A host of industry-leading speakers attracted many of the thousands of visitors to this year’s World of Learning Conference.
Key issues currently affecting the sector were covered including investing in the leaders of the future, delivering with reduced time and budgets and integrating formal, informal and social learning. Visitors came away from the two day conference armed with plenty of valuable advice and guidance to take back with them to the workplace.
One of the issues discussed was eLearning, in particular how to make engage learners and demonstrate ROI. We asked some of the speakers ‘What is your greatest eLearning challenge?’
Martin Baker, founder and managing director of the Charity Learning Consortium, says:
“The results of benchmarking research undertaken specifically for the third sector indicates that engaging learners is one of the chief challenges. Marketing and evaluation are also barriers to overcome. These are all common themes from standard benchmarking surveys covering the corporate sector."
“However, what we need to bear in mind is that compared to the corporate sector, charities have a relatively low budget. It is therefore all the more note worthy that they continue to achieve such results despite their financial constraints.”
Nancy Ouma, assessment and training manager, VSO, says:
“There are two challenges of particular note. First are the many different learning styles that suit different people. Some learners may not be receptive to the idea of eLearning, so require guidance and support around this in order to show how it can benefit them."
“The second challenge is demonstrating its effectiveness. Participation levels are an obvious measurement but this raises the question of how do you define participation? Does this relate to attendance, interaction or delivery? This definition needs to be determined before the evaluation process is put into place.”
Laura Overton, managing director at Towards Maturity, says:
“We have gathered data on the barriers to adoption of e-learning. In 2004, poor infrastructure was cited as one of the top barriers, in 2006 it was the cost of set up."
“For the last three years, the main barriers are all to do with the knowledge, skills and confidence of the L&D team, their perceptions that their learners are not ready and willing for technology, and the reluctance of management to adopt new ways of working.”
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