks are then identified and broken down for the designer. It determines the kind of activities required for the audience in order to meet the goals identified in theAnalyze phase.

Develop –

involves the creation of the activities that will be implemented. It is in this stage that the blueprints of the design phase are assembled.

Implement –

After the content is developed, it is then Implemented. This stage allows the instructional designer to test all materials to determine if they are functional and appropriate for the intended audience.

Evaluate –

The final phase, Evaluate, ensures the materials achieved the desired goals. The evaluation phase consists of two parts: formative and summative assessment. The ADDIE model is an iterative process of instructional design, which means that at each stage the designer can assess the project’s elements and revise them if necessary.

The key point is that instructional designing(ID) provides value and are able to pull the content together to craft courses that are focused and meaningful. With ID, there are clear instructional goals, learners characteristics are considered, and students are engaged with interactive instruction. Hence Instructional Designing is a very essential area of econtent development process.

Learning should be a gradual experience. We should learn and it should stay with us for the remaining years. If we try to dump all the knowledge which is packaged into one carton, the experience is more pressing or stressful than learning. Elearning gives complete learning experience. The knowledge transmission is as expected from any other format of learning. Let me put down few of its beneficial features.

Measurable

You can easily gauge your own performance. A quick glance at your course access history, it will tell you all you need to know about your progress. In an eLearning environment, this is an important element of the experience. Learners are easily be able to see how far along they are.

Attempts & Re-Attempts

eLearning, you’re putting yourself out there, testing your knowledge, and that doesn’t always end pretty. That’s why a good course needs some lifelines. The purpose of testing learners at regular intervals is to test their knowledge gain. If they answer wrong, they should invite further exploration. Ideally, failing should result in a reassessment of the situation, not in a conclusion about one’s ability.

Anchor Support

The Anchor is the important thing holding the whole ship. If it is not strong everything will sink. Learners also need a good anchor, someone to help and instruct them through the more difficult learning. The anchor in eLearning is the Subject Matter Experts (SME). He/ She needs to have a

greater understanding of the subject /course material than those who are learning. Otherwise, how can a learner learn new things when their SME/instructor is not up to the mark.

Step by Step

An eLearning course is set up in segments. It makes the learner feel comfortable as it is gradual learning process. One does not have to be burdened by the entire contents in one go. After each segment he/she can get confident about the topic and then move on. If not , it can be revisited. Take a quick rest, and then go to the next topic..

Elearning industry is experimenting on all new possibilities for enhancing learner experiences. Be it blended learning, Responsive learning, Mobile learning , Game based learning and many more to come.

With the demanding lifestyle, it becomes really difficult to suffice expectation of everyone around.. Time management and To Do list’s never seem to get along.

The day seems to vanish, while managing the professional task and balancing personal life. Still we never feel we have the perfect balance.

In such conditions, people don’t give a thought to learning anything new, even if it is needed to increase the professional productivity. Companies are facing low productivity due to low or negative response of the stress up employees.

Whenever you get few minutes of break, what are your stress busters?

1. Reading
2. Listening to songs or music
3. Playing Games on your mobile devices.

In this scenario , What if you are given a solution which includes all Reading, Listening and playing Games and “a Learning experience” too. This can be experienced on any device you wish to use.

Yes ! this can be achieved where it is Win-Win situation for both employer and employee. The employer can expect a better productivity from the employee.

For the employee it can be a few minutes of stress busting activity, with Gamification, good sound, and learning content in an interactive format. And of course on your own devices . You can do learning while travelling, between your meetings, during your break time. Anytime & Anywhere Learning. How better does can it be …

Elearning / Mobile learning is the best learning solution, for the effective use of time and giving equal importance for your personal choices.

People – they are the most important assets in any organisation. With this, there is no wonder why the management invests a lot of money for improving their knowledge and skills, making them highly-contributory in the success of the enterprise. There are several ways by which this is done, but one of the most popular would be through online training solutions. E-learning is believed to improve retention rate by up to 60%, and participants are five times more likely to learn compared to traditional training approaches.

