Top 5 eLearning trends in 2020

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The world of eLearning is growing rapidly. More and more companies are looking to modernize their work and employees and keep up with the latest solutions. Soon, eLearning will be a part of every company worldwide.

The new year has just started. Here is our list of top 5 eLearning trends in 2020 that you should know:

 

     1. Big Data Analysis

 

Methods of working, learning habits, and the behavior of employees are constantly changing. They are different than they were only a few years ago. Big Data Analysis is a way to gather relevant information about learners (students, employees,…) and present them in a suitable form.

If you are running a training module, the data could be the test results, learners’ progress, course completion rates, or any other data that is relevant to your training.

Our software GetCertified is an example of a system which enables you to collect that data. Your employees can take personalized tests and you can see the reports for each of them. In these reports, you can see a few pieces of information that could be relevant to your company.

You can use that data for several things. You can keep track of the learning performance, changes in the learning ROI, and improve your decision-making process and strategies for future progress.

Big Data Analysis is a very important trend because traditional data gathering will soon be impossible to do in modern companies.

 

     2. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

 

Artificial intelligence is making an impact not only in eLearning but in every industry in the world. AI will continue to improve the online training process. It has the potential to become the best eLearning tool.

One of the advantages of AI is that you can have automated data gathering and analysis as well. Then the L&D teams can adapt and create more personalized learning modules for the specific learner.

Another AI advantage are chatbots, robot assistants that can help the learners at any time. They are affordable, effective, fast, and they can help you improve your training methods.

AI will continue to improve and redefine in 2020, so you should keep an eye on this fast-growing trend.

 

     3. AR, VR, MR for immersive eLearning

 

Augmented Reality or AR represents having a real-world experience with digital information overlay. Real-world remains central to the experience, enhanced by virtual details.

Virtual Reality or VR represents learning in a completely digital enviroment.

Merged Reality represents having a real-world and virtual world experience intertwined. Interaction with and manipulation of both the physical and virtual enviroment.

Many people are visual learners. They prefer to get immersed in training to acquire knowledge. These technologies will be more introduced to eLearning in 2020 due to the decrease in their costs and improved experience.

They are still far from reaching their full potential, but there is a great possibility that they will become mainstream in eLearning.

 

     4. Learning Experience Platform (LXP)

 

Learning Experience Platform or LXP represents an upgrade of LMS. The purpose of LXP is to help companies create a self-directed learning experience.

With the LXP Platform, you can easily create a personalized learning experience for your learners.

LXP is a system that looks more like a content provider, such as YouTube or Netflix. This way the content is easier to consume. LXP systems are compatible with all kinds of content, such as videos and podcasts.

One of the biggest examples of using LXP Platform is LinkedIn. Their module, LinkedIn Learning, is offering video courses taught by experts in certain fields.

The only problem with LXP is that it is difficult to implement is with existing LMSs. It is better to build it in your company from scratch and adapt it to your needs.

 

     5. Gamification and Game-Based Learning

 

Gamification of learning is not a new trend, but it has started to grow over the last couple of years and it is on its way to becoming a widely used eLearning method.

Gamification allows companies and learning institutions to motivate learners and make them more engaged in the training and learning experience. Drivers like being on the leaderboard, gathering points, getting badges and trophies, can increase learners’ engagement, boost retention rates, and reduce the course dropout rates.

 

     Conclusion

 

As you can see, technologies and methods in eLearning are getting more redefined and user-friendly with each year. Soon they will replace all traditional training and learning methods and become the standard. That is why it is important to keep up with the latest trends and apply changes in order to stay relevant in your current industry.

The advantages of online testing

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Employees are the backbone of companies worldwide, and it is crucial to test and evaluate employees consistently as it enables top performance.  It is also a requirement for the recruitment process.

The problem occurs when the testing has to be done at a specific location.

A large number of companies use only one facility for these kinds of activities, so employees located in different areas have to travel to that specific place to take the tests. In many industries, these evaluations happen more than once a year.

This option is not very cost-effective and creates several obstacles for both companies and employees

Here is an example of solving this type of problem by switching to online testing and evaluation.

 

Ontario Provincial Police (OPP)

 

OPP used to require an ATS certificate from their police candidates as a part of their application process.

