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by Joel-Zvi Chetzroni, CEO MULTILEARNING Group Inc.
eLearning Portals. These days, we’re hearing a lot about association eLearning portal initiatives. This is great news because associations can now extend the educational services offered to their targeted audience all year long, beyond the actual congress period.
These eLearning portals are designed to centralize all possible types of content generated online, a kind of "eLearning Hub" concept. We hear less and less about single congress webcast projects as the vision of associations is changing towards gathering more content, and as associations rely on different tools used internally and/or suppliers to populate their different materials or initiatives (such as ePosters, webcasts, podcasts, CME courses, article reviews and more, right up to online certification), the challenge they are facing is enormous.
Successful long-term eLearning portals require a huge structure.
Two weeks ago, during the opening ceremony of the European Society of Regional Anaesthesia (ESRA) Congress, I had the honour of co-presenting with the chair of education the official launch of the spectacular "ESRA Academy", the official eLearning portal of ESRA.
The structure of this eLearning portal has been set according to the educational objectives ESRA had in mind. This virtual library I have designed is tailor-made for associations and structured like a real library. The concept of being able to do a search is surpassed by the ability to instantly retrieve specific materials. Users are now exposed to material meeting their learning needs within seconds. It's straight to the point, combines all possible types of content, and materials are structured according to the association’s own scientific topics with the ability to absorb unlimited new levels of content over the years without affecting users’ experience. The same applies to LiverLearning, the official eLearning portal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD).
When one takes into consideration that the most important aspect of an eLearning initiative is to make your audience feel it's a new benefit being offered to them, enhancing their online educational experience is the key to success.
This is why we suggest to our clients that they should carefully select the content they wish to generate and publish it in an optimized way (e.g., with laser pointer movements for webcasts, auto-zooms for ePosters etc…). This content will represent their scientific contribution to the field.
Once the eLearning environment is implemented and functional, this is where the fun part begins. In-depth activity level reports should be made easy to understand and show to your board in order to assess the level of educational activity online, so we no longer talk about the number of items being viewed here, but rather the range of time spent by different types of users on different topics. This data then allows the association to shape the content of their scientific projects/congresses according to the current and accurate needs of the audience.
The other challenge is then to ensure the ability for end-users to access content on any devices from anywhere and incorporate that activity with the web activity, and this is what we have been able to do with the popular "TALKS on the GO" iPad/iPhone & Android App we developed.
With the pressure on major associations to grow and become independent in the delivery of most of their services, the only need they couldn’t fill with the help of different vendors due to the complexity of setting up a proper and evolving online educational environment was to have an entity in charge of mastering their online educational material. That’s how we came into this unexpected situation with the European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL) acquiring an asset of 11.11% in our company. It's not every day one may see a not-for-profit organization investing in a commercial entity (which we are very proud of), and the beauty is that our other clients have seen this positively.
Through this investment, EASL is paving the way for associations who wish to become independent in providing services to their targeted audience, which for EASL involves providing State-of-the-Art online educational services to its members.
Our advanced educational tools coupled with the strategies EASL has implemented are directly related to some of the success EASL has experienced since 2005. (EASL has more than doubled its membership during this time).
The educational material an association may populate online is an asset that should never be controlled or used for the benefit (even in part) of another entity. This material has much more value than an association may realize today and the key to mastering this new benefit (equivalent to a Journal) in the association world is the implementation of platforms enhanced for this specific educational purpose with an unlimited capacity to absorb new content. Associations have to urgently evaluate the potential delivery of eLearning (if not done), before they are pushed by their own audience to invest in something that requires deep analysis and large investments.
www.multilearning.com