August 13th, 2010 by Robin Green

“ I walked into the conference room,  there were 8 team members sitting there waiting for me. I didn’t know who knew what, who was supposed to be doing what, and worst of all, hardly knew their names”.

When managing a team, particularly a team that is new to you one critical factor is evaluating their capabilities. Often, when taking over a group or a project, there is not much data or documentation that tells you about the capabilities of its members, and this can lead to serious problems when you begin to try and delegate responsibilities in an effective manner.

Often the previous manager, team lead, or director, was quickly moved, and left little or no notes pertaining t team members. So its left to you, the team lead to sort out how to effectively transfer knowledge, who has what strengths, and how to best capitalize on them.  Getting the soft skills evaluated can be easier; a group session by an intuitive manager can lead to some significant insights about his or her team. You can quickly become familiar with personalities and communication styles.  It’s the hard skills, the operational, or technical, performance abilities that are difficult to evaluate. This can be particularly critical when a group has been together for a long period of time.  Often team members will compensate for one and others strengths and weaknesses leading to a scrum of activity that makes it particularly difficult to evaluate who is doing, and responsible for what exactly.

An excellent way to avoid situations, and quickly and transparently asses and measure what everyone knows and what their strengths are is to deploy a pre meeting assessment on a hosted Learning Management System like Coggno.com .  By using an online learning platform, you can quickly and easily upload and deploy the quiz or test, and because you are not present while they are completing it, you don’t have the awkwardness inherent in an instructor lead evaluation, your audience won’t  feel judged. The evaluations also go a long o set a sense of inherent expectations, and project a measure of management discipline that you may be seeking when taking on a new team.

Using the Learning Management System at www.Coggno.com is a great cost effective way to facilitate this. The tools are intuitive and easy to use, there is no set-up fee, and best of all, the per-use system make it extremely cost effective.

The evaluations you create will go a long way to setting up a sense of inherent expectations, and project a measure of management discipline that you will be seeking when taking on a new team.

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Coggno.com provides world-class online education.

April 28th, 2010 by Robin Green

As your company matures and expands, you’ll find your employees are handling more calls and emails from customers. And if this situation has begun to spiral out of control–too many calls and emails to track–you know it’s time to step up to the plate and implement a new strategy to deal with the influx of communicative traffic. This is a critical moment in the evolution of your company, and may be the perfect time for you to consider implementing a call center. Call centers and contact centers are efficient and help you organize, maintain, track, and improve your customer relationships. They also help cut costs–especially when training and other processes are taken care of online.

Once upon a time, before learning management systems (LMS) and other online training systems were used, training employees across distances was a chaotic, decentralized, and often inefficient process. Most of the time, a company was unable to confirm how much money it was spending on employee training across the enterprise. The training process in each group of the company could vary significantly.

Today, companies utilizing business process outsourcing (BPO) for call centers can cut costs if they are able to centralize, unify, and repeat the process of employee training. This is where LMSs are useful, since an LMS allows its users to develop and distribute their own training solutions. Companies can create and customize training, integrating their logo and applying the company colors. And the ability to pay-per-use makes it easy for companies to load and reload learning content as required for relevant and up-to-date training. This pay-per-use model provides companies with a way to train employees in a call center in an efficient and timely manner.

Coggno is now offering a limited time free trial on its pay-per-use LMS. Click here to try it out.

Outsourced call centers require online training, easily delivered via LMS. But why create and/or outsource your call center to begin with? There are numerous benefits to implementing a call center, or a customer relationship management team. First of all, a call center creates greater efficiency in your company. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a big operation, involving a separate office, although it often does. However, if need be, a call center may involve minimal employees, in any location in the world. In fact, you might not even need to hire extra personnel.

Second, call centers allow you to track business processes and progress. Using customer relationship management software, your office can track the number of calls and emails received and responded to each day by making them into simple and trackable cases. An ordinary helpdesk isn’t able to track these. A call center generates these statistics and allows you to use them for future reference and to take measures to improve your business processes and ultimately, your business.

