Chances are you may be having challenges with employee training, onboarding, or overall knowledge sharing. One thought is to seek out a learning management software (LMS), or use what you have. With our intranet software, you can handle some aspects provided by LMS software. In this article, we'll cover what elements can be used to facilitate online learning.
Training Site
To start, having a Site as the core place for employees to find all online learning-related content should have a home. The best place to do this is to create a site to host this information.
Include the following in your Training Site as a starting point:
- Assign Site Owners - This will likely fall to a training department, or individuals responsible for training within your organization
- Apps to include:
- Documents - host all training materials
- Video library - used to either host the video files or embed videos from YouTube or another hosting service
- Training Calendar - Used for displaying upcoming training sessions and allow users to register
- Company News - Announcements for staff related to training
- Link to Tests - Test forms can be created through the Online Forms app (This app lives on the Home site and can't be moved or added to the Training site)
Test Forms
One of the key components that an LMS can do well is being able to track the progress of an individual. While our software is unable to show all completed sections across multiple apps, one aspect can be handled through an online form.
One way to handle the progress is to have a separate form with links to the forms they need to complete, each field should be a link address field that can help track the individuals submitted responses to tests, surveys, etc. This method would put the responsibility on the employee to copy and paste their response links after completing a form or test.
Here's an example of how this may be laid out:
- Employee Information - each field in this section is using a User Data field to automatically pull in the information based on the employee signed in.
- Content fields - This section is used to link to the required tests
- Link fields - This field is where the employee will paste in their completed form response link..
Curriculum Content Within the Form
Within your online form, you can embed content or link to the content for the course that the employee is completing. Here's some ideas you can use for various ways to incorporate the content in your form:
Content field - Embed videos from sources like YouTube or from a video uploaded to the intranet (see our Add Content article for how to do this) as shown below:
Content fields can also be used to link to other areas of the software (e.g. a document you've uploaded to an app, web docs, folders containing all related course material, etc).
Completion Status
Within individual forms, you can also be creative with the Workflow approval stages to track progress. It structure of your workflow and leveraging that to show a user's current 'status' as they progress through the curriculum.
Here's an example of how this may look for your approval stages:
Within the form, you will need to structure the sections so that the users know that at the end of each section, they'll need to 'save' their progress and then click 'approve to mark completion of that section.
Form permissions - Forms by default don't allow the submitting user to edit their responses. This can be enabled by:
- Edit the form
- Click the Security tab
- Scroll down to 'who can view form responses'
- Beside Submitting User, check the box under the 'Edit' column
- Save changes
Once the final stage has been approved by the employee signifying they've completed the course, additional approval stages containing supervisors/training managers, etc. can be triggered for review. If you're using a 'test' form type, you can build the fields within the Question Bank section to automatically score the test at the end.
Additional Considerations
Triggers - It's not recommended to include triggers to hide fields for this process. If a user selects the item to trigger the field and later changes this to hide the field again, any information added to the hidden field will be lost.
Spread out instructions - There's an instruction field provided above the form where you can include additional instructions, branding, etc. If too much content is above fields where users would interact (e.g. date field, name field, questions, etc), the screen will load the form and jump to the first interactable field which bypasses the content. You can put instructions in a content field at the top of each separate section to split up the content.
Employee Progress Tracker - Some customers like to utilize an application to contain the employee's progress through their online training. Each folder can be broken down by team/department. Within each folder, click 'Add' to add an employee's progress. As they complete additional courses, their progress is updated within this application for a visual on where they're at. You can utilize dropdown fields as status indicators if desired.