ATS Testing Inc is the only company licensed by the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police (OACP) to conduct the required testing for police candidates. Even though they deliver testing in various province locations, they only travel as far north as Thunder Bay. They provide testing there biannually.

It is a real challenge for the candidates in Northern Ontario that have to travel to Thunder Bay to obtain certification. On top of that, they have to do that twice! The PREP is only valid for six months.

The total investment for one trip for the initial testing is $1.677,93 + meals. Each time they need to renew their PREP test, they still incur the base cost above.

So, it’s no surprise that OPP removed the ATS testing from their application process. But they didn’t entirely solve their problem. They still need to come up with a new way to do their testing while maintaining the golden standard.

Their solution was an online testing method, called “In-House Testing.” In this way, candidates wouldn’t have to travel, and OPP can save a lot of time and money. The issue with this is that OPP needs to come up with online tests that will be complex enough to produce the same quality as the ATS testing.

Another issue that can occur is that they can experience an application “boom.” The downside is a significant increase in the number of candidates who apply, which can lead to vast piles of applications waiting to be processed.

An opposite problem can happen, as well. A decrease in the number of candidates because of what happens if they don’t get accepted in OPP. To have a career in the police, they will need to complete the ATS testing. That means that some of the potential candidates won’t apply at OPP.

One of the possibilities is to have ATS Testing Inc. create an online testing platform where candidates living in remote locations such as Northern Ontario, can take the tests from their homes. In that way, OPP could keep its partnership with ATP and maintain its level of suitable and qualified applicants. A completely win-win situation for everyone!

 

Summary

 

Various companies are facing the same problem. Online testing and evaluation is the inevitable future. Even though the solution is visible, it’s not an easy task to find a way to implement it. For some companies, it’s challenging to create an online platform and not have substantial financial costs.

Software such as YouTestMe can help you with starting your transition to the online way of testing.

College of Today vs. College of Tomorrow

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Education is the basis of all civilization, and it is the only way for an individual to find their place in society. Without education technology would be non-existent, and it is only fitting that technology, now that it is as advanced as it is, can help us re-design and improve education to be far more efficient than before.

The Problem with Classic Education

For centuries education has gone on in basically the exact same way; students would attend a class in a classroom with potentially hundreds of their peers, listen to a lecture, go home, do their homework and study for the exam. This is a system that has seemingly been very efficient for many years, and has produced many well-educated, successful people. However, it’s also a possibility that we think this system is efficient simply because we as a society had no alternative up until now.

Many schools and colleges are now transitioning to a more modern type of education, aided by software and technology, but many still cling to the traditional, proven method of pen, paper and auditory. Let’s take a quick glance at this traditional approach to education, and see how it compares to the ever-evolving concept of online learning and why you should maybe consider an LMS for your further educational needs, whether you’re a student or a tutor.

Administration

Running a traditional educational institution is a lot of work, mostly because a lot of the things are being done by hand. For every little process there exists some form of paperwork that has to be filled out, validated (sometimes by several different people), and this all takes a lot of time and money that could be spent elsewhere.

This problem is mainly due to the fact that, even though computers and technology in educational institutions are being used more than before, they still aren’t being nearly utilized to their full potential, so most of the administration still relies on human labor. Computers are mostly used for organizing online timesheets, sending e-mails, and other very basic functions that most people can get a grasp of quickly. There’s also the issue of training people that don’t have that much experience with computer use, which is a good investment but not one that many educational institutions are willing to make.

Costs

One of the main disadvantages of the traditional approach is simply the fact that both students and the university itself are burdened with costs that are simply unavoidable. Books can be very expensive, especially large textbooks from reputable authors, and of course it’s absolutely against the law for the university to scan and copy anything from it, even for educational purposes. If a single textbook costs $20, and there are 400 students per year per course, then that’s $8,000 spent on just one book – and there are many of them. Surely these are funds that could’ve been used in a better way by both the faculty and the students, and this is probably the main argument against the traditional approach to education.

On the other hand, when using an LMS for teaching, most tutors tend to create their own learning materials, which they share with the students free of charge – after all, it’s in their best interest for the student to gain as much as they can from the course and become a well-educated individual, and the teachers themselves gain nothing from insisting that students buy learning materials.

