From Brandon Hall Research eLearning conference in San Jose: Very interesting session on merging actual data intensive business processes with eLearning implementations. Idea is that most training courses are developed separately from the actual business process. You could say “divorced from”.
What’s required is for the eLearning environment to have access to actual product, marketing or sales training information via database access or timely XML exports.
BTW, most business’s data happens to reside in Excel spreadsheets.
One example shown was of the how New Balance Shoes integrated new product data from normal development and marketing processes from database so it could be used by the product research teams, production, sliced for sales team training and consumer marketing messages. “Chunks” of text descriptions are then fed into the training materials more or less dynamically.
Since they come out with 50-80 new products a quarter it’s the only way to organize and execute on the volume of sales and marketing’s training needs. Thought provoking.