At Multiversity, we believe that no organisation will be able to succeed without a competent workforce. With this, we are working with HR managers of leading corporates, government agencies & training institutes to create content that will be used for online employee training. We have a content-centric approach, and we believe that this is the best way to instil knowledge and skills to an employee. We believe that delivering learning experiences through well-crafted content through a creative understanding of the requirements. A highly skilled team of Instructional designers make it possible to bring out the best in every employee and to train them to help an organisation achieve its competitive edge.

Deployment of E-Learning Modules

The deployment of our modules that are used for online training follows a systematic approach, making sure of the best outcomes all the time.

Research: In designing content for e-Learning solutions, one of the first things that we do is research. We look at the target audience and their needs, which will provide the fundamentals for designing the course.
Training Needs Analysis and Identification: This is a systematic approach that determines the gap that should be addressed. It identifies the problem, which will be the basis of the modules that will be completed.
Development: By this time, we are already starting to devise the content that will be used for e-Learning. The output is not completed in a single day. It takes patience to come up with a learning tool that can deliver a high level of effectiveness.
Feedbacks: Once an initial output has been created, we gather feedbacks from stakeholders. This is an opportunity to spot any possible flaw or issue that can have a negative impact on the user.
Revision: Based on the feedbacks that have been gathered, the online learning courses will be modified as needed. This is going to be done repeatedly until we are completely satisfied with the final material.
custom elearning

How Our Content Can Help

E-learning can be beneficial in more ways than one, specifically because it promotes convenience since training materials can be accessed virtually anywhere. Nonetheless, it will be useless in the absence of having the right content. With this, here are some of the reasons why the content created by Multiversity can be helpful for any organisation taking up e-Learning:

We work with Subject Matter Experts to churn out contents for our online learning courses. We are leveraging their technical expertise in different disciplines to help us come up with relevant content.
We also come up with content with a logical progression. Meaning, it can facilitate better trail of thought. We use different Instructional Design models to guide the creation of our modules. For instance, through Bloom’s Taxonomy, we make sure that all modules are designed in such a way that they will be geared towards the following goals: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.
Most importantly, we make sure that our content is engaging. We see to it that learners will not be bored. They are created in such a way that it will offer an enhanced learning experience, which will help improve the outcomes of online employee training.

Why Choose Multiversity?

While there are many options when it comes to developers of online learning courses, at Multiversity, we take pride in being one of the best.

We create localised contents. Our custom online training for employees courses are tailor-fitted based on the location of the client while considering global trends. Our content is available in multiple local languages, depending on what is required by the client.
The team employs the best technology like authoring tools of Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, Camtasia, and HTML5, among others to develop high level design modules that embrace the needs of companies.
We have served more than 4.5 million users and created more than 1,000 hours of content, which helped us build a better reputation in the industry.
We create valuable content that will help encourage independent learning, which will make online employee training more effective and efficient.
For Custom Elearning Modules for your business email us at elearning@multiversity.co.in

NABARD ties up with Multiversity for training content development

It is a crucial task for any organization to ensure that employees maintain and enhance their professional expertise and stay updated on current trends in the field. For the government organization like National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), it is not just linked with the development as an organization, but also with the development as a nation.

NABARD has regional offices across all 29 states of India and in two Union Territories, whereas their training establishments can be counted on one hand. With this statistics, continuous employee training becomes a mammoth challenge. Constantly changing rules and regulations in the financial sector only add to the task. E-learning provides an apt solution to tackle this challenge.

The E-learning Advantage

As Section 38 of the NABARD Act mentions, the Bank shall maintain expert staff to study all problems relating to agriculture and rural development and be available for consultation to the Central Government, the Reserve Bank, the State Governments and the other institutions engaged in the field of rural development. The Bank has a training philosophy that ‘Training in NABARD is a proactive, planned and continuous process, as an integral part of organisational development. It seeks to impart knowledge, improve skills and re-orient attitudes for individual growth and organizational effectiveness’. This highlights the importance of continuous training of employees at NABARD.

