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Using SaaS Technology to Transform Your Online Learning

Credit: iStock Adobe/gorodenkoff

Meta Description – E-learning technologies can help businesses increase profits, optimize processes and help train their employees, how do they do that? Find out more here.

SaaS Elearning: The New Way to Conquer Teamwork Challenges 

SaaS (software as service) platforms arose out of the need for companies to optimize in the face of growing digitization. Companies that had previously relied on proprietary software tools specific to their organization and only available on their networks were at risk of being left behind in the rush to go digital. SaaS technologies held the promise of helping businesses of all sizes optimize their processes, find and resolve inefficiencies, as well as provide a better way to train employees. Apart from those benefits, the scope of SaaS has expanded to several areas of business so much so that pre-made or customized software solutions can be tweaked to serve that area’s primary interests.

SaaS E-Learning for Online Education and New Teacher Resources 

One of the vital areas of business that SaaS has made more effective is the realm of e-learning. While many organizations deploy bespoke software tools to specific areas like content management, finance or human resources, not to mention important vectors like customer service and service-delivery, e-learning is one area that has greatly benefited from software-as-a-service.

This is a marked improvement over the old days of installing pre-made, inflexible software onto company servers and expecting employees to train themselves. SaaS e-learning lets companies decide how, what, and where their employees can learn new skills without any of the strictures that reigned in previous training processes.

It also gives more freedom to employees to be able to access important learning materials from anywhere anytime they want. Here are a few of the ways that e-learning technologies can help companies improve their remote learning capabilities, which will be expanded upon in the article:

  • Improved service delivery makes training easier and makes employees more conducive to learning
  • Companies receive expert advice from software designers and developers
  • SaaS designers can also provide best deployment strategies
  • Building a relationship with a software provider helps improve overall service
  • Field-testing new software solutions lets all stakeholders learn from their strengths and weaknesses

Making Training and Learning More Enjoyable 

The same principles apply to adopting a learning management system as to buying and deploying any SaaS: namely, it has to please the user. Getting employees to log in after work hours to attend remote learning training courses and sessions would be a lot easier if the tool they are supposed to use is easy-to-use and easily navigable.

Software-as-a-Service that lacks the last component – service – does not live up to the promise that software solutions are supposed to offer. Long load times, confusing interfaces and connectivity issues should be found and resolved before launch to ensure that employees do not have an excuse to skip or miss training sessions.

Listening to Your Service Provider

There is no one who knows better about seamless rollouts of new software than the people who made that software. Depending on whether you outsource your software development to a third-party provider or if you choose to design something in-house, the former options let you access a knowledge base that you may lack in your own organization.

An SaaS provider can help set a series of goals and objectives for not only the deployment of your software, but also focus on particular benchmarks like reducing churn rates, increasing customer (and employee) satisfaction, as well as how to customize software in the future. Conversely, it is important that your SaaS provider listens to you. Make sure they understand your objectives like expanding your customer base and generating more revenue so you can both explore the best ways to achieve those goals.

Building Mutually Beneficial Relationships 

The relationship between software vendors and a business goes far beyond simple, bi-weekly updates and progress reports. To build the most ideal software solution, an SaaS provider must know the intimate details of any organization so that they can fine-tune their design to best satisfy the needs of the company.

This means opening up and getting as close as possible to each other to the extent that you share your failures as well as your successes. This type of business relationship is beneficial in the long run as achieving synchronicity between your two organizations will help focus energy on important issues like optimization and profitability rather than minor organizational concerns.

Exceptional Service as the Best Marketing Tool 

One way not only to attract new business but also retain it is with exceptional service. That tenet applies as much to a business trying to bring in new customers as it does to a company trying to get their employees to learn new skills to ultimately increase a company’s profitability. The more employees are pleased with their remote learning assignments the more they are likely to spread the word that these new e-learning commitments are not as bad as they sound.

While employees can learn individually, an LMS that supports cross-collaboration, file-sharing and on-the-spot assessments that can also induce remote learners to work together to resolve teamwork challenges. Much the same way a document-sharing software like Lumin PDF lets users share, transfer and annotate PDF files, an exceptional LMS can let users interact with each at every step of their training to provide answers as well as support.

Observing New Software in Action 

Every new software solution comes to market with certain expectations. There is also the expectation that despite the talent and expertise that went into designing it some problems can arise. The key to resolving these issues is the same as always: providing excellent service. Much like SaaS providers bend over backwards to address any unexpected flare-ups and problems with their software, companies should not hesitate to support their employees whenever they encounter difficulties in a newly deployed LMS.

But these unexpected problems also present opportunities. The ways that a software responds to real-world interactions lets designers and managers identify the ways it can be improved. Any new software solution should be monitored not only to gauge its performance but to see how the people using it on the front-end respond to its features. 

Credit: iStock Adobe/shironosov

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