Hyderabad, India – October 09, 2015 – As a part of its 15th anniversary celebrations, CommLab India, a global elearning company, conducted a unique experiment in organization-wide internal learning through user-generated content. The objective of this endeavor was to promote cross-functional training in the company in order to better serve the customers and to increase the company’s competency as a whole.
It is common knowledge that functional teams generally work in silos and are unaware of the developments, challenges, and innovations happening in the other teams, especially Marketing/ Sales and Operations. By assigning a dedicated time, where teams share and learn from one another, the sum total of knowledge in the company is increased and employees leverage this “other” knowledge in their own domains to achieve holistic results.
With this rationale in mind, CommLab launched an event, “Learning Seminar”, which ran during the entire month of September, culminating in comprehensive test on the last day of the month.
The specific goals of the event were:
1. To promote cross-learning among different teams in CommLab so that teams:
Acquire holistic knowledge of the business
Can do their jobs better with “other” knowledge
Can better appreciate others contributions
Can rotate to other teams
2. To promote synergy and make the company holistic and stronger
A unique blended methodology was adopted where all employees became learners as well as teachers. The entire company was divided into nine teams with representation from all the main functions – marketing, sales, project management, instructional design, visual design, production, technology and support. These teams were given specific targets to generate content in the form of blogs, info-graphics, videos and classroom presentations. The content thus generated from the teams was quality checked by SMEs of the respective subjects before it was hosted on the company’s LMS. Every day, a specific time was assigned for the learners to read and comment on the learning assets on the LMS. Every week, two 30-minute presentations were made to the entire company on important subjects, followed by a vigorous question-answer session.
“The activity produced huge amounts of high quality training material generated by the learners themselves, in their own time and alongside their normal work-related deliverables. Nothing was delayed; nobody was overworked,” said RK Prasad, the chief executive officer.
To assess the learning outcome, a final examination of 50 MCQ questions was administered to all employees. Talking about the outcome, Deepika, the HR Manager adds, “The results are gratifying. All 135 employees scored over 60%…”
A total of 1,500 learning hours were clocked and resulted in phenomenal user-generated content – 252 unique pieces of content in the form of blogs, info-graphics, videos, and PowerPoint presentations.
The learning bytes were presented in multiple formats and took just 2-5 minutes to complete. Employees could comment, question, or post queries after going through each learning resource on the LMS. Queries were answered by peers or SMEs facilitating a truly collaborative learning experience.
The experiment proved that, given clear targets and freedom to learn from one another, employees will learn much more than in any conventional e-learning or classroom training and at a fraction of the cost.
Though CommLab has been developing e-learning courses for external organizations, this is the first time that its employees were involved in an online and collaborative learning experience of this magnitude and scale for internal training purposes.
About CommLab India
CommLab India LLP is a leading learning solutions company with expertise in design and development of eLearning courses. Its learning solutions include eLearning course development, mLearning solutions, conversion of legacy courses into the mobile compatible HTML5 format, translation of online courses and hosting and managing training materials on LMS.
CommLab has worked with organizations in various industries such as finance, insurance, manufacturing and healthcare. Based in India, it is a preferred vendor to several Fortune 500 companies, such as Alcoa, Mettler-Toledo and Pepco Holding Inc. and has an ongoing relationship with organizations such as SAI Global and Unilever.