eLearning Takeaways from eACH 2014

A few weeks ago fellow executives and I travelled to Toronto for the 2014 eLearning Alliance of Canadian Hospitals (eACH) Conference. I have wanted to write this blog since we returned and I’m happy to finally have a brief pause to reflect and share everything we learned.

If you aren’t acquainted with the eACH Conference, it is an annual event that brings together hospitals, healthcare workers, and eLearning organizations to share what is new for training, talent management and knowledge sharing in healthcare. This year we noticed attendees were a very active and passionate group of learning professionals who formed into a tight knit collection of experts. As an organization, eACH is a small group of teaching hospitals in Toronto that originally formed to purchase a shared Learning Management System (LMS). From this initial sharing venture, the group has evolved to share everything from knowledge about eLearning design, development and implementation, and eLearning courses.

This year at eACH, the notion of ‘shamelessly sharing’ was an innovative idea that really resonated with me and my colleagues. At Lambda Solutions we provide LMS services to clients from many different worlds—corporate, education, government and healthcare. One trend we have recognized in the past 12 years of operation is the increase of knowledge sharing between organizations in the education and government sectors. This has yet to happen in healthcare but due to the recent implementation of LMSs, it is now easier to facilitate knowledge sharing. We believe that this is the next frontier in improving patient outcomes and advancing research faster than ever before.

Additional takeaways we gained from questions that arose again and again, is that healthcare organizations are still experience reoccurring eLearning and LMS challenges that are affecting the efficiency and effectiveness of eLearning. Here is a summary of some of the challenges we heard from healthcare organizations:

1. Lack of LMS training—eLearning course developers have been promoted to these positions due to their expertise but lack the technical training and knowledge to effectively administer eLearning courses.
2. Resource waste with tedious manual process work due to the lack of integration between systems.
3. Struggles implementing social and blended learning material due to availability and infrastructure constraints.
4. Difficulties converting course material for online delivery.
5. Difficulty meeting compliance requirements for day to day operations and for ministry requirements.
6. Lack of sophisticated reporting in LMSs using big data analytics.
7. Exchanging and sourcing good healthcare education content—attendees were keen on the idea of paying for content from another healthcare organization’s LMS if it was accessible and useful.
8. Generating profit from eLearning content—this really blew me away to see something that is a cost center being asked to be cost neutral or profitable.

The conference was an overall success and we are very happy to have contributed through our platinum sponsorship and presentations on eLearning. Our presentation that was the biggest hit was given by Amelia Newbury, our Director of Research in Healthcare Education. Since her presentation, The Wisdom of the Cloud: Cloud Based Leaning in Healthcare was such a hit, we have decided to provide it again in this month’s webinar. This way, those who didn’t have the opportunity to attend this year’s eACH Conference can view it for free! Stay tuned to Twitter and our website to sign-up.