Monthly Archives: September 2021

What Makes Extended Enterprise Training Successful?

Written by Team LiqvidSeptember 29, 2021

Businesses worldwide use extended enterprise training as a strategic tool to grow their business. It means different things to different organizations and can be broadly categorized into customer training and partner training, underpinning the source of revenue for the business. Extended enterprise training is also significant for associations and member-based organizations, public organizations, and academic institutions.

However, in the era of specialization, having the same system for delivering internal employee and extended enterprise training does not work. Plus, having a system designed specifically for your industry makes it even better.

Let’s see why extended enterprise training is beneficial for you.

Four Core Benefits of Extended Enterprise Training

Improved brand reach and visibility: When you train a group, they become better brand ambassadors, know your products and services thoroughly, and help you create brand visibility.

Increased revenue: The outcome of extended enterprise training is adding revenue for your business. If you are training your channel partner network, they can sell better and in turn, get more business. If you train your customers, they can use the products and services better and add to revenue through renewed subscriptions.

Reduced costs: When your customer and partner ecosystem are better educated about your products and services, it improves customer satisfaction and reduces risks associated with knowledge gaps and misinformation. It reduces the overall customer support costs too.

Accelerated time-to-market: With an extended enterprise training infrastructure, you can roll out new products, features, services to the known territories faster. You can also expand to newer territories effectively and add to sales revenues.

What Facilitates Extended Enterprise Training?

You need a robust hosted learning management system (LMS) to roll out and manage extended enterprise training – an LMS with the capability to deliver learning content in various formats, tracking and measuring performance. All enterprise learning initiatives are different, but five common traits bind them:

1. All are voluntary learners on your LMS. This audience isn’t your employee, so you must invest in creatively engaging them.

2. The size of the audience is larger than internal training. In some cases, the LMS needs to support more than 100,000 learners.

3. Extended enterprise deployments must typically integrate with several other systems and tools, including CRMs, e-commerce, marketing automation, content management, customer support.

4. Specific business objectives drive most extended enterprise learning programs, and to measure the success of these objectives, tying them to defined metrics is essential.

5. Extended enterprise learning systems are domain-specific.

Step-by-Step Implementation of Extended Enterprise Training

So, how can you start implementing an extended enterprise learning program in your organization? Here are five basic steps to start with.

Step 1: Determine your target audience

Like any other new initiative, you need to identify your target audience before you think of doing anything. Figure out whether your targeted learners are customers, vendors, distributors, suppliers. And since they aren’t your employees, you’d have to invest a lot of time and effort and customize the approach, content, or even the training itself for their tastes or needs.

Step 2: Define your KPIs

Your next step must be defining the key performance indicators. When you define the expected outcomes, you’d have a clear roadmap. And every target audience segment’s KPIs will be different. Your distributors and agents’ KPIs can be their sales and quality of service metrics, while your customers’ KPIs could be customer satisfaction, the frequency of use, or conversion rate after taking the training.

Step 3: Gauge your LMS capabilities

Find out the exact capabilities of your LMS. It must be able to handle different groups as well as a number of learners. Extended enterprise learning needs to have separate content, user profiles, and rules.

Step 4: Calculate ROI

Calculating the approximate training costs at each stage will hold you in good stead to convince your stakeholders to adopt the program. Do you create courses in-house or outsource? How much does this process cost per learner? How do you compute the ROI of each training course that you run?

Step 5: Make a business case

After all your data collection and analysis is over, gather your requirements and get going on a feasible business case for an extended enterprise learning strategy.

Conclusion

Driving a revenue stream with extended enterprise training plays a significant part in your business success. Mapping the LMS to your target audience groups’ exact needs is the foundation. There are more than 800 LMS in the market available currently and selecting the right one can be a daunting proposition.

You have corporate LMS that are primarily built for employee training and can be customized for extended enterprise training while the open-source platforms focus purely on extended solutions.

If you need help in finding the right LMS for your extended enterprise training, we can help. For organizations focused on English language education, we have a Language LMS specially crafted by our ELT experts. We also offer hosted LMS that is widely being used by training companies, publishers, and educational institutions. Contact us to learn more.

7 Ways How Learning Apps Add Value to Training and Education

Written by Team LiqvidSeptember 14, 2021

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By 2022, the global eLearning industry is projected to surpass $243 billion, per Statista, while a study by Research & Market predicts the market size to be $336.98 billion by 2026. The eLearning industry was growing at a healthy rate even before the pandemic, but since last year, the growth has been exponential, especially with the proliferation of learning apps.

When it comes to numbers, Statista says Duolingo was the most popular learning app worldwide in April 2021 based on monthly downloads, with more than five million users. Cake, another learning app was second on the list with Lingokids at the third spot.