Favoritism

A very sad fact of life is that human beings are unavoidably subjective, even if we try not to be, and because of this, favoritism in education is inevitable. It’s extremely unfair when a student, despite their best efforts, gets shoved to the wayside because a teacher favors one of their peers instead of them. This doesn’t have to be very obvious favoritism, as most professionals tend to try and be as objective as possible. But subjectivity is a part of human nature, and simply knowing the name or recognizing the handwriting of a student on a test can impact the teacher’s decision to give them a lower or higher grade, even if it’s just a little bit.

When using an LMS (a learning management system), the software is built in such a way so the computer handles all the grading. Not only does this mean the grading will be done much faster, but it will also be completely objective.

The Solution: Classroom 2020 College Edition

If you’re considering to make the switch to e-Learning, the first thing you’re going to have to do is decide which LMS you’re going to use. LMS is short for learning management system, and put simply it is a piece of software that includes all the features you need to teach a course to any number of students.

With Classroom 2020: College Edition you have many such features at your disposal – for example, the test creation feature allows you to quickly create many different variants of tests from a custom-created question pool, based on different parameters. Classroom 2020: College Edition can help you single-handedly and quickly create your own custom study program, arrange courses, and keep track of which students are taking which course – all within the same application. And finally, Classroom 2020: College Edition also includes a sophisticated statistics module that helps you track information about your students, courses, tests etc., which makes it easy to make quick comparisons and get the information you need to improve your course in the future.

Now let’s talk about a few advantages that you as an educator can receive from using an LMS such as Classroom 2020 College Edition, and why you should consider doing so in the future.

Convenience

First of all, using an LMS for your education is convenient both for you and your students. The concept of superior connectivity when teaching and learning online is something you just don’t have in the conventional approach. One advantage of this is that your students don’t need to be in the same physical space as you anymore. They can attend the lecture remotely across the Internet despite all the conditions that might have rendered it impossible to physically attend a class (weather conditions, perhaps they live very far away and it is costly for them to travel, etc.).

Another example of why this is advantageous is that you can quickly and easily update any learning materials within the LMS itself, or via a simple Cloud platform. You can then share these with your students without having to give them a hard copy of a book that they need to copy, which is a process that takes a lot longer especially if there are a lot of students that require this. It’s simply more convenient in every possible way, simply because of the fact that you’re dealing with advanced technology.

Higher Efficiency

Computers and software lack the human ability to create an original idea and improvise, but other than that they’ve pretty much got us beat in every other area – including efficiency. A modern computer processor can execute a billion different operations per second, at a speed unparalleled to what any human can do, and this has made them ideal for automating all sorts of tedious tasks that don’t take that much brainpower but use up a lot of your time.

There are a lot of applications for this in education, and every modern LMS will have these features already built-in and ready to use.

Multimedia and Interactive Environments

A major advantage of using an LMS for education is the fact that you’re no longer able to share just text and simple pictures with your students. Multimedia of all kinds can now be used, and this helps create an interactive environment with the students, in which they’ll be able to learn and progress much more quickly than if they were studying from a plain textbook.

If you’re creative enough, you can even use an LMS to create an interactive environment on the tests themselves, which is far superior to the traditional pen-and-paper style exam.

Conclusion

It is inevitable that technology will start playing a bigger part in our lives as it evolves further, and despite much prejudice this can only serve for the betterment of our education, and quite frankly, anything else that technology touches. More automation means more efficiency, more time for the human mind to focus on what it is actually needed for, and a better-educated workforce that will better serve society.

If you haven’t already considered using an LMS to teach and learn, now might be the right time to do so. Be sure to check out Classroom 2020: College Edition, as it offers everything an LMS should have at a fair price, so you can start enjoying the benefits of automated learning as soon as possible.

 

Training in Government

Employee Training in Government Institutions

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If you’re an employer in a government institution, you probably already know that the competence of your employees is one of the most important aspects of your job. A hardworking, capable workforce is the backbone of any good company, but this goes especially when you work for the government, as the quality of your work is something that can affect a very large number of people.