This point leads to the next benefit: launching a call center strategy will help you get organized and up to date on the most robust technology–including LMS software and communication handling systems–available. For example, using the Software as a service technology delivery model, virtual call centers are the most recent phenomenon emerging to manage customer relationships. Oftentimes call centers operate using cloud-based services like Salesforce.com, for a monthly or annual fee, to integrate with their call center functionality. Software like Salesforce also includes ways to help call center reps stay connected, use feeds to keep up with the latest salesforce activities and record updates, and more social networking-style tools that are actually useful in the communication-handling world.

Salesforce’s up-and-coming collaboration platform, Chatter, includes a variety of cutting edge and useful tools for a call center. Status updates provide a way to quickly let others know what you’re working on, without having to post to a staff blog or send an email. And in addition to following other staff members (like Twitter, only the ones you choose) you can also follow individual records in Salesforce such as contacts, accounts, cases, or opportunities. For example, say you’re a customer service rep and you’ve got a case (an email or phone call from a customer) you want come help on. Now you can share a question, comment, link, or file about the case in your status update, and have the answer from your followers right in Salesforce.

Likewise, as more companies utilize LMS for training, such software has developed in sophistication. In some instances, educational software begins to look more game-like in its interactivity, and fun-to-use tools and interactive and practical features. Social networking features are an up-and-coming addition to online courseware and LMSs, with potentiality to transform learning and create more robust training modules.

Coggno is now offering a limited time free trial on its pay-per-use LMS. Click here to try it out.

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Coggno.com provides premier e-learning education.

April 20th, 2010 by Robin Green

Despite the media telling us that the economy is stabilizing, we all know many people are still jobless or working in a position that isn’t up to their standards, simply for fear that finding something better will be impossible. What do many people do at a time like this? They go back to school and cultivate some skills, so that when jobs begin pouring into the economy again, they’re are ready to snag a great one.

Consider picking up a vocational or other online course to increase your skills and become more valuable in the marketplace. Become more tech-savvy. LMS (Learning Management System) online programs are available in a wide range of career fields, and their self-paced format is designed fit to your life. If you are working as a service provider in an outsourced position, you may consider expanding your resume and offering a wider variety of services, or an altogether new service. Or, you may learn how to further develop the skills you already have.

These days, educational systems are increasingly preparing students for a tech-infused workplace. And as more institutions use LMS courses, such software has developed in sophistication. In some instances, educational software begins to look more game-like in its interactivity, and fun-to-use tools and interfaces.

Educational software with game-like characteristics (such as virtual worlds) has begun to creep into higher education and the professional world. For example, some universities have either begun to implement, or are making plans to integrate, a virtual world into their education systems. And research firm eMarketer reports that 24% of the 34.3 million internet users under age 19 use virtual worlds at least once a month, a figure that they predict will jump to 53% by 2011.

As more students gain experience with e-learning, and as online education becomes more sophisticated, their experience becomes more easily translated into a professional setting. And given the benefits that studying online and collaboratively with an LMS provides students, more schools are seeking out and integrating advanced technology. As a result, more and more young people graduate high school prepared not only for more education, but for an increasingly competitive job market which values ICT skills more and more each day.

However, most students are still graduating high school with little idea of what they want to do with their lives. Furthermore, many students graduate from university with the same problem. It often takes years of working in different jobs to decide what you like best, and this is when many people decide to gain more education.

Unless you are in your twenties or younger, you may not have had a great deal of experience with online education. High school didn’t prepare my generation for the business world as directly as it does today, and for this reason, now might be a good time to increase your value in the workplace by taking online vocational training.

More and more colleges and universities, technical schools and institutes are answering the call for online education. Courses provided online allow students to work towards certifications and degrees. In some cases, they also supplement face-to-face learning.

Vocational courses are related to a particular skill or kind of work. Students complete a series of tasks and assignments which prepare them for real work experience. Certification programs include a variety of professional fields including like social care, health care and childcare; hospitality and catering; leisure and tourism; media and design; construction; business; information technology; and animal care. Vocational courses traverse a vast landscape of professional possibilities.

Coggno is one LMS with a simple interface and a variety of professional skill-building online courses.

Enter Coggno’s marketplace and discover LMS online courses for cultivating your professional skills. For a limited time, Coggno is offering a free trial on their Learning Management System.

