ELEARNING GOLD - THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR LEADERS: How to Achieve Excellence in Your Distance Education & Training Program

What Is Your Why?

Whether it be a degree for students or a new certification for employees, offering your education and training program online is a necessity if you want to stay competitive in the digital age. But how do you go about designing and launching an effective one? In this chapter, we’ll cover the essentials you will need to consider when deciding the type of elearning program your organization will offer.

Most organizations in the past few years have been deeply affected in one way or another by a rapidly changing world in a health crisis. Innovative technologies were already evolving at a pace likely challenging for you as a leader to keep up with and plan for. Most people today starting professional qualification or degree programs in technology are studying software and systems which may no longer exist by the time they graduate from their program.

Whether you’re a university, a college, a high school, or a corporation providing education and training for your employees, there are many benefits to making education and training available online. I loved Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why (2011), and it inspires me to ask why you feel it’s important for your organization to offer your learners a virtual education and training program. Why should you build an elearning system for your company, and why is it essential to have a digital component to your education and training program? Are you already a school and need to transform your bricks-and-mortar learning program into a distance education environment? Is your organization already offering face-to-face classroom training or upgraded career qualification courses, and it’s been forced to go online rapidly because of the new post-pandemic world?

A key question to ask yourself is why you need to go online. What is your purpose and reason for existing in a virtual world? What value proposition do you need to be able to offer your program participants to achieve program success, and what are the benefits of having an elearning system? Some examples might be:

1. Remote Learning – connecting with your learning system from home;

2. Learning While Traveling – having students or employees able to access your education and training while traveling;

3. International Access – connecting and training people in other countries; or

4. Flexible Pacing – allowing users to learn at their own pace using a competency-based learning strategy.

Whether your current education and training program is in a face-to-face classroom or online, these are typical questions I would ask an organization prior to constructing their elearning plan and strategy.

Define Your Objectives

Before you design your online learning program, it’s important that you take some time to define your objectives. What are your goals for the program? Are you interested in offering an online degree or diploma program to students? Increasing employee retention or improving customer service? Boosting sales? Or something else entirely? Once you have a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve, you can start thinking about how best to design your program.

No matter your reasons for wanting to offer an elearning program, there are some key factors you will need to consider before transitioning. Defining your why and your organizational objectives for your program is an important starting point in ensuring your exciting new virtual world will meet the needs of your learners.

Who Are Your Learners?

As an organizational leader, you know that having a successful distance education program requires more than just a quality curriculum. It also requires understanding the needs and interests of each learner enrolled in your program. As you begin imagining your program design, it is important to know who your learners are and to design a program that will best serve their education and training needs.

Organizational leaders and instructors responsible for distance education program planning must consider learner demographics, psychographics, and language capabilities in their program design. Who are your learners, and what is motivating them to enroll in your program? Do they need to have taken a previous certification or hold prerequisite knowledge before taking your courses? Understanding learner motivation is a key component in developing and offering successful distance education programs.

For example, the worldwide health crisis prevented learners from accessing traditional classroom learning systems, thereby forcing a major shift to technological learning paradigms. As a result of this shift, many learners who would not typically seek out distance education and training solutions found themselves reluctantly entering a sphere of education that was previously foreign to them.

Additionally, when someone takes an online course, they typically have a set of expectations about the outcomes they will have attained after completing the program. Why should your learners attend your elearning program? What benefits will be derived from it? What will your learners expect to have achieved upon successful completion of your program?

If your online program covers an entirely different set of information, skill sets, and outcomes or delivers irrelevant information, they will be disappointed. Providing information that is relevant, relatable, and real-world-centered is critical to program success, so it’s important to learn as much about your learners’ expectations as possible (Pappas, 2018). If you can uncover individuals’ motivation for enrolling in an elearning program and their end goals, you will be able to develop stronger elearning content and system processes to meet their needs.

Learner Demographics

Age, race, ethnicity, gender, marital status, income, education, and employment are all demographic considerations for program planning and learner success. Are your learners teenagers or adults, and how will this information impact the amount of support required to successfully complete your program? Are they Millennials? Gen Z? Boomers? For example, young teenage learners who enter foreign distance education programs usually want to earn a globally accepted pre-university diploma to enable them to apply for entrance to top universities around the world. International distance education learners typically do not seek to graduate from secondary school programs so they can go into industry to work. Among the thousands of international students I’ve worked with, the majority usually enrolled in distance education programs with a specific career goal in mind, with the most popular professions being medicine, dentistry, and engineering.

Adult learners, by contrast, are often seeking to further their education and training at universities and colleges or within their organization of employment in order to become qualified in a new career or to advance their knowledge and skill sets in their current vocation.

Learner Self-Efficacy

More and more studies have now examined the role of psychological factors and their impact on learner success. One such factor, known as self-efficacy, involves confidence in one’s ability to achieve personal and professional goals. Self-efficacy is related to our sense of self-worth or value as a human being. Several studies have noted self-efficacy to be a significant predictor of academic success (Bressler et al., 2011). Although learner self-efficacy and learner motivation are deeply entwined, they remain two separate constructs. Self-efficacy is based on one’s belief in one’s own capacity to achieve, while motivation is based on one’s desire to achieve.

Skill Level and Learning Style

You should also consider the skill level and learning style of every individual enrolled in your courses. Different students learn in different ways; some prefer visual content, while others are better auditory learners. Additionally, some professionals may already be advanced in their field, while others require more basic instruction. Once you know your learners’ preferences, you can create courses that cater to their individual needs, allowing them to progress through the materials at their own pace.

Interests and Goals

Finally, it’s important to understand the interests and goals of each person enrolled in your courses. Knowing what motivates them can help you tailor curriculum around their specific interests and aspirations so that they can get the most out of their learning experience. Taking time to get to know each learner on a more personal level is also beneficial for creating a sense of community within your virtual classroom world, and this is essential for successful distance learning programs.

Conclusion

As organizational leaders, it is our responsibility to make sure our distance education programs are tailored specifically toward our learner population’s needs, interests, skill levels, learning styles, ages, locations—the list goes on! Having this information allows us to create virtual worlds which meet our learners where they are so that they get maximum benefit from our courses.

Leadership Questions

1. What are the values, opinions, attitudes, activities, interests, opinions, and lifestyles of your learners?

2. What impact might this information have on your distance learning program planning considerations?

3. Why are learners choosing your distance education program in particular, and what is motivating them to go online? For example, more opportunities for foreign university admission, exciting learning and career advancement opportunities, or perhaps just no other available