In order to build a capable workforce, it is paramount that you invest inadequate employee training, and the main issue with this when it comes to government institutions is the rather large number of employees that need to be trained and have their knowledge and competence tested. In the past, this used to be a tedious, expensive process, but with the advance of information technology, it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be back in the day.

Today, we want to talk a bit about how implementing an E-learning training in government institutions can help you regulate training and testing costs, as well as significantly increase the efficiency of employee training.

Testing

Testing is one of the most important aspects of employee training, as it is the only way that you can actually know how effective the training was and how much your employees benefited from it. In an institution with a large number of employees, high-volume testing using the conventional pen-and-paper method can be quite costly. This is not only due to the overwhelming printing expenses, but you also have to hire someone to supervise the testing process.

Using a good learning management system (or LMS) such as Classroom 2020 can help you save a lot of resources on this, as the testing process is automated with the help of a computer. Additionally, this allows employees to take the test at their leisure, which eliminates the need for the reservation of a particular time and space for the testing to take place.

Another advantage of using an LMS for employee testing is that the tests themselves no longer have to be limited to a simple question-and-answer format. Thanks to technology, you can introduce multimedia such as videos and imagery, which can help make the process easier, more intuitive and definitely more effective.

Information Security

One of the main concerns of a government-based institution when it comes to E-learning is the concept of the Cloud. Because information is being stored and shared online, many people are rightfully worried that it might fall into the wrong hands. This concern is so large that many institutions are not even allowed to store information on servers that are outside the country. The opinion that data is much safer on an offline, hard medium such as an external hard disk locked away in a drawer is completely understandable, but not necessarily correct.

According to recent studies, there really is no significant difference when it comes to security. The studies inconclusively proved that the means of access matter far more than the actual location of the data, and as long as the security of the server is sufficient, your data remains safe. And when you consider the many benefits that storing data on the Cloud can have for your company versus the negligibly small risk, it’s really a no-brainer.

Online Courses

Taking a course online has completely transformed the way we view education, and as technology improves further so will the courses that become accessible to us via the Internet. Back in the day, the company would have to pay transportation and hotel fees for employees to attend a centralized course in a specific time and place – now they can do it from the comfort of their home.

There is still a lot of prejudice concerning how effective online courses truly are, and some of the more common arguments are that there’s no sense of urgency when you take a course online. And while this might be true to some extent, online learning offers a myriad of benefits that completely outweighs that one potential disadvantage. For example, when attending a traditional lecture, if you aren’t able to keep your focus throughout the entire lecture, there’s a chance that you will miss a crucial point in the presentation. When taking a course online, however, there’s a good chance that the material is pre-recorded, so you can listen to it as many times as you need in order to soak it in. This is just one of the many advantages that studying online can offer your employees, so it is definitely something worth considering.

Course Statistics

After your employees complete an online course and all the necessary testing that comes afterwards, you’re left with the issue of gathering all the information you need from these tests – how well your employees did, how difficult the test itself was from their point of view etc. – and sorting the information in a statistically adequate manner.

This used to be a really tedious process, but with the help of an LMS such as Classroom 2020, this can be done in mere seconds. The software automatically collects and arranges the test results and the feedback left by the employees, and only provides you with information that is actually useful to you. A highly useful feature that can potentially save you a lot of valuable time and energy.

Summary

There is no replacement for a capable workforce, and as you can see, one of the best ways to make sure you have one is to make sure they are properly trained and their knowledge is evaluated on a regular basis. E-learning software is improving every day and is bound to take over education in the very near future, so it’s a good idea to get acquainted with it as soon as possible.

Employee Training: Software vs. Face-To-Face

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It goes without saying that competent, hardworking employees are the backbone of any successful company, and no matter how good job management might be doing, if the workforce is less than satisfactory, then there isn’t much anyone can do. This is why it is very important to have a good idea about just how competent your workers are and to regularly think of ways to improve their skills for the betterment of the entire corporation.

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employee knowledge evaluation

The Advantages of Employee Knowledge Evaluation Automation

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The key to a company’s success is a capable, intelligent workforce. No matter how good you are at running a company, if you don’t have the right kind of people to help you achieve your dream, you aren’t going to make it.

The ideal employee requires minimal supervision, is able to complete their tasks on time, and will even be knowledgeable and experienced enough to give you suggestions of their own on how the process they’re involved in can be upgraded to benefit the company.

