Online learning offers many advantages for busy officials and executives who may not have the time or the budget to travel for a traditional day course. E-learning benefits both the learner and the company willing to educate their employees. Some of the proven befits of e-learning include evidence of lower costs, more effective learning, faster delivery, and lower environmental impact.

Cost-efficient and effective way of learning

E-learning is more cost-effective because there is a reduction in training time known as learning compression. This is because the single largest cost of training in organisations is the cost of staff attending the training course, rather than the direct delivery costs in terms of trainers, course materials, travel and accommodation. E-learning can deliver benefits by reducing the time it takes to train people because:

•          Learners can go at their own pace, not at the pace of the slowest member of a group

•          Time in classrooms can be spent on questions / topics introduced by other delegates that are irrelevant to the needs of the individual learner

•          There is less social interaction time

•          It takes less time to start and wind up a learning session

•          There is less travel time to and from a training event

•          Learners learn what they need to learn, they can skip elements of a program they don’t need

An example of successful e-learning is British Telecom which delivered e-business training to 23,000 employees in three months, at a cost of €7m, compared to €21.3 million and a five-year time span for classroom training (Taylor, 2002).

Fast way of learning

At a time when change is faster than ever a key advantage of e-learning is that it has a faster delivery cycle time than traditional classroom-based instruction. There is a practical limitation on how fast learning can be rolled out with classroom-based instruction, as the capacity to deliver learning is limited by the number of available classrooms and trainers.

Better for the environment

A study by the Open University, “Towards Sustainable Higher Education: Environmental Impacts of Campus-Based and Distance Higher Education Systems,” found that on average, the production and provision of distance learning courses consumed nearly 90 percent less energy and produced 85 percent fewer CO2 emissions per student than conventional campus-based university courses.

Public affairs Ireland is offering a selection of focused e-learning courses for the public sector in Ireland. Our e-learning products have developed from highly successful day courses which have proved extremely popular over the years. The tutors are all cutting-edge experts in their fields and have been working with us for many years delivering relevant, up to the minute day courses with excellent feedback.

Browse our e-learning courses here