The Top 10 E-Learning Challenges Faced by L&D Professionals

In the age of remote working, e-learning continues to play a dominant role in the modern enterprise's learning and development program. However, as new trends and technologies continue to emerge, L&D professionals face a slew of challenges.

Here are the top 10 e-learning challenges constantly faced by L&D professionals:

Learner Engagement

Most employees are simply too distracted, busy, or lack the necessary attention span to benefit from e-learning sessions. Among the leading concerns, all employees are not interested in attending "long" online training sessions (even at their most convenient time).

On their part, L&D professionals need to design their learning sessions in such a way that learners are engaged at a cognitive and emotional level. Innovative techniques like gamification and microlearning can help drive the learner's engagement.

The Subject Matter Is Not Interesting

This is relevant to highly technical subjects. A "boring" subject can impact the learner's involvement and make it more challenging for L&D professionals to design the course. To increase learning engagement and excitement, organizations need to leverage creativity and fresh thinking in the overall e-learning experience.

Employee-generated learning is an excellent way of designing interesting content where organizations can leverage the knowledge of their subject matter experts. Besides, these specialists can also function as instructors for the subject matter. This can improve team engagement and learning experience.

Ineffective Assessment

Most organizations conduct online training sessions without properly implementing an effective learner assessment strategy. Learning assessments are essential to understand if online learners have grasped the subject and retained valuable information. In short, ineffective assessments can result in poor learning outcomes and a waste of company resources.

To improve the outcome, organizations can design assessments in the form of short quizzes, learner surveys, and even regular examinations. Notably, the assessment questions must align with the learning objectives and adhere to a consistent format.

Developing New Learning Content

E-learning programs require plenty of subject matter content. To develop learning content, organizations need to hire (or outsource to) subject matter experts (SMEs). Besides, L&D professionals and SMEs must develop e-learning content that matches organizational needs. They also need to develop e-learning content for different generations of learners, including Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z.

Additionally, manual content development consumes a lot of time and money. An efficient learning management system (LMS) offers the best platform to develop and store learning material. With its multiple learning modules, an LMS simplifies the process of creating new content for effective learning.

Tracking the Progress of the E-Learning Program

L&D professionals need to actively track the progress of their e-learning courses to check if they are meeting learning objectives. However, using manual methods, they can no longer track all the relevant e-learning metrics. It's even more challenging when multiple training programs are running at the same time.

Studies have previously outlined how learners forget close to 70% of their learned concepts within 24 hours of the training session. So, L&D professionals must identify and improve ineffective e-learning courses. Favorably, with an LMS, they can easily track the relevant metrics in real-time and download reports automatically.

Aligning Training with Organizational Goals

E-learning training programs are ineffective unless they align with the organizational goals and business objectives. A generic training course is the biggest challenge for L&D professionals in any organization. They need to customize and update every training program in line with changing business requirements.

An example would be employee training that caters to compliance with industry regulations. These training courses must be regularly updated to ensure they meet the latest industry standards and regulations.

Managing Organizational Change

Besides aligning with organizational goals, e-learning courses also transform whenever there is any major change in the organization. Organizational change can be in the form of mergers, acquisitions, or restructuring. For organizations that are constantly undergoing flux, L&D professionals find it demanding to plan their development program.

Apart from this, with more workforce recruitment, L&D specialists need to constantly train new and existing employees (taking on a new role or function).

Siloed Systems

Modern enterprises have access to a host of communication tools like Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams that can improve team collaboration among remote workers. The challenge is that most of these third-party tools operate as "siloed" systems and do not integrate with the e-learning platform. Fragmented or siloed systems reduce business productivity while costing both time and money.

An integrated LMS platform advances e-learning by integrating with third-party tools installed by the organization. Through seamless integration, LMS can reduce manual efforts and promote learning.

Busy Employees

L&D professionals often need to schedule their online training during product releases or major projects. Employees find it challenging to take out time from their busy days to attend a training program. Too often, organizations have low priority for employee training and development.

To keep busy employees engaged in e-learning, organizations must consider designing a microlearning strategy or bite-sized learning courses. With this, employees can undergo training in shorter periods or even when they are on the move.

Lack of Personalized Content

In the age of personalization that caters to individual needs and interests, a lack of personalized content is among the top challenges for L&D professionals. Organizations usually have little time to evaluate each employee's learning needs and pace of learning.

With personalized content, LMS platforms can develop and sustain employee engagement by providing them control over what they want to learn. Through easy configuration, they can personalize their consumed content to suit their learning abilities and skills.

Conclusion

Modern-day organizations have a plethora of options when it comes to choosing the right e-learning platform and partner. An experienced LMS partner can help organizations address these e-learning challenges and deliver better learning outcomes.

At Gyrus, we have developed the efficient GyrusAim LMS solution that can help build employee skills and design rich and personalized content.

Looking to implement an efficient LMS solution in your organization? Contact us with your learning requirements today!