Furthering your skills might involve enrollment in a technical or community college program, an online certification course, or an LMS training program. Regardless of form your studies take, developing your skills is the first step on your path to new and better employment opportunities.  Take advantage of the flexibility offered by online courses to gain the skills and/or certification that will take you where you want to be.

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Coggno.com offers premier e-learning education.

March 16th, 2010 by Robin Green

Whether you are a business or an individual joining the world of internet marketing, now is a great time to invest in LMS online training and/or certification.

What exactly is internet marketing? It involves both technical and creative features of the internet, including design, development, advertising, and sales. It also refers to various stages of the customer engagement cycle via search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), banner ads, email marketing, and Web 2.0 and social networking strategies.

If you are a business seeking greater exposure on the internet, you may consider a variety of internet marketing techniques. To implement these techniques, many businesses use outsourced service providers to develop their internet marketing strategies, along with other outsourced business processes such as website design and programming.

Unfortunately, what happens all too often is that service providers take on projects they can’t support. They have too much on their plate, or they simply can’t do all the work you need them to. Too often, business owners end up wasting thousands of dollars choosing the wrong service providers when they are first starting out in their internet marketing campaign.

Therefore, your company’s success in internet marketing will depend on the winning combination of two factors: finding the right people, and training those people to maximize your marketing budget.

Internet marketing training will ensure that your team is well equipped to develop and implement your business’s internet strategy. Luckily, there are a growing number of LMS courses and online certification programs available in internet marketing, for both individual and group learning.

Despite the qualifications your service providers possess, the vibrant and rapidly-expanding world of internet marketing is continuously producing more techniques to be learned. There are many skills your service provider can learn from LMS courses in internet marketing. For example, in a course dedicated solely to SEO, your service providers will learn, among other things, how to top search engine rankings and be listed more often on Google, what keywords customers are searching with, how to improve link popularity, Google ranking factors, and how to create effective Google AdWords ads.

The internet has forever changed the landscape of the business world, prompting a sweeping change from traditional exposure and advertising strategies to more complex online techniques, often with immediate and easy-to-measure results. Companies want to see those results–especially given the troubled economy and many companies’ financial worries.

If you are individual thinking of taking an LMS certification course in internet marketing, it’s a great time to do so. Internet marketing is growing and is a business you can begin to develop while keeping your day job.

The opportunities for marketing professionals and organizations with thorough internet expertise are vast. As an individual taking up internet marketing, consider taking an online training program for advancing your knowledge and securing the credentials you need to become an interactive marketing expert. You can learn about web analytics, social media, blogs, Web 2.0, website usability, SEO, affiliate marketing, and more. Enrolling in a certification program will help you not only learn internet marketing strategies, but also develop and implement your own strategies to offer to companies.

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Coggno.com provides high-quality online training.

February 25th, 2010 by Robin Green

When shopping around for a learning management system that perfectly fits the needs of your organization, you might consider seeking the help of an LMS consultant. Consultants can help you sort out all the nitty gritty in your decision-making process, bringing years of experience in the LMS industry to your aid.

They are able to determine your company’s requirements for the system and review proposals and demonstrations of each vendor. Consultants can cut down on the amount of effort you’ll need to spend and can show you how each vendor meets or doesn’t meet your LMS requirements. They are able to highlight concerns and issues that might otherwise go unidentified.

Of course, whether or not you choose to hire a learning management system consultant, your first step to securing the perfect LMS is to decide on your organization’s needs. Consider a few different issues. First, determine the scale. How many students and other users will you be catering to? Consider the number of learners, courses, trainers, sessions, and administrators involved.

Second, what do you need your LMS to do? What do you need to track? These might be courses, grades, attendance and so on. Find out whether or not you need your LMS to be standards compliant (SCORM, IMS, etc.).

Third, consider your distribution plan. Will you be using your LMS only internally, or will you want it to have e-commerve capabilities? Will you need automatic billing?

Get straight on all the details before choosing an LMS. Learning management systems come in all sizes and meet a variety of requirements, so ensure that you have one in mind that covers all the bases you see fit.

A fourth consideration: should your LMS be connected to other systems within your company? Should it be able to export data to other systems?

