An effective online Corporate University contributes to the growth, efficiency and profitability of your organization in many ways:
 
Save Money
 
Perhaps saving money isn’t the most graceful reason for wanting an online Corporate University, but let‘s be honest, you’re running a business! At the end of the day (or should I say “quarter”), the bottom line matters.
 
Delivering corporate training can be very expensive, especially if your organization has employees located in various locations. Travel and living expenses usually represent 40% to 60% of overall training costs when instructors and/or students need to travel in order to take a class. Delivering content via an online Corporate University instantly frees up half of your training budget, leaving more money for the design and delivery of additional courses.
 
Deliver Higher Quality Training Programs
 
The debate is still out on who is best-suited to train employees; subject-matter experts or certified instructors. Unfortunately, very few people possess both skill sets, which renders most face-to-face training sessions only somewhat effective.
 
Designing courses for an online Corporate University allows subject-matter experts and Instructional Designers to work together ahead of the actual act of learning. This evidently allows for higher quality training programs. It also eliminates the need to “train the trainer”, since the “trainer” now becomes your online Corporate University.
 
Subject-matter experts and instructional designers could also collaborate on conventional user guides or manuals that don’t require the use of an online Corporate University as a delivery medium.  However, studies have proven time and again that multimedia-rich eLearning courses yield better learning. Richard Mayer, Colvin Clark and other researchers have all concluded that narrated online courses yield an average improvement of 80% over text and graphic courses, and 97.8% over text-only courses typically found in printed manuals.
 
Allow For “Anytime, Anywhere” Learning
 
People nowadays expect nothing less than “anytime, anywhere” training. And why wouldn’t they? Why would a new hire have to wait weeks for the next “new hire” training course to take place? Why would a remote sales executive have to travel to the head office to learn about the latest and greatest features of your product? Why could an employee who just transferred business units not simply go online and learn about the new department’s tools and processes? Why could a promising developer not take a project management course in his/her spare time (evenings or weekends) to further his career within your organization?
 
“Anytime, anywhere” training is advantageous for everyone. Your students expect it, and you should support it.
 
Help Retain Employees
 
The #1 reason why skilled employees leave companies is because of the unconstructive relationship with their immediate superior. The #2 reason is because they feel their career has come to a standstill and they are no longer learning.
 
Help retain your employees by giving them a continuous opportunity to learn new skills and further their career.  Develop online tests and quizzes or even interactive games to help them measure their performance against those specific abilities so they can get an objective, unbiased understanding of their skill level.

Foster Continuous Individual, Business Unit and Organizational Effectiveness
 
Individuals, business units and the organization all have different objectives when it comes to training. The individual wants to learn new skills that will help his/her personal career. The business unit wants to ensure its members are knowledgeable and up-to-date with the latest advancements in their respective fields. The organization wants to equip their future leaders with the appropriate development opportunities so they can eventually climb the corporate ladder and help the company with strategic initiatives. At the same time, the organization wants new hires to quickly come up-to-speed and fill the holes left behind by the recently promoted top-performers.
 
An online Corporate University helps you meet all of these objectives at once. Employees entered in the system can be enrolled (or self-enroll) in courses specific to their individual career goals, or courses deemed appropriate by their business unit manager, HR managers or senior-level executives.
 
Provide a Hub for Knowledge Collection and Dissemination
 
An online Corporate University is a great place to learn. It’s an even better place to teach!
 
An online Corporate University allows students to interact with each other via chat rooms and discussion boards. It also allows employees to post valuable information in Wikis. Furthermore, an online Corporate University lets system administrators grant teacher privileges to selected subject-matter experts who can then become teachers themselves. They can then develop courses of their own via a simple text or HTML editor all the while receiving gratification from being a recognized mentor for others.
 
Allow You to Measure Investments in Learning in Relation to Business Results
 
An online Corporate University allows you to track who has taken which course, and how they performed on the online evaluation. As a result, you can measure the overall investment in time and money in relation to business results.
 
An HR department for example could easily measure the reduction in sexual harassment complaints following the mandatory participation of every employee in a Sexual Harassment Awareness course. Software companies could easily evaluate the disparity in bug count between developers who took an optional Software Development Best Practices course versus those who chose to skip it.
 
Deciding whether or not to further invest in certain fields or to make courses mandatory is now a science, not a guessing game.
 
Support Change in the Organization
 
Attempts to change certain behaviors in the organization are seldom successful. Why?
 
Communication and information dissemination is not always effective. The larger the company, the larger the problem.
 
Enrolling all or selected students in an online course that promotes the preferred behavior allows you to introduce and support organizational change. More importantly, it doesn’t impact the day-to-day activities of the company since the enrolled students can take the course at their convenience, not at the convenience of their instructor. Anytime, anywhere!
 
Be Perceived as Leading-Edge and Innovative
 
Having a first-class online Corporate University with current, multimedia-rich courses goes a long way to convincing your employees (and potential hires) that your company invests in its most important resource; its people.
 
This small investment could do more for your HR department than any career fair, marketing campaign or internal employee motivation initiative.
 
Shorten Classroom Sessions and Overall Training
 
Studies clearly demonstrate that people learn best when training sessions are 17 minutes or less. The short attention span of most people doesn’t allow them to remain attentive for hours at a time. Not to mention that most people don’t have hours to spare on any given day; hours for which your company pays.
 
That being said, most people won’t bother showing up for a 15-minute conventional face-to-face course, especially when the class is in a remote location. They do however welcome short online courses in the format of articles, videos or even Podcasts, especially when they can take them anytime, anywhere.
 
Track Participation & Performance
 
One of the major advantages of an online Corporate University over other delivery channels, say the Intranet, is that an online Corporate University allows instructors and managers to track who took what course and how well they performed on the quiz or final test. It also allows you to generate reports for pertinent information. If you believe in the old adage that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”, then an online Corporate University is a definite must.
 
Eliminate Logistical Problems
 
If you’ve ever tried to organize a training session with even as few as a dozen people, you know how difficult it can be. Students are too busy to attend. Instructors are not readily available. Classrooms are already booked. Projectors have all of a sudden vanished. And that’s only with a dozen students. Imagine when you need to deliver a specific course company-wide!
 
The solution? An online Corporate University that allows you to deliver training anytime, anywhere and tracks who took the course and optionally passed the exam.
 


 
By now, you should be convinced that an online Corporate University will contribute to the growth, efficiency and profitability of your organization in many ways; 12 ways to be exact according to this article.
 
In the early 1990’s, many Marketing managers didn’t see the value of a corporate Internet site. The visionaries who did understand the potential of the Web had to convince the rest of their team in order to free up budget. Human Resource departments nowadays are where Marketing departments were in the early to mid 1990’s.
 
Dual Code’s vision is that within 5 to 10 years, online Corporate Universities will be as widespread as corporate Web sites in organizations large enough to warrant a Human Resources department. In order to ensure this vision realizes itself, our strategy is to make online Corporate Universities as affordable as Web sites. We’re hoping that corporations will feel the same way and grant the same level of importance to online Corporate Universities as they currently do to Web sites. After all, aren’t your people your greatest resource?