Numbers don’t lie! Learning apps, which blend gamification, have become an increasingly popular learning mode for adults and kids. They are also proving to be increasingly effective in learning due to accessibility and inclusivity. Let’s see why.

7 Benefits of Learning Apps

1. Novel learning techniques: These apps employ many novel learning techniques, which are refreshing from the traditional monotonous learning patterns of restricted and upright book learning. They add an element of fun and engagement through puzzles, games, and other exercises. Additionally, using the latest technologies like AR and VR, such apps effectively break down complex learning topics into simple approaches.

2. Enhanced interaction: Learning apps make learning more interactive and increase the engagement factor. Students are more attentive; even the participation between instructors and students and parents and instructors is better and productive.

3. More learning resources: Learning apps give learners a vast trove of resources like ebooks, pdf files, presentations, and other online learning materials that are otherwise impossible or difficult through the traditional learning approaches. Everything online means such resources are accessible to all, irrespective of geographies.

4. Convenient and accessible: Learning apps are convenient; you don’t have to be physically present at a location. As mentioned earlier, they are also accessible, portable, and mobile.

5. Utilization of leisure hours: With TV, the internet, and gaming becoming addictive, learning apps have become a relief for parents and educators. Instead of engaging in such activities, children can spend their time learning new things and gaining knowledge.

6. 24/7 availability: Learning apps can be accessed 24/7, unlike the traditional learning formats where instructors aren’t available all the time to clear learners’ doubts.

7. Inclusive: Learning apps are inclusive as the courses can be structured, designed, and tailored for all demographics. They are also a helpful tool to educate learners on complex, difficult, or taboo topics, such as sex, racism, abuse, etc.

Top Training Areas for Learning Apps

Speaking of inclusivity, learning apps are indeed helpful as they can be used as an effective tool in several areas.

1. Skill development
Learning apps can be effectively used for focused skill development programs. For instance, you can have an app to teach specific skills like music, baking, hospital management, or coding. Within the larger education fold, you can have apps as per student levels like pre-school, high-school, or a college graduate, even competitive exams.

2. Building language proficiency
Learning apps make learning a new language effortless. It’s not always possible to learn from a native speaker or even visit a particular school to learn. Voice directives allow the user to hear how a word is pronounced and practice with the speaker.

3. Soft skills training
Most soft skills young people need to succeed, like communication, social skills, empathy, even a positive outlook, must be built through interaction with other people. Learning apps make such interactions possible. For example, a restaurant chain or a retail outlet can leverage a learning app to teach customer service skills. The apps would be especially helpful in such a scenario as the employees can’t afford to spend long hours in the classroom. A gamified quiz or a bite-sized microlearning nugget that’s quick, engaging, and easily delivered would be engaging as well as effective.

4. Product training
Learning apps can be used to train employees and channel partners on the company’s products and solutions. The depth of product knowledge needed for each learner group can be designed accordingly. For the customer-facing teams, a scenario-based learning approach can help prepare for the typical questions faced on the products. Adding gamification can make learning competitive and engaging. Learning apps enable companies to customize product training, conduct assessments and employ analytics to track preparedness.

5. K-12 education
For the K-12 education sector, learning apps have been extremely helpful, especially when the world has been forced to embrace online learning rapidly due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Learning apps can work as a complete learning management solution where there are device constraints. Teachers can manage their classes, interact with students, set up lessons, create interactive presentations and lesson plans, and perform student evaluation procedures. Setting up multiple classes, sharing documents, and creating different projects are easy for teachers, while students can access lessons and complete assignments online. Parents can also monitor their children’s activity and performance. When the infrastructure is not an issue, learning apps make a great learning companion tool.

In Conclusion

In today’s connected world, training and education require a delicate balance. As the traditional learning approaches often do, packing too much information can confuse the learners and hinder learning and productivity. On the other hand, learning apps make eLearning more accessible, interactive, and fun in a modern learning environment. As an experienced digital learning company with white-labeled learning apps as one of the core offerings, Liqvid helps organizations roll out standalone learning apps and companion apps to achieve the training goals.

For a mobile-first strategy, a wide range of templates can be utilized to create engaging, interactive content and branded learning apps on Android and iOS platforms. If the strategy needs companion apps for continuous learning, better retention, and reinforcement, a personalized learning experience via learning apps help. The backend applications of learning apps are hosted on a learning management system (LMS), enabling easy progress tracking and custom reports.

Our learning apps are the preferred choice for global organizations with robust content authoring, LMS integration, and analytics. Contact us today to see how we can create interactive learning apps for you.