E-learning in businesses: an asset reserved to large companies?
For many years, e-learning, or learning online, was regarded by many decision makers as a tool of luxury within the grasp of major companies alone.
And rightly so.
Indeed, the solutions available until recently involved recourse either to major projects to be developed in-house, or to software to be installed on an infrastructure belonging to the company. In either case, one at least needed a competent IT team, as well as investment in servers and their maintenance.
Today, more and more e-learning solutions can be made available to companies (or organizations) on a server managed by the provider, who takes charge of security, installation, configurations, maintenance and updates.
UpPoint® is based on this type of technology. In specialized language, we refer to PaaS: “Platform as a Service”. UpPoint® has been a precursor in its field and the platform used today is highly perfected. The implementation of such a service is infinitely less burdensome and faster than the “historical” solutions. For this reason alone, they are accessible to small and mid-sized companies.
But what about creating the contents of the training programmes? Here again, we see online e-learning services appearing which offer tools facilitating the development of contents without computer skills. Here the managers themselves, often within the department of human resources, or experts in the domains concerned, from within the company, create and place the contents intended for their team members online. Again, UpPoint® has been a pioneer in this sense: with UpPoint®, a person can be taught to create online training programmes in a few hours.
If we adds to that the fact that today a vast majority of workers have their own smartphone, and are thus equipped to access training programmes any time and anywhere, we can readily understand that today e-learning is within the grasp of even modest sized companies.
Georges Ziant