The fifth issue is a critical one. What kind of support will you need? Does your organization have a strong IT department which will be able to meet any tech-related issues that may arise while using the LMS? And finally, does LMS you are considering provide reliable and 24-hour support to users?

Sixth, take into account your organizational needs in respect to organizing the training. LMSs have evolved to provide not only online education and training, but also to meet organizations’ planning and procedural needs. Ensure that these functions will be sustainable throughout the development of your organization.

Oftentimes, choosing an LMS forces companies to take a hard look at their approach to corporate training. For example, you may discover that you need to redefine some of your business processes, or even redesign your course delivery methods.

A learning management system should be both flexible and scalable. Too often organizations implement a LMS that works for a while, but as the organization grows, the LMS no longer meets its needs. LMSs should help you grow, so be sure to select an LMS that will grow with you.

Having a handle on what each LMS offers is a clear first step in deciding on which one you would like to employ. A consultant can help you answer the questions, “Does this LMS provide all the features we need?” Different LMSs offer a wide variety of functions including video, text, audio, assessment and quiz, gaming, podcast, and other tools to make your online training effective and interactive.

However, beyond making sure that your chosen LMS has everything you need, you should also consider any function the system provides that you actually won’t need. In many cases, you’re paying for all those extra features in addition to the actually useful ones. Of course, neat extra features might seem cool to have, but do you really need them? In order to prevent paying more for your LMS than you need to, it’s wise not to choose on an LMS with lots of bells and whistles that you will never actually employ.

But do check out the unique tools and functionalities offered by each LMS, and contact a few vendors to ask them to demo their LMS. Be sure that the learning management system has everything you need, and that the demo is able to illustrate your company’s requirements.

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Coggno.com offers premier online education.

February 23rd, 2010 by Robin Green

The Learning Management System is currently taking the lead in helping over a thousand companies to use in their application processes. There are some who find it a relief to acquire such program and there are a lot of people who commends the computer based training program as convenient and user-friendly. Here are some more reasons why it is very important to acquire this type of software for your organization.

First of the advantages that Learning Management System can provide is that it has a comprehendible course management feature. Anyone or people who are not that equipped with such knowledge regarding high end technologies can easily comprehend every single detail of the process being assessed as the system can sort and organize courses and lessons.

You may have noticed a lot of companies have already adapted this kind of system online. It is just in your discretion on which one has caught your interest or which system provides you better outputs. However, it does not matter what company you select. Comparing it to traditional ways of learning programs, it is better by a mile. Your stressful task has just been solved through these types of programs.

These programs are generated through hard works of the best programmers and developers in the world. They were able to come up with various courses from a set of fields ranging from health, education, computer courses or accounting and other. An organization has the option to choose the specific field they are interested to deal with in this type of technique.

Learning Management System also manages to have a systematic compilation and organized documentation of ever course and lecture a company or an organization has, which makes it easier to understand. Not only that, it is more convenient for people as they can allocate time by considering their pacing in understanding the course. Bid farewell to piles of lecture notes as Learning Management System do everything for you by not compensating the knowledge you would be getting from the program.

With the best things Learning Management System could provide, it just proves why it is leading the current trend of computer based training programs that companies and organizations love to use.

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Coggno.com is a leading provider of high-quality online training.

February 12th, 2010 by Robin Green

Over a thousand companies and organizations have chosen Learning Management System for quite a few reasons. Some say they are really relived that there is such an application, and some people comment that they are quite convenient and are easy to use. There are actually top ten reasons why it is essential to have this kind of software – that is if you haven’t got one for your organization yet.

Among all the top ten reasons, the most popular reason why it is recommended to use this kind of program is because it provides an easy course management feature. What does this necessarily entail? Basically, this feature of the Learning Management System simply states that a child or someone taking up a short course can easily understand each and every single concept because the system can actually divide and have all the courses well organized.

Well, there are different companies offering this kind of system online, it is up to you whether which one catches your attention and which system can answer to all of your needs. But, no matter from what company you choose, definitely, it is a lot better compared to the normal hands on or even paper test and course lectures. So, if you would ask, how does a Learning Management System provide all of your needs and have it organized at the same time? You may think that it may be quite stressful, or even a hassle. Definitely, it will go the other way around.

