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Making the case for e-learning

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, April 21, 2006

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According to Wendy Berke, director of business development with the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN), e-learning is a good training solution for busy nurses and staff educators because it provides flexibility for the learner, standardizes content distribution methods, and allows for easy tracking and personalization of learner performance.

From their research, Berke and her colleagues found that e-learning programs

• increase recruitment and retention of nurses
• make offering just-in-time training easier
• decrease training costs by cutting training time and requiring less resources (e.g., handouts and textbooks)
• increase staff and educator productivity (i.e., they require less time away from the units and free up staff educators' time to handle more urgent training needs)

After you justify why you want to implement an e-learning program within your organization, take a look at the financial side of taking on such a project. Begin by quantifying direct and indirect costs related to training each staff member under your current system, says Berke. Do so by first determining the cost of orientation for each employee. This can be calculated by multiplying the number of hours spent in the classroom by the learner's hourly pay rate.

To learn more about e-learning implementation and how to calculate associated costs, go to The Staff Educator (TSE). For the cost of just three stories, you can get the entire April issue of TSE. Click here to choose between the PDF and HTML versions for just $30. Subscribers to the online version of TSE have free access to this article. Subscribers to the print newsletter can find this article in their April issue.

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