One of the speakers at a conference I recently attended was Kim Kemeny, the Learning and Development Manager from an  Australian company – Codan Limited – whose main Australian base is in Adelaide. Kim’s talk, titled Simple & Effective e-learning in action – An industry example, was about how the company identified a need to respond to a number of business drivers including industry skills shortage, expanding workforce requiring training on-demand, continuous re-skilling and up-skilling of their employees due to constantly changing technology. This led to identifying a need to review their training methods to better utilise their resources and improve efficiency.

One option from this review was to introduce an online training package. This presented a considerable challenge to their training resources as they only had 3 trainers. Also, up till this time all training was carried out using traditional training methods so they had to start from scratch. After reviewing 25 training packages they decided to go alone and develop their own package. One of the factors was that with all packages reviewed they would need to keep going back to the vendor each time they wanted to modify the course content, hence ongoing costs.

Codan were fortunate to secure financial assistance for their project through the Australian Flexible Learning Framework organisation. Another major decision was to collaborate with peer groups, industry associations as well as TAFE and UNSA.

The process they followed was to identify the needs of the package as well as the platform requirements. This led them to an e-learning development program – Showcase - which they used to develop their course. Part of the process was to identify e-learning challenges and some of these were cost, resistance to e-learning from older staff and computer phobia. One of the methods used with regard to the older staff was to include them right from the beginning of the development process to give them ownership.

A significant partner in the whole process was the Australian Flexible Learning Framework . As the name states this organisation is committed to the flexible learning philosophy especially e-learning.  

The final training package was produced at a cost below $5000 and the actual training takes a blended approach. The response from the employees was very positive and the company has gone on to produce another four courses.

 The talk was very inspiring and demonstrated that anyone can take that step from just thinking about e-learning to actually doing it.

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