Most of these systems were developed by great, if not great, the best programmers in the world, these developers were able to come up with different courses coming from different fields – health, accounting, education, or even a short computer course. With this, an organization may be able to choose which particular field they are interested - something that is related to their line of industry.

The Learning Management System has the following features, which enables each and every company or organization to have their courses, or lectures more organized and even easier to understand.

People would not have to leave their homes and have to struggle through the traffic while carrying a pen and even a notebook for training. Course takers may simply use the wonders of innovation and technology and have everything laid out to them without all these paper works. Say goodbye to a mountain pile of notes for lecture – say goodbye to confusing notes, and even struggle to write everything that is being discussed. The Learning Management System is definitely a paperless environment, wherein students can go back to the previous lectures just in case something is not clearly discussed.

Since this is an online course, this kind of system has texts and sometimes audio that comes along with the course. That way, trainees won’t be able to doze off, and even become more interested because of the interface. As a matter of fact, aside from being organized, many researches have already been conducted and had been proved that this kind of learning system is more effective compared to the traditional learning system course.

With the wonders Learning Management System could offer, it is so precise and there is no doubt why a lot of organizations are going into this kind of learning course.

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Coggno.com offers world-class e-learning education.

February 8th, 2010 by Robin Green

Although there’s no denying that the education trend (not only online learning via learning management systems, but non-virtual learning as well) has shifted toward an independent, self-guided mode, people still require incentives to learn just about anything. For this reason and others, monitoring trainees’ learning processes is critical.

Despite the widespread pedagogical pressure to believe the contrary, intentional learning doesn’t happen for most people. Or perhaps it does in some areas, but not for all kinds of content. Of course, anyone can get excited about learning a particular skill or topic that interests them. There’s no need to keep tabs on a teenager’s learning of their new video game, for example. The intention already exists.

But the hard truth is that although company training certainly can be fun and engaging, it’s often not centered around the most exciting topics trainees can imagine.

At its core, learning is about always wanting something. For people in a classroom setting, that something may be good grades. In a company training session or learning management system (LMS) course, the desired objective may include rewards for good performance, or simple verbal encouragement and acclaim.

People of all ages–both children and adults–are typically responsive to simple words of encouragement from a respected superior. Along with a user-friendly training program with its own system of points and rewards, employees benefit greatly from human motivation. A leader who motivates trainees not only facilitates the learning process, but instills a sense of team unity, which improves work relationships.

But beyond encouragement from a supervisor or training leader, another way to aid effective training is to monitor student progress. Some LMSs have features like the Activities monitor, which helps solve a problem all too prevalent in online training. The Activities tool makes simple the administrative responsibility of overseeing and guiding students in their learning process. It provides training administrators with a simple tool to track, in real time, the online course activities of students through a tab in the LMS interface.

The Activities feature serves a practical purpose. Using the feature, administrators can track student activities to find out where each one is exceeding, and in what areas extra attention may be required.

Monitoring trainees with the aid of a feature like Activities helps ensure that students are actually absorbing the content they are learning. Why is this important? First of all, ensuring training effectiveness saves organizations and educators valuable time and energy. In what ways? Many–and each depending on the kind of training you’re delivering.

On the other hand, some kinds of training may not necessarily benefit from such a feature. For example, training material given to new employees, teaching them the ins and outs of their new position, may not cry for a feature that monitors student progress in such an active way. After all, newcomers to an organization are typically excited about their new job–they want to learn. They are intentional learners.

With compliance training, however, that story changes. Here organizations save money in the long run if they ensure successful training. Conflict can be avoided, and employees can be protected. And of course, productivity is always increased when employees are well educated on workplace issues which are meant to facilitate communication and prevent conflict.

Automated tracking of learning allows trainers and educators to concentrate on teaching and administering content. Trainers can focus on the content and guiding student interaction with the material, rather than actively keeping tabs on them.

However, the most effective way to ensure that learning is taking place is the existence of a strong and engaging training course. It’s not enough to create satisfactory content, get it out there, and expect students to eat it up. A complete and flexible learning management system which provides a variety of robust features is the best way to create content that entices all learners to become intentional ones.

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Coggno.com is a leading provider of world-class online training.