Employee training for the huge workforce of NABARD spread across its vast territory also involves huge expenditure. The traditional classroom training incurs enormous operational costs with regards to accommodation of employees and other expenses. Besides, there are hidden costs involved as employees have to travel to another city /state and focus exclusively on learning.

The dynamics of e-learning enables the organization to cut down on unnecessary logistical expenditures and also provides employees with the flexibility to receive training at the time and place of their own convenience.

The Multiversity Approach

Developing training content for the financial sector calls for thorough understanding of the subject, meticulousness in presentation and a lot of effort to make it engaging for learners. Multiversity has earlier worked with IDBI and Cosmos Bank and brings in the valuable experience of working with the financial sector.

Leveraging the past experience, Multiversity will work in close coordination with Subject Matter Experts from NABARD to design and develop e-learning content. Instructional Designers from Multiversity will create the detailed storyboard by taking up segmented and sequential instructional approach with the use of interactive graphics and visuals.

The content will also include objectives-based assessment at regular intervals to break the monotony and facilitate better comprehension. Final development will be carried out using the latest HTML 5 technology, which makes it compatible for the use with various devices like desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

What will it mean for NABARD, its employees and the nation?

Online employee training is the right solution for government organization like NABARD as e-learning helps it to stay aligned to its objective of maintaining expert staff to take ahead rural development in India. NABARD employees will benefit from the flexibility offered by e-learning and will also have an easily accessible reference source that can be used in a variety of situations. And ultimately, it will be their expertise that will help take our nation ahead along the road of rural development.

WHY OUTSOURCE CUSTOM E-LEARNING CONTENT DEVELOPMENT?

Understanding benefits through examples

E-learning industry has experienced enormous growth since the beginning of twenty-first century. As organizations become aware of e-learning, they are looking at creating custom content for their specific needs. In many scenarios, outsourcing of custom content development offers a flexible option and provides several benefits. Let us understand some of these benefits through real life examples.

Case #1 – To achieve a reduction in development time and cost

Outsourcing of e-learning content development can result in significant reduction in time and cost. An organization providing training for hospitality professionals needed custom e-learning content for their training purposes. The organization was an established name and had tie-ups with several large hotel chains, human resource agencies as well as colleges.

They had a large pool of talent for training in hospitality. However, development of e-learning content required different set of skills, which the existing resources did not provide. In addition, it also required significant investment in terms of time and efforts. Building a new team to do the job would have required insane amount of investment in terms of time and finance. The management did not consider it feasible at the time, whereas meeting the need for e-learning content was need of the hour.

In such a scenario, outsourcing e-learning content development proved to be the right solution. The content development team coordinated with their in-house hospitality experts to provide the content that was a thoughtful mix of plain text, infographics, visuals and animation. The institute not only saved on time and cost, but also benefitted from excellent quality, which newly built team perhaps would not have been able to deliver.

Case #2 – To have greater tlexibility with human resource pool

Every year, an e-learning company would see an upsurge in the volume of work during specific months. While it was important to meet the occasionally rising demands of existing clients, hiring additional resources would have added to the cost even during the times of lesser volumes of work.

Therefore, it was a strategic business decision to enter into a multi-year contract with another
e-learning organization, which would collaborate with the in-house team to fill in the occasional gap of resources. With outsourcing, the e-learning company could have the necessary flexibility with resource pool and also benefitted from the access to a different set of content development practices, which resulted in optimization of their own practices.

Case #3 – Get innovative solutions from e-learning experts

A multinational organization providing financial services required each of their associates to complete the training on Global Employee Policies. As it was a fundamental part of work, every employee, irrespective of their designation, had to go through the training. The content, which was heavy with several legalities, would find almost everybody struggling to stay awake. So this multinational tasked an e-learning company to make the content engaging for its employees.

The solution that was delivered by e-learning experts contained audio-video stories where the global employee policies were applicable. Similarity of the situations would make employees relate to the stories and help them understand the policies in relevant context. As realism was the key here, the video featured professional actors bringing the action alive at a real-life workplace.

