Business Impact of a Nextgen Learning Management System

Learning Management System solutions rightly focus on the teacher-student needs of educational institutions. But a big part of their market, and one which does not need much convincing to adapt to an e-Learning method, is the corporate and organizational training sector.

A recent research report prepared by Bersin Associates explores the business impact of next generation e-Learning, including examples of corporate entities and organizations that benefited immensely from implementing such a platform.

The report breaks up the benefits into three parts. One is scalability, as in the ability to accommodate more learners without any additional cost, and the bonus of access to learner-generated content.

The second major benefit is learning agility, where e-Learning enhances the organization’s ability to respond to change, by providing skills as and when required to help workers tackle new work responsibilities.

An extension of this becomes the third benefit, as the organization tends to develop a culture of learning – as an ongoing process, instead of as an event based response.

Another section of the report focused on reduction in usage of administrative resources. Putting training on an LMS instead of in a physical classroom eliminates classroom space and hard copy study material, meals, coordination and planning for events and the travel costs.

An example cited in the report is the Shiawassee Regional Education Service District (SRESD) in Michigan, which included 55 school districts. Attendance for training events had started dropping, perhaps because the rural district participants got tired of the travel hassle and costs incurred on the eight hour trips.

So they finally decided to move the training to an LMS which provided everything from live chats to screen-sharing, audio and video and other interactive elements. The results were instant and stunning – SRESD says the districts started saving as much as 335 miles and $170/person.

Along these lines, the report explores in detail how organizational goals can be met using the e-Learning platform. This starts with the ROI on the implementation of the platform itself. The report provides the concrete example of Xerox, which wanted to transform the training model it was using for 130,000 sales and support personnel.

After Xerox moved to an e-Learning platform, they got 100 percent ROI on their entire investment within a single quarter. A single training event for their Canada business unit that was moved online saved $150,000. Overall travel expenses in Europe got slashed by 10 percent. When you consider the amounts in question spent on travel and the enormous scale of the company, a 10 percent cut is virtually unimaginable using any other cost-cutting or innovative mechanism.

The report ends with useful tips such as preparing for the Learning Management System installation and being prepared to handle glitches and bugs until the system is streamlined and running smoothly. They also recommend setting up a support center for helping users new to the platform, along with assigning the task to a local expert at each unit.

Read the full report titled “The Business Impact of Next-Generation e-Learning” – Download (pdf).