I just finished presenting from my home office along with colleague who was at a conference over 3 hours away. Though I enjoy engaging face to face with my audiences, I was not able to make the trip because of prior committments. In the past, I would have missed this opportunity to work with an incredible group of people and to share tools that can enhance their work.

To make this a reality, we used Skype to provide the connection into the session. My video was run from the computer to an LCD projector and the audio was run into the sound system. We were able to communicate with our audience as if we were standing next to each other. The participants were actively engaged and we were able to fulfill the objectives the conference coordinators set before us. This event highlights a few barriers that e-learning can overcome for your company, organization, or classroom.

Barrier 1: Distance. Many times we are limited by the availability of professionals in our geographic region. I have worked with a few agencies that were seeking the support of a service provider. Unfortunately, they were forced to select their 3rd and 4th option because their top choices did not have time to provide what they needed (or did not want to make the trip). E-learning solutions allow people to provide their skills to a much wider audience; minimize the barriers of time and distance; and maximize effectiveness.

Barrier 2: Finances. As travel costs increase and the price of a gallon of gasoline skyrockets, this will become the greatest hurdle to access support services and training to assist your staff. The use of e-learning as a communication tool minimizes or removes the costs that you would be required to spend to bring in the “expert from Harvard” to train your staff. No flight, no rental car, no overnight stay, and no meals (which is important if you are bringing in the championship eating all-stars to give a motivational speech) are required.

Barrier 3: Follow-up. The key to any effective professional development is follow-up. The research literature is very consistent in supporting that “one-shot, sit and get lessons do not change the way people work”. However, most training events are exactly that. We sit and listen to someone drag on and on about a topic while hoping that the fire alarm will go off or Jesus will come back. As supervisors, we have unrealistic expectations that our staff will go out and do what was talked about during the session. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way (yet we still do this over and over). E-learning technologies provide a realistic way for trainers to connect back with the participants to follow-up after the initial training. This let’s everyone know that the content matters and provides a venue for questions to be addressed as implementation ensues.

When you are planning training and events for your staff and clientèle, the options have grown quite a bit. Most importantly, “Keep the main thing, the main thing”! Great technology and poor content is still poor content.