To find this kind of employee, you need to have the right kind of screening process, sophisticated enough to differentiate the competent from the unqualified, but simple enough to not scare even the good ones away. For as long as we know it, this has been done with the help of various tests and interviews. As an interviewer, your job is to put your employee in a sort of simulation that mirrors the type of work they’re going to be doing after you potentially hire them. If they do well on this simulation, you know (or at least you hope) that will translate to a competent worker later on.t just

The problem is that this can often be a very complicated, tedious, and time-and-resource-consuming process if it is done manually. For this reason, many major companies have already started using the software in order to automate this process as much as possible, so that it is more efficient and costs the company less.

Today, we want to talk about just a few advantages that your company will be able to enjoy if you choose to switch to an automated employee knowledge evaluation system, so without further ado, here they are.

Printing

If your company is just starting off and you haven’t really hired a lot of employees, and you don’t plan on hiring a lot more anytime soon, then it might still be okay to stick to the old-fashioned pen and paper approach for employee knowledge evaluation – although there are still other benefits of automation that you would be missing out on.

But if you have a large number of employees, then the first thing you should think about is how much money you’re spending on printing costs. For every new test you need an additional piece of paper, and for a big company this can add up to being quite an expense, pretty quickly.

The great thing about software-based knowledge evaluation is that it is performed with the help of computers, so you need virtually no paper at all. Additionally, if you’re legally obliged to destroy the testing material,  that means that switching to software means you can ditch the paper shredders as well.

Staff Requirements

Putting testing material into practice not only requires a substantial amount of paper, but also human personnel for supervising and elaboration purposes. This personnel would have to be present every time a test is being conducted, ready to answer any queries or questions that the evaluated party might have about the test itself.

This is where it comes in handy to use software for the purpose of employee knowledge evaluation. Because testees can choose to be evaluated at any given time, and since the Internet allows for instant contact with your supervisor, it means that the personnel tasked with assistance don’t have to be in the same room as the person taking the test. Additionally, what you can do is put together an easily accessible FAQ within the testing software itself that the testee might find sufficiently helpful so they don’t even have to contact anybody.

Time Efficiency

The beauty of computers is that while they’re incapable of original thought and pretty much have to be “told” what to do, they’re much, much faster than any human could ever hope to be. Modern computer processors can perform billions of operations per second, which means they can multitask billions of times better than a human and perform all those tasks at the same speed.

There is a lot of information involved in the knowledge evaluation of new employees, not only grading but also statistically analyzing the collective results in order to improve the testing process. A good piece of testing software can do all of this on its own, and just provide you with the information you need. It’s really a huge step up from the manual approach, especially if you have a large number of tests that you need to gather all this information from.

Objectivity & Consistency

Finally, possibly the biggest advantage you’ll be able to get from automated knowledge evaluation stems from the two things that computers will always be superior to humans at consistency, and objectivity. When performing the same task, over and over again for many repetitions (like working on a treadmill, or grading a test), the human mind gets tired and becomes more prone to errors. It’s unavoidable that you’ll make mistakes and therefore not be able to deliver the same kind of quality each time around.

This is exactly the opposite when it comes to computers. Once you tell a computer what to do, it automates the process and performs it according to a certain set of rules, and does it identically each time around. This is invaluable when it comes to scoring tests and ranking employees, because you completely eliminate the human factor, in a good way.

The same goes for objectivity. We, humans, are very subjective by nature, no matter how much we try not to be. Even small, intricate differences between candidates such as their handwriting can influence our final decision, in a way that they really shouldn’t be. Computers don’t possess the ability to be biased, so using them to evaluate employees is fairer and will deliver a far more objective and precise decision, as long as the programmed testing process is doing its job correctly.

What Great HR Managers do Differently?

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The human resources department is an integral part of any company that wants to make it in this ever-evolving and competitive business world. They’re the single tie between the people up on the top and the common employee, and it is their job to make sure the workforce is helping to improve the company instead of dragging it down. It takes a lot of experience and a load of trial and error to become a good HR manager that your employees will not only look to for guidance but will also know that you’ll be able to provide it to them.