As a result of engaging content, the client needed fewer training facilitators to achieve maximum participation and adherence to policies considerably increased. In this case, content development outsourcing enabled the client to create engaging content as e-learning experts came up with an innovative solution and also took care of its meticulous execution.

Case #4 – To maintain singular focus on core business

One of the largest medical distributors in a country was planning to provide online educational resources for medical professionals. This would add value to their products as educational resources would make it easier for medical professionals to use their products accurately and would also promote their brand.

The medical distributor entered into a contract with an e-learning company to deliver content for their online educational resources. The e-learning company deployed a highly customized LMS that helped improve product awareness and user experience. In a latter phase, the two companies also collaborated to create a series of online courses to educate medical professionals to follow proper processes while using their products.

As a result, the number of registered users grew six-fold within the span of a year. Subsequently, it led to greater user engagement and improved site performance and eventually became an integral part of the brand promotion and marketing activities of the medical distribution company.

By outsourcing e-learning content development, the medical distributor was able to maintain its focus on core business activities of manufacturing and distributing medical products and equipment. Simultaneously, it could also reap the benefits of value that was added by e-learning resources to their strategic activities.

What you need is the right partner!

The benefits of outsourcing eLearning content development are many. The right partner will understand your specific needs. They will collaborate with you to create bespoke or custom e-learning content that will engage your audience and drive them to their goals. Ultimately, this will also enable your organization to reach the goals more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Multiversity can be your right partner for development of custom e-learning content. For more information, get in touch with us at elearning@multiversity.co.in

According to a report by market research firm Evaluate Pharma, global growth rate for the pharma industry is expected to reach 6.3% CAGR through 2022, up from the 5% CAGR it predicted last year for the 2014-2020 period, and according to a report by IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics 2012 the world market for medical products is expected to reach nearly 1.17 trillion by 2017. (Source)

This growing industry employs millions of people across the world, and they play a key role in the success of the Pharma companies. It is important that these employees (direct and indirect) are trained in compliances, product knowledge, culture, and other areas to address dynamic business needs of the companies and contribute to success of the organization.

Before we look at how L&D department of Pharma companies can advantage of eLearning, let us look at some of the challenges faced by them currently. Some of the key challenges are a) Footprint of the companies across the globe b) Rapid launch of new drugs c) Rapidly changing regulatory compliances d) Budgetary controls for training organization wide e) Availability of face to face trainer f) High employee turnover ratio.

Elearning is able to deftly handle all these challenges and yet provide a more suitable alternative to classroom training in an affordable manner. The online courses take training to a next level but it ensures ethos of the training are kept intact. New technologies allow to create innovative and engaging courses and ensures no learner is left behind.

The most significant impact of elearning for the pharmaceutical industry is the amount of time saved: It takes fewer hours to train people online. That is especially critical when large numbers of medical represetatives must be trained simultaneously to launch a new product.

Here are some benefits that pharmaceutical companies can derive by using E-learning courses for training their employees:

Ease of access:

First and foremost, in-lab training is expensive and requires excessive precaution when it comes to handling hazardous material. Elearning courses eliminate the need of a brick and mortar training room and allow for a safer virtual environment. These courses replace the need for instructors and provide consistent training at any point and place of the user’s choice. Today’s technology driven workforce prefers using their mobiles, ipads, etc to gain knowledge. Companies can leverage on this trait and allow employees to learn as per their preferred time and place making a highly flexible and dynamic learning process

Handle change in requirements:

Product requirements evolve and change from time to time as newer markets are being tapped into at a rapid pace. For example, certain compositions in a drug may need to vary to suit regional compliances and norms. Instead of educating trainers who may then impart this knowledge to the employees, Elearning courses can be easily modified to incorporate these changes. They can also be designed to adapt to suit regional norms and linguistics.

