Advantages & Disadvantages of Learning Online
What are the Advantages of learning and Training Online?
Convenience
Traditional offline training normally involves employees needing to collectively leave the workplace. They have to leave and return at a certain time, regardless of whether they understood the training.
Training online means that both you and your employees can learn without needing to leave the workplace; they can fit training around their workload, and repeat areas that they find difficult. This means they will learn more, training will be much more efficient, and hours of work lost while training will be fewer (reducing costs).
Training online also means that each employee can learn at their own pace. With offline training, you are generally forced to work at the pace of the slowest employee. However, with online training, an employee can spend longer on difficult areas, and keep repeating a lesson until they understand it, without slowing down those who already do.
Cost
Online training is much more cost effective for small businesses than offline training. Where as offline training is aimed at relatively large numbers of employees, online training is aimed at the individual. This allows you to target different training for yourself and individual employees, and you need only pay for the training you use, without having to pay for a training professional to be involved.
If you buy an online training program designed specifically for your business, it can be kept and used for any new employees, where as traditional training would need to be repeated (and paid for again) as new employees arrive. Most standard courses can also be kept for future use (by present or future employees) without the need to pay again.
Some businesses are entitled to receive funding towards training and development of staff. The funding depends on the type, size, and location of your business.
Time
Online training allows you to access a course whenever you want; where as traditional training has to be done at a set time. This flexibility allows you or your employees to repeat or redo sections that you do not understand or would like to check up on. This means they can also look back on old training for future reference.
It also allows new employees to catch up on old training without the need to take everyone through it again.
What are the Disadvantages of Learning and Training Online ?
Fixed Courses
As online training uses set courses, it can be difficult to find training for less common areas of business, although the number of courses available is increasing.
If you need a training program set up for your business specifically (e.g. To inform employees of how to use a new system) it will cost you considerably more, although this program can then be kept for use by all future employees.
There is software available that allows you to make your own training programs. This would be useful for specific pieces of training, however, the cost of this software is quite high, and a lot of time would be needed to learn the software and how to use it for effective training; making it of little use to most small businesses.
Personal Contact
As online training is through your computer, there is no direct contact to training professionals or a teacher. This makes it more difficult if an employee has questions or does not understand a part of the training. They may get stuck and be unable to complete the training without further help, which can cause delays in training.
Online training has been designed to be very easy to follow in order to minimise this problem, and a small number of training companies offer a support contact for people to contact if they do not understand something.
Some forms of training are designed for a group of employees to learn at the same time; and an online version of this training will be unable to provide the group contact or discussion that offline group-training can.
A w ay to comb at this is to hold a short group meeting after the course, which allows employees to discuss the skills and information that has been taught. This will also allow any problems or questions to become known, and will help you to make sure that all employees have understood the training.
Reliability
The quality of online learning will vary depending on the training company; you should always check whether the training company you use has good feedback from past customers. Otherwise you may end up with poor quality training that wastes you and your employees’ time and money.
Article Index
- Training & Learning Online
- Advantages and Disadvantages
- Types of Online Learning and Online Training
- Online Learning Websites
- Related Articles