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Survey Software

Why HR Needs to Invest in Exam and Survey Software

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When it comes to hiring and training new employees, as well as evaluating the performance of existing ones, the human resources department often has its hands full with a very difficult and tedious job. There is a lot of information involved with surveying and testing the knowledge of employees, and handling all of this information by hand can often be quite a challenge and take a considerable amount of time. In the last decade, technology has become advanced enough for computers to take over a big part of this process with the help of certain survey software.

When it first started getting developed, this kind of software was rather clunky, inefficient and not that easy to use, but as time went by it had improved drastically, and nowadays many companies are switching to this sort of approach when it comes to surveying and testing employees.

Exam & Survey Software vs. the Conventional Approach

In this post, we’d like to sum up some of the differences between using exam software, as well as survey software as a means of employee evaluation in your company, and the conventional approach where everything is done by pen and paper, ultimately trying to figure out which approach is more efficient, and will thus help save the company both time and money.

One of the things that the conventional approach has going for it is that the majority of people are used to it; everyone can take a piece of paper, write something down and use that rather simple skill to construct a test and gather useful information about the company’s workforce.

The problem with this approach is that it takes a considerable amount of time, and when you have a lot of employees, it is a very tedious process. If your number of workers is twenty or less, it might make less sense to invest in a good piece of survey software, but as soon as that number grows you’ll see that the workload can get a bit out of hand.

Multimedia Aids

Another issue with the conventional manner of testing and surveying via the pen and paper approach is that you’re limited to the type of information you can include in your test. Tests are mostly text, and simple images and graphs when required. Many studies have proven that people learn much more quickly and with greater efficiency when they’re presented with more tangible material, such as audio and video.

Imagine trying to teach a programmer how to code using a piece of paper. You’d have to have them write the program down on a piece of paper, have no way for them to test it efficiently and then you’d have to input their “answers” into your computer at a later time, to see if everything checks out. By using sophisticated exam software, this whole process can become automated and interactive, and therefore much more efficient at both teaching the employee what they need to learn and ultimately testing their knowledge.

Automation and Consistency

Humans make mistakes – that is a fact of life. They especially make a lot of mistakes when it comes to tedious, repetitive tasks, and this is one area where a computer will always be superior. Once you explain to it how to perform a certain task, it will perform it the same way no matter the number of times it has to do it.

With humans, it’s a completely different story. The time during which we can be focused on a single, repetitive task is rather limited, only a few hours at best, so by using exam software you’re making sure that the results you’re getting will always be consistent and correct.

No Cheating

One of the biggest concerns when it comes to using automated testing software is whether it will be easier for people to cheat just because they’re using a computer. After all, anyone can use Google to find the right answer in mere seconds.

The thing is, though, that most exam software developers nowadays have already considered this problem and implemented some kind of efficient solution in their software. When taking an online test, you can’t alt-tab out of the software, you can’t take screenshots or just about do anything else that would allow you to cheat. In fact, we’d go as far as to say that it’s harder to cheat using testing software, so in the end, tests conducted in this manner might actually be more reliable.

Reading Speed Difference?

You’ve probably often heard the argument against reading off a screen that elaborates our reading speed is significantly hindered when reading off a screen, because of a rather high refresh rate. If this is so, then using survey software would indeed be at a great disadvantage in this particular field, as the speed at which one can read and understand a test is imperative to one’s performance. Fortunately, according to newer studies, while there is a difference in speed in favor of the traditional testing approach, the difference is nowhere near large enough to make any sort of significant impact.

In other words, humans can read off a computer screen almost as fast as they can off an ordinary piece of paper, so this is no longer a valid argument against using screens to replace paper.

Summary

As you can see, there are quite a few reasons why you, as an HR manager should start investing in survey and exam software, as it can bring your company a world of good as long as you utilize it in the proper manner. To sum up, using software to test and survey your employees gives you the following benefits:

  1. It saves you time and money
  2. It automates part of the process, making it more consistent
  3. It allows the use of multimedia, which enhances the entire learning process
  4. It potentially makes cheating more difficult

There are many more potential reasons, but we think that these will be sufficient for now. We highly recommend that you grab a good piece of survey software like GetCertified and start learning it right away, because chances are that you’ll be using something similar in the future.