Presentation and demo made easy:

Elearning courses can help medical representatives to a great extent. Being always on the run to pitch new products and/or drugs to a growing clientele, they have limited time to consume information. Yet they have to keep up with the newest products, their features as well as knowledge about whether these products have been created after following necessary regulations. These modules can be created in small chunks that can be easily accessible and digested whenever required. If the situation demands that the end customer be demonstrated how the product works, the med rep can show these videos in the absence of said product.
For example, it may not be feasible to carry huge equipments such as ultrasound and MRI machines. Sales persons can demonstrate how machines work using videos on their laptops with minimal hassles.
Elearning has transformed classroom training to a more collaborative training and development process. It is not only more interactive but also allows the users to discuss their progress and difficulties as per their own convenience. Pharmaceutical companies now find sales personnel training alongside training of factory workers can be done more efficiently.

The phenomenal growth of the elearning industry in recent years is a testament to its increasing popularity. For learning and development initiatives, it has become one of the top preferred choices of a large number of companies. What separates elearning from traditional learning is its ability to maintain consistency no matter how, when or who is going to consume the information. Additionally, the course content can be modified at any point of time to integrate new data with ease.

We have seen in our previous blog how companies are now leveraging video based elearning to ensure that employees are learning faster and in a more efficient manner, resulting in higher productivity. AR and VR are the latest buzzwords that are said to further enrich the experience of video based elearning by providing a highly interactive and immersive experience of learners. A recent study predicts that by 2020 the AR industry has potential of $120B whereas VR will be around $30B.

Typically, the terms AR – Augmented Reality and VR – Virtual Reality are spoken in the same breath. Though they are both built on the same types of technology, there is a significant difference between the two. First let us understand each of these and then determine how it can be beneficial for the elearning industry.

What is Virtual Reality?

Virtual reality is a computer technology that uses headsets to create an artificial 3-dimensional environment that can be primarily experienced by the user’s 2 senses viz. sight and sound. Virtual reality is quite popular among gamers as it gives them almost a life-like experience of actually being in the game.

Uses of VR in Elearning industry

The level of immersion that VR provides is the reason that makes it a game changer for the future of eLearning. It enables the learners to become fully engaged with the content that they need to learn thus increasing their capacity to retain optimum information.

When it comes to creating elearning content for industries that have a certain amount of risk involved, virtual reality in elearning based training can reduce this risk in its entirety. Here the learners need to be extremely cautious of how they operate heavy machinery, for example. Instead of actually using live models for training, it is wiser to recreate a simulated environment to provide the learner with the exact same experience. It ensures that the training is equally effective and yet the element of risk or damage to either the learner or the machines can be completely avoided.

VR headset or headgears is also inexpensive and can be easily integrated with most training modules. It also eliminates the need for instructional designers to create complex CAD and 3D models for 2D screens. These cannot be easily interpreted by learners if they are studied on computer screens. Instead they can use platforms that support Virtual Reality and allow for better design manipulations.

What is Augmented Reality?

AR or Augmented reality takes the experience created by Virtual Reality to a whole new level. While VR creates an entirely new life-like environment, AR makes use of our existing reality and ‘augments’ it further. Basically it allows more freedom to the users by combining real life experience with 3D environments in real time.

One of the most well known examples of AR is the ultra popular game of 2016, Pokemon Go. Developed by Niantic for both iOS and Android, the game became an instant hit worldwide and went to break 5 Guinness world records!

Another example is Google Glass which is basically a computer that can worn like glasses. Apple too is not far behind.

“I’m excited about Augmented Reality because unlike Virtual Reality which closes the world out, AR allows individuals to be present in the world but hopefully allows an improvement on what’s happening presently. Most people don’t want to lock themselves out from the world for a long period of time and today you can’t do that because you get sick from it. With AR you can, not be engrossed in something, but have it be a part of your world, of your conversation. That has resonance.”

Tim Cook – CEO of Apple Inc. (Source)

Uses of Augmented Reality in Elearning industry

AR will be used more as a point of need training i.e. instead of using standard classrooms or training environments, AR can be directly used on actual locations. For example, for as simple a procedure as changing the nuts of a transformer, the machine can be damaged if the right tools are not used. In this case, an AR tool, preferably a smartphone owing to its ubiquitous nature can be used to simply point to the nut and the application will identify which tools should be used to correctly complete the procedure without causing damage to the unit.

