Contemporary e-learning as panacea for large-scale software training

Large organizations renew their core business software with some regularity, resulting in serious challenges for in-company training officers. Especially when large numbers of employees need to be trained to use updated software on short notice, traditional face-to-face training methods fall short. Contemporary e-learning is regarded a solution for such short-term and large-scale training. This paper discusses the effect of a didactically sound e-learning solution on learning to use a new version of an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software package. This solution not only features generally recognized e-learning characteristics like any time, place, path, and pace, but also marks the element ‘just enough’ to emphasize that the e-learning content only covers knowledge (concepts and procedures) necessary to perform the daily professional tasks. Around 2000 healthcare workers of a mental healthcare institution were educated online to use a renewed version of an EMR software package within two months. Results (i.e., time on task, test results, and perceived effectiveness) indicate that contemporary online solutions can help large organizations to face short-term and large-scale training problems. (This paper was presented at CSEDU 2013 in Aachen, Germany; see http://www.csedu.org/?y=2013)