User centered learning

To bring in high rate of effectiveness, learning organizations must move beyond just managing training delivery and controlling the cost of learning activities. With technology being such a big part of the learning experience, it's crucial to achieve a high rate of LMS adoption - and that requires a user-centered learning portal or website, that creates learning 2.0 destinations that fits the interest of specific learner segments.

Achieving cost efficiency

The most important reason for outsourcing to be highly cost efficient is because it can help an organization centralize and consolidate key learning functions. And these functions include learning facility administration, class rosters and registrations, LMS integration, and content development and management. These are often called shared services and they tend to be used by multiple units throughout the enterprise.
The disadvantage of decentralization is that it is rife with inefficiencies. Technology purchases are duplicated and staffing becomes redundant. Integration efforts can be lengthier and more costly because of a lack of standardization. When a learning BPO service provider initially gets a company’s business, the typical first response is to centralize as many commonly used functions as possible in order to eliminate duplication of tasks. While this does usually result in immediate cost savings, it does not account for the need for different business processes.

Learning 2.0 - its advantages in Corporate and Extended enterprise learning

Industry specialists look at informal learning as a way to inspire innovation and organizational performance among the younger workforce and thereby look to integrating informal learning in the workplace. Though informal learning or collaborative learning in the form of peer-to-peer or community discussions has always been there as a primary source of learning for the employees, the evolving face of the online medium, and the increasing usage of the new age tools for learning by the employees, is making it imperative to focus on more intricate aspects of this form of learning. The advantage of Corporate social learning that most analysts specify is that users get to retain their learning and also tend to apply it more when compared to the traditional form of learning, since the information is not being thrust on them , rather they go in search of the information, collaborate and get to know about its crests and troughs. This also promises greater performance results and higher learner satisfaction. When it comes to the extended enterprise learning, which comprises of customers and partners, there seems to be increased impact with the deployment of learning 2.0 services. Regular updates through blogs and interaction through forums helps in solving the issues faced by the customers and partners. When a customer encounters an issue with the newly deployed product, or finds trouble in using it, he/she immediately, logs it in the forum where the person is assisted by the specialists in the organization. The user forums also help in many instances where they get to know about the issues faced by other customers and how they resolve it. All this helps in building customer satisfaction and from the organizations perspective integrating learning 2.0 with the traditional learning translates into reduced investments in technology aspects, increased user adoption and added value to the learning.

Informal Learning - Expectations and the current scenario

It is becoming increasingly important to involve and accept informal learning in corporate learning organizations.Much is spoken about this topic in the recent times by the industry specialists and the learning professionals. As the acceptance of the importance of informal learning is increasing, more insights on its intricacies is also being discussed. Josh bersin in his recent blog post, speaks about the increasing acceptance levels and how informal learning can be made formal. To quote him - "Thanks to the slowing economy and the widespread availability of social networking and online wikis and portals, “informal learning” is the next big thing." This makes it clear how analysts see the advantage in utilizing informal learning to bring about effective learning.
When we talk about informal learning, some of the things that pop-up in many of our minds are social networking, blogs, wikis, instant messaging etc. But these cannot exist as 'stand alone functionalities'in the corporate learning environment.Many organizations have indeed started thinking about integrating them with the existing processes and technologies to make them more trackable, to increase the ease in monitoring and more so to obtain increased benefits in terms of employee performance or revenue generation (in the case of partner/customer training).
But is it right to depend on the existing LMS to solve this problem? Will it be cost effective to expect that functionality in a LMS? The answer to this is mostly NO. Moreover not many LMS vendors have much to contribute on these lines except for Saba and CornerStone OnDemand.
Less investments in the technology aspects, increased user adoption, added value to the learning are some of things that are being expected out of these informal learning functionalities. And to address these requirements Learning Portals seem to be the efficient and effective way to go. A recent article by CLO Media discusses how EMC, one of the technology giants found an easy way through, to achieve all the above mentioned. Tom Clancy, VP Education and Performance, says how he made learning available through this portal to his customers and partners and found sharp increase in their learning revenues. The article can be found here: http://www.expertus.com/sites/expertus.com/files/public-files/CLO_Human-Capital-Insights_EMC-Learning-Portals.pdf
Expertus, one of the learning solutions providers has helped EMC to accomplish these advantages through their Smart Learning Portal functionality, a cost effective and efficient approach in fulfilling the requirements.

Obtaining effective, efficient and cost effective results seem to be the need of the hour. Let us hope more to come in this area to address the needs of the current learning scenario.