The 5 Minute Guide on How to Cut Down on Human Resources Costs

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The backbone of any good company is undoubtedly its employees, the workforce that makes the company able to deliver its service or product at the level of quality that is expected of it. The managers and the CEO are there to coordinate the company, to help it grow, expand and branch out, and you, as a human resources manager, are the integral link that holds the two together. You are responsible for keeping the employees content, ensuring they’re doing their job correctly, and managing any and all resources regarding the workers themselves.

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Training Employees

Training Employees with Exam Software

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When accepting a new employee into the company, you have to make sure that they possess all the necessary skills that they will require when doing their actual job. If you’re lucky, your candidate will already possess all the needed skills, and you won’t have to spend any resources in order to teach them how to do it.

More often than not, though, you’re going to run into the type of employee that has some experience in the field they’re going to be working in, but there are still some things that you will have to cover. And, on occasion, you’re also going to be forced to accept an employee that isn’t really that experienced at all, someone who’d really benefit from a full-on training course in order to get their skills up to an acceptable level.

Now, training employees isn’t easy, and it requires some serious skill in and of itself. Fortunately, thanks to the advent of modern technology, nowadays there are various software tools that can make this process a whole lot easier, faster and more efficient. Today, we want to talk about a few key points about using a software as a means of training employees, things that any educator should have on their mind before the course even begins.

Focus On Particular Skillsets

When you first get the hang of using training software as a means of education, you’re probably going to be thrilled by the fact how easy it is to create learning material for your students. Since you’re not limited to pen and paper anymore, it might be very tempting to try and expand to various different subjects and try to bestow a large volume of skills upon your students.

It can be very easy to quickly get way ahead of yourself in this process, and you have to remember that while you might have the opportunity to provide your students with a lot of material, they aren’t going to be able to absorb it all. Unlike your training software, they’re still human and they will need a considerable amount of time to soak all of that in. Just like in a regular old classroom, you still need to prioritize and figure out which skillset you want to focus on first, and which one you can leave for later or potentially leave out altogether. Flooding your students with tons of new information isn’t something that will be particularly useful, so make sure you don’t make that mistake.

Engaging Content

Whether it’s because of social media or just the fact that we’re staring into computer screens much more than we used to, the average human attention span is significantly shorter than it was a few decades ago. We’re flooded with information on all sides, and our brains aren’t always able of processing all that information at the same time. This is the kind of idea that you need to incorporate into your employee training. You need to keep your content engaging, interesting and concise in order for it to come across with your students.

Fortunately, using training software you can do this pretty easily – visual, interactive content is easier to create than ever, so if you utilize the software properly this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Incorporate Social Elements When Training Employees

A huge advantage that online training has over the conventional approach is the fact that students can learn at their own pace. Not everyone will be able to master a certain subject in exactly the same amount of time, but by utilizing training software each of your students can go over the material as quickly or as slowly as they need to, without having to worry about dragging anyone down or leaving anyone behind.

However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t incorporate any social elements into your program, as various studies have shown that students actually learn more efficiently when they work in groups. Don’t be afraid to introduce your employees to group projects and have them tackle certain tasks in teams, as teams are exactly what they are going to be working in after they complete the course.

High-Quality Tests

Testing is one of the most important parts of any learning course, especially when you’re training employees. A good test will properly gauge how efficiently a student has mastered all the necessary skills during the training program, and it will also let you know how efficient your program is at teaching them. Creating a good test isn’t a walk in the park either, but thanks to the help of exam software this can also be done pretty easily these days.

With a good piece of exam software like GetCertified, you’re given access to a powerful test generator, a multitude of ways to organize your questions, and a powerful reporting and statistics system that will automatically generate useful information based on the results of the tests themselves. This is extremely useful and might we say even essential if you want to improve the quality of your tests in the long run, and with GetCertified it takes mere seconds for you to get your hands on this information.

Summary

The development of information technology will continue to improve the way in which we teach our employees, making it faster, easier and more efficient, but it’s important to remember that there are still some rules that we must abide by if we want to be good at passing down what we know. The tools are all there and they’re improving every day, and all we need to do is to learn how to use them properly and keep improving our skills as educators.