Using the Internet for learning purposes

When conducting training programs employees, companies often struggle with these problems:

• Your employees are needed to keep business up and running. They cannot tear themselves away for one or two days to attend a training session.

• The employees cannot remember everything they were taught during an intensive seminar. And they will be able to put just as little of it into practice.

• Participants having to travel in order to attend seminars in person involves high costs and downtime.

Companies can partly counteract these problems by using modern information and communications media to train their employees. For example, MTI has been planning and designing so-called webinars for its customers for many years. These webinars are much like regular seminars except that employees either participate from their PC at home or at work. Webinars have proven especially useful for

• continuing education topics requiring a high degree of cognitive learning, and

• target groups such as field staff and virtual teams in which the participants live and work in far-away locations.

Webinars are especially well-suited for setting up learning architectures. For example:

• On Friday afternoon, every two weeks, the key account managers sit down to their PC for about 1.5 hours to join their colleagues for a webinar lead by a trainer who covers a strategic business topic.

• Towards the end of the webinar, participants receive learning and work assignments that have to be completed by the next webinar session.

• During the next webinar, these assignments are then discussed before moving onto the next topic.