Should you use digital learning in the workplace?
Technological developments have had a major impact on the way most people work over the last 20 years. Most of us can now do at least some of our work from anywhere and communication between colleagues in different offices and timezones has become much more straightforward. One part of our working lives that hasn’t changed significantly in recent years is training. Many training courses are still delivered by a trainer to a seminar room of people. Attendees are still required to show up to a particular location at a particular time and complete the same training. In some cases, the most significant change has been the replacement of the overhead slide projector with its modern equivalent.
However, in recent years, a number of innovations have arrived that make it possible to deliver digital learning in the workplace. This means that it’s possible for people to complete training and learning away from the office at any time. In this article we’ll take a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of using digital learning in the workplace instead of traditional training methods.
Traditional training can waste resources
When you arrange a traditional training day, it’s quite likely that you’ll need to take an entire team away from their desks for half a day or more. Digital learning allows individuals to compete training at different times, meaning that a business doesn’t have to worry about the decrease in productivity caused by several staff members being away from their desks at the same time.
Delivering training to one person at a time can have its disadvantages too. It’s more difficult to learn collaboratively, although there are digital learning platforms that integrate with social media sites to allow this. It’s also possible to include leaderboards and to gamify some elements of the training, to encourage learners to compete with one another as they complete the training.
Digital learning is easier to review
Asessments delivered through a digital learning system in the workplace can be reviewed instantly, allowing the learner to put any feedback into practice immediately. This also makes it easier to assess a learner’s progress throughout the training, meaning that any gaps in their knowledge can be filled in during the course. In some traditional training situations these issues won’t appear until an end of course assessment, by which point it can be too late to go back and fill in any gaps.
This form of review has its drawbacks. It generally limits the type of responses that learners can give, since their answers need to be interpreted and marked by a computer. In some situations it is possible to combine this form of assessment with longer, written answers that are reviewed by a human in order to have the best of both worlds.
