Area9 Lyceum Blog

Which is better: e-learning or classroom instruction? It’s a question Learning and Development (L&D) has been asking since e-learning first came on the scene two decades ago. We’re ready for an answer. So let’s break down both options.

When you log on to an online retailer, like Amazon, one of the first things you’ll see are recommendations for future purchases. If you purchased a certain brand of stroller, Amazon might suggest you take a look at the brand’s car seats, as well. Online retailers keep track of what you bought so that they know what you might like in the future, providing a more personalized shopping experience in the process. And no surprise - customers love this feature because it shortens the time it takes them to shop, and helps them shop more effectively.

The learning function has two purposes: to deliver business impact by training employees, and to prove that the training has impact. 

According to a study conducted by Training magazine, companies averaged 53.8 hours of training per employee in 2015. That’s 13 hours more than in 2014. But how do we know that adding more time to the learning achieved better results?

2017 was a great year for exploring the advantages of Adaptive Learning, and we hope this blog has been helpful, informative, and a good guide to e-learning resources. This post is a quick celebration of the top five blog posts most enjoyed by CLOs this past year in the Area9 blog.

We all know what we want from our corporate learning initiatives: learning that has business impact. Some corporate learning approaches claim to provide exactly that, but do they really? Microlearning is one of those approaches. Here, we’ll break down what microlearning is and how it stacks up against Adaptive Learning.

It’s easy to imagine what makes bad corporate training, but what makes good training? That depends on what you want out of it.

How do we view success in corporate training? Is it the number of people who take the training? Is it the number of hours the training takes to complete? Is it the number of in-house naps employees take while looking over training material?

If there’s one certainty in the business world, it’s this: mistakes will be made. That’s not just a fact of business, of course. That’s a fact of life. Human beings are flawed. We make mistakes. We have knowledge gaps, and the sooner we accept this, the more open we’ll be to better methods of corporate learning.

Global spending on corporate training is going up - as much as 2-5% - and yet rates of unconscious incompetence in the workforce are as high as ever. It’s getting more and more expensive to force employees into unfulfilling training that ultimately falls short.

When you take a training course to get your motorcycle license, does passing the course make you a master motorist? No, of course not. The course only means you have the most basic knowledge required to safely operate a motorcycle on the road.

As corporate learning continues to evolve, so does the role of the corporate training instructor. Learners expect instructors to take on a different role than the one we’ve seen in traditional corporate training. This new role combined with Adaptive Learning creates the perfect environment for blended learning.