Social media companies rely on individuals with unique skill sets that didn’t exist over a decade ago. Even experienced offline marketers struggle to navigate the challenges of social media marketing. Marketing agencies need to make sure that their employees are properly trained.
In the past, agencies often trained their employees in a traditional office setting, despite the availability of technology that enabled remote working. The COVID-19 virus has forced them to transition towards remote learning and working. There are signs that this is going to be a permanent shift for social media companies all over the world.
Social Media Companies Will Train their Workers Remotely for the Foreseeable Future
For many people, two of the most obvious signs of COVID has been the shutting kindergartens and schools, colleges and universities and the halting of face-to-face training for businesses and companies. This closing of places of learning and training facilities has led to a paradigm mass-shift in the methodologies used for education and professional development. This hasn’t affected social media agencies as much as other companies, but they have been impacted to some degree. Some of them still relied heavily on an in-person workplace, which created a new dynamic when the illness hit.
They have adjusted well and are seeing the potential of a workplace that relies more on eLearning. This can change the future for social media training, but there are still some kinks to work out.
After all, even though much of the world has implemented social distancing, the need for education has not stopped and staff still need to build their skills and abilities. This includes workplaces that need to train their employees to handle complex tasks such as social media marketing.
To fill this need, e-learning has been rolling out on a scale as never before seen.
What is e-Learning?
For the average person, e-Learning can mean ‘leaning done by studying at home by using computers and courses provided on the internet’ or for any learning where the content is delivered through electronic means. But while both these are true, they do not give the whole picture. E-Learning, as a separate definition describes it, is:
‘a learning system based on formalized teaching but with the help of electronic resources… While teaching can be based in or out of the classrooms, the use of computers and the Internet forms the major component of E-learning. E-learning can also be termed as a network enabled transfer of skills and knowledge [where] the delivery of education is made to a large number of recipients at the same or different times’.
E-learning is a structured learning process and can be made up of many different types of content – online lectures, audio recordings, simulations, videos, quizzes, activities, even games. It can be delivered via web browser interface or through e-learning solutions, such as apps.
The Association for Talent Development states that e-Learning falls into two categories, asynchronous and synchronous:
- Asynchronous e-learning is taken at the pace of the learner, i.e. it is self-driven, self-paced. Learners take the e-Learning element (normally a course) on their own, usually via a computer (laptop, desktop etc.). Asynchronous e-learning can incorporate content that is pre-made or pre-recorded, such as lectures, videos, text, other visuals, but can also include more interactive aspects such as quizzes, simulations and games.
- Synchronous e-learning, also known as live-online training or virtual classroom training, is instructor-led and taken at the same time as other learners – everyone just happens to be geographically dispersed. This training typically uses a web-conferencing or a virtual classroom platform (such as Adobe Connect or GoToTraining) that offers features such as slide or screen sharing, as well as interaction tools such as chats, polling, and screen annotation.
The ATD states that there are multiple benefits that can be gained from e-Learning when compared to more traditional methods. It breaks these down as follows:
| Benefit | Asynchronous E-Learning | Synchronous E-Learning |
| Taken anywhere | Yes | Yes |
| Taken anytime | Yes | |
| Tracking capabilities | Yes | Yes |
| Can be less expensive | Yes | Yes |
| Highly scalable | Yes | |
| Reduced time away | Yes | Yes |
| Train dispersed groups | Yes | Yes |
| Can be more personalized via branching or adaptive learning | Yes | |
| Allows for global collaboration | Yes |
The growth in e-Learning
E-Learning is not new – it has been growing in popularity since the early 2000s, notably with the development of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). But because of the requirements for physical distancing since the start of COVID, the extent of e-Learning provision has increased substantially. Educational establishments have had to shift their entire teaching curriculums online, requiring the rapid development and deployment of e-learning solutions. This has not just taken place in Europe and North America: globally, more and more courses are now offering using e-Learning or, at the least, incorporating e-Learning elements, with universities from Namibia to Jordan all using e-learning.
But how does the development of e-Learning take place?
E-Learning Development Services
One of the results of the expansion of e-Learning – not just in the last few months but over the past decade – has been an increase in the professionalism of both the platforms used and the content offered. As with many aspects of online content and delivery, the creation of e-Learning solutions – whether this is related to the need to put together specific content or create an e-learning app – is often best done by firms that are specialists in e-Learning application development and the provision of e-Learning development services. These firms work closely with the subject matter specialists (normally the customer who wants a particular project created) to produce a software package that can offer the content to the desired audience in the required manner.
There are many aspects that need to be considered when doing this, for example: what is the content that needs to be conveyed? Are there pre-existing platforms that need to be incorporated? What is the likely user hardware and software profile? What is the state of the telecoms network that the target user will have to make use of? What is the praxeology of the course? Which languages does the content need to be offered in?
A specialist e-Learning solutions firm is able to take the answers to these and other questions and create an e-Learning app that precisely meets the needs of the client and user. With the expansion and growth of e-Learning solutions around the world, ensuring the delivery of high-quality content is essential for educational and professional development providers.
Social Media Companies Will Continue to Train their Employees Remotely in 2020
The government lockdown has led many companies to train their employees remotely. Social media companies are no exception. In fact, they are among the companies leading this trend. This trend is proving to be successful, so it will likely continue long after the COVID-19 crisis comes to an end.
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