Impact of Covid-19 on enterprise eLearning
As on March 26, UNESCO estimates that more than 1524 million children are affected worldwide. The number of children, youth and adults not attending schools or universities because of COVID-19 is soaring every day. According to UNESCO monitoring, over 150 countries have implemented nationwide closures, impacting over 80% of the world’s student population. On the enterprise learning front, the sudden closure of office premises has necessitated the virtual delivery of learning and training among other verticals in pursuit of business continuance. As businesses assess the developments, they scramble to move L&D online. L&D leaders understand that they cannot stop their capability building exercise. In-person programs have been canceled or put on hold in large numbers. Induction and onboarding schedules for new recruits are on hold. Whether reskilling or upskilling programs at the business unit level or org-wide aspirational change, the learning objectives have to be met. With the majority of employees working remotely and flexibly, businesses want to conduct various remote productivity and change management training for its employees. Amid all the disruptions and changing business objectives, L&D also wants to align its training goals towards the aspired transformation. And while there would inevitably be erstwhile challenges, many believe whether the future might just have come a little early. Hasn’t “adopt eLearning” been a buzzword for ages? Now the pandemic will upsurge eLearning adoption like never before. Online learning, everyone believes would be the future but if there was no Corona virus, that realisation would have taken another few years.
The impact we believe Covind-19 will have on remote learning or eLearning in the enterprise space.
Massive adoption: eLearning gets its big moment and attention due to the outbreak. There is no two-ways about it. Remote, digital learning is now mainstream and not a niche or value addition anymore. Traditional education and its practices are about to be uprooted as much as the organisations, small and big, are going to work remotely due to Covid-19. The ed-tech and online learning ecospace is ready with the innovation-led remote education solutions to enable ‘learning anywhere, anytime’ mandate.
More well-rounded process ecosystem: Organisations that have not invested on remote learning readiness so far are caught off-guard with this sudden unprecedented pandemic. The dynamics of learning change when instructors and students are not in the same room. Employees from different generations situated across different time zones make things even more complicated. Add to that technology and data compliance, infrastructure mandates, quality of education and partners, ability to produce in-house curriculum or blend existing into a learning management system like EduNxt, Manipal’s own LMS. All these voids and many more challenges have the power to hinder the overall learning goals. Before rolling out eLearning programs hastily, learning leaders will take tactical and strategic measures to design and scale learning outcomes.
Tracking & preparing employees: Like many things in life, eLearning does not run on autopilot. There are many challenges associated with remote learning. Learners’ engagement level is less, they lack in self-discipline, give lacklustre performance, do not attend trainings, move out after logging in and often drop out before completion. Manipal Global Education Services has complete suite of training and assessment solutions to take care of all such issues.