In similar ways, Augmented Reality in Elearning can be used for training of innumerable complicated products.

To summarize, one technology is not better than the other. There are many cases where both Augmented and Virtual Reality  can be used together to enhance the entire Elearning experience.

Elearning has gained tremendous popularity in recent years. Since 2000, the industry has grown by approximately 900%! It has already been proven to be more effective than classroom training as it allows users to learn at their own pace. Depending on the technology used, elearning can be classified into podcasts, mobile elearning, virtual training rooms, simulation modules, learning CMS as well as video based learning. Of late, video based learning is the preferred choice of most companies for training their employees.

In the past 10 years, consumption of videos has increased quite significantly. Today not just Millennials but the Baby Boomers and Generation X too prefer videos over any other medium. By 2020, videos are said to represent more than 80% of all internet traffic. (Source: Inc.com) Elearning videos are a perfect medium for instructional designers to present both visual and auditory information interactively. Video based elearning is able to engage the learners on a higher scale as compared to any printed training guide. Studies show that we endure more cognitive pressure while reading a text as compared to videos. Whereas watching a video requires lesser efforts and energy and the information is assimilated much faster. They are also better at stimulating knowledge gain, aid in memory retention, explain and demonstrate complicated processes in an easy manner.

Elearning videos are compatible with all platforms. However instead of creating lengthy videos that take forever to load, create smaller videos. Using technologies like SCORM, their size can be reduced while maintaining their effectiveness. Users should be able to access these videos on their mobile phones, tablets or any portable device irrespective of net connectivity.

How to leverage video based Elearning?

1. Installation and Setup videos

The most common problem that many customers face with industrial machines or appliances are caused by either incorrect installation or faulty setup. The on site technical representatives may not be fully trained to carry out these processes. Combined with lack of proper installation guides, they are bound to make mistakes during installation. Using video based elearning courses, these individuals can be quickly trained to handle all operations in the most efficient manner. They can even access these videos on site so that there are no errors that prohibit the units from functioning to their full capacity. Valuable time can be saved that would otherwise have been wasted by going back and forth to the office to collect setup manuals. Thus it works well both for the manufacturer as well as the customers saving both time and expenses.

2. Product Demonstration

Every salesperson should know the most intricate details about the products he sells. It’s what makes them successful. End users are more likely to trust salespeople who are confident and
can explain/demonstrate complex product features in an easy manner. They are the ones who are going to use it and thus need to be assured that the product can be handled with minimal efforts. Elearning videos are a powerful medium to educate everyone on what-to- do and what- not-to- do in the most engaging manner. Using elearning videos for product demonstration is an effective way of replicating typical brick and mortar experience. It saves cost and efforts of actually operating the product. These videos can be used infinite number of times by viewers till they understand how the product works. Instead of carrying all the equipment to the client site, sales personnel can simply show these videos and explain how the products function and what can be the end results. A simple pen drive or a compact disc can suffice if the material is not already available on any cloud platform.

3. Safety and Security guide

Videos are great way to eliminate any risk that could occur due to incorrect handling of complex products. By using tutorials to educate employees about the safety and security procedures,
actually carrying out the entire procedure can be avoided. In some cases, quick tests or exams can be conducted to test how aware an individual is about the standard safety and security norms in his or her company. Only upon achieving a certain score, should he or she be made eligible to proceed further with actual use of product.

4. Troubleshooting videos

In case of complaints or service requests, technical reps need to go on site to fix the customer’s units. Having a handy troubleshooting video guide can help these individuals gauge what the
actual problem is and how to solve it. These videos can be created in such a way that even those with minimal technical expertise should be able to handle the problem and provide appropriate solutions to it.
By leveraging on video based learning, companies can be assured of faster learning, lesser mistakes and higher productivity from their employees. Additionally, they are able to provide better services to their customers before, during as well as after the sales process takes place.