Abstract:

Why get involved in Blended or Online learning?
A major benefit of blended learning and online training is that neither course participants nor tutors need to attend a central location to study or deliver a course. This has the potential to save both time and money by cutting travel time and costs, hotel bills and subsistence costs too. However studying this way is not without some time costs, as the participants need to spend additional time undertaking various course commitments. Many Employers overlook this fact. Often managers will make no real time allowance and continue to expect their staff to undertake a full workload at the same time. This often results in courses not being completed or the individual participant abandoning the course. When this happens the sponsoring organisation ends squandering time, effort, money and often reduces employee ‘good will’ too, due to frustration. In this paper, I hope to give people, who are thinking of employing either blended learning or online training, a list of actions that I have found greatly assist the retention of course participants and thus help to ensure course completion.

Such pre course actions include:
1. Allowing participants sufficient time to undertake the course requirements.
2. Setting very firm instructions to supervisors not to impinge on study time, without exceptional reasons and having disciplinary sanctions where these instructions are ignored.
3. Giving Course participants access to computers and the Internet away from their offices, but close enough to be able to visit regularly.
4. Insure that all course participants are aware of the costs of these courses and the value that their company puts on such training.
5. Course participants are told that they will be expected to submit and ‘End of Course Report’ outlining what were their Key Learning points and how they are going to use this knowledge in their work.

The rational for each of these pre-course actions will be explained more fully later in this paper. He also looks at the effect of cultural differences on E-Learning Delivery.

Keywords:

Effective Blended & e-learning Delivery, Cultural effects on e-learning, Online Tutor Training.