How charities should approach eLearning
For charities, giving your people the right training and skills can help motivate and empower them, to improve the services and care they deliver. Training and development can be for a range of employees and volunteers, and those in need of new skills or perspectives, including fundraisers, people in contact centres and field workers.
Although some of these training and development opportunities can be transformational and even life-changing, it’s important to note that much of day-to-day training is driven by necessity and can be quite dry, seen as a “box-ticking” exercise by many. This may include things such as new processes and health and safety procedures.
In these cases it’s doubly important that any training or learning programmes are designed and delivered as effectively as possible, to ensure you gain and keep people’s attention, measure their progress and ultimately, ensure people learn exactly what they need to.
An increasingly important way to offer this training is through digital learning programmes or eLearning. This eLearning approach can bring with it a range of benefits: it’s inherently scalable and doesn’t require people to be in one place at the same time. It also doesn’t need the same level of tutor guidance which can save training budgets, and it can also offer a new level of flexibility to the learner, who is able to learn at times that suit them.
However, if not approached correctly, there can be a range of pitfalls that can lead to poor engagement and overall disappointing learning outcomes.
What is eLearning?
The term eLearning is usually used to describe a predominantly online-delivered learning programme. These programmes can be short and last just a few minutes, or can also be much longer and more involved. For example, some higher education institutions run online versions of their post-graduate courses that can run over two years and attract full-time and part-time students from all around the world.
eLearning courses can include a range of formats from written guides to engaging tutor-led videos, to Zoom tutorials and seminars with experts. They can include interactive tools on learning management systems like quizzes and other gamified elements, all designed to offer feedback and test the learners.
They are specifically designed to be delivered online so they can quite often differ significantly from similar courses that are delivered in-person, and reflect the very different ways that people learn online. When they work well, they’re designed not just to be passive and peripheral, but instead they grab and maintain the learner's attention, giving them the feedback when they need it and making the whole process of learning, active and engaging.
It’s also important to note that just putting some information on a website and asking them to read it is highly unlikely to work for most people. Although this can be a useful way to share information, it’s not what one would describe as an eLearning programme. An eLearning programme needs a more specific focus on design and delivery to be effective, and ultimately for people to learn and action what they’ve learned.
Charities using eLearning
Charities are increasingly turning to eLearning to train staff and volunteers and educate supporters. It’s being used for a huge range of different purposes and even in a range of different ways.
Large charities including the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and the Make-A-Wish Foundation have used eLearning to provide education, training, and resources to their volunteers and supporters. For example, the Red Cross offers a wide range of online courses covering topics such as disaster preparedness, first aid and CPR, and more.
The United Way has developed an online learning platform to help its network of supporters understand the full scope of its work and how they can contribute. The Salvation Army has also implemented eLearning tools to help its volunteers learn more about its mission and how to best serve those in need.
Benefits of eLearning
There are a range of clear benefits that can make eLearning an extremely useful tool for charities. Many of these are in line with why so many resources and services in our daily lives are being digitised, and are rooted in the ability to make significant efficiencies and scale easily.
Online courses offer an opportunity to scale training far beyond the classroom. They don’t require people to be in a certain place at a certain time and they don't need an expert tutor to be present for all of these training sessions. This saves time, money and resources over time and makes learning programmes far more accessible to more of your people.
Although there is an investment that needs to be made to set up these online programmes, they can often be used over several years with far less ongoing support and resources needed than any in-person equivalents.
These eLearning programmes also allow learners to learn on their own terms. They can do the training at times that fit around their lives and even in the flow of their work (doing the training when they most need it). They can also do this at a pace and in a way that best suits them.
Having this more personalised and flexible approach is important to best serve all your different learners, but it’s also important to note that different people may need different types of support on certain programmes for the best outcomes. This includes offering tutor or peer feedback and offering metrics or testing that help learners to understand the progress they’re making.
One of the other significant benefits of eLearning for charities lies in the unique way it’s delivered. Delivering these programmes online allows you to utilise aids like high quality video and animations that can help to visualise and explain things much more effectively than explaining by teaching or using slides. This is particularly true for teaching complex information and relationships, where this approach can be clearer, more memorable and repeatable (the resources can be re-watched and learning refreshed when needed).
The flip side of this is that simply putting in-person courses online and operating in exactly the same ways (long online videos and articles), will mean learners do not benefit from these unique advantages that eLearning offers.
Overcoming potential pitfalls
There are a range of potential pitfalls with eLearning if not approached correctly. If not designed and delivered with care and with the specific learners in mind, the danger is that the learning will be passive at best. At worst learners will barely begin the courses, let alone work their way through them in any meaningful way. This is particularly the case for aspects that people may consider “box-ticking” training, that needs to be done, but may be considered dry and dull and of no real benefit to them and their general roles.
If you’re unable to get or keep learners’ attention, the eLearning course will not do what you need it to. Online learners can potentially become distracted, half-watching the content and not actively learning. Making the online materials dynamic, to the point and clearly establishing relevance and ‘’why it matters’, you can give learners an understanding of what the course will enable them to do.
Online learning content needs to be delivered and structured in a way that’s more appropriate to how learners view content on digital devices. It should be short, clearly focused and visually appealing. Clearly structuring and breaking down the content into manageable chunks, also lends itself to active learning. This can be further enhanced by taking out any extraneous or unnecessary material around the content that doesn’t matter to the learners.
Being able to give learners effective feedback as part of an eLearning course is another important factor and potential issue if not approached correctly. Effective “active learning” depends on learners receiving effective feedback. This sort of interaction is essential for effective learning, but also for keeping learners focused and engaged.
Not having in mind the specific needs of your learners when designing these programmes is another common pitfall for eLearning. It’s important to understand the unique needs and behaviours of your audience, and build the programme accordingly. For example, are they short of time and likely to consume information on mobiles or is there a wider community or cohort of people they could learn and share feedback with?
Charities doing more eLearning
Developing eLearning based programmes can help in a range of situations, but it’s important that the unique needs and considerations of different learner groups are first fully understood to see if this approach is most appropriate. What’s the information you need them to learn? What sort of support are they likely to need?
Then it’s time to focus on the design and delivery of these programmes. Making sure they are designed with learning best-practice in mind - making them accessible, dynamic and easily to navigate is essential. Then ensuring learners are supported - sometimes with the technology that they view the content on, sometimes through tutor and peer support via facilities like Zoom - is equally important.
eLearning can offer charities huge opportunities to train and develop their people and stakeholders at a scale that has been impossible before now. However, unless this is done properly and designed and delivered in the correct ways it will be an opportunity missed.
