If there was ever an ideal fit for eLearning that would be the military. After all, it’s one of the biggest employers in any given country, with lots of distributed departments, offices and bases, a constant need for training and re-training its people, and puts an emphasis on standardization.
It’s not just about teaching recruits how to march and how to fight either. Any modern military has to train its people in all kinds of skills to support its multi-faceted operations, from cooking and first-aid to electrical engineering and foreign languages.
An LMS, such as eFront, possesses all the right kind of features for military use:
– It’s massively scalable. It can handle from a small platoon to a whole army division, and all from a single installation.
– It can be deployed quickly. You can be over with installation and configuration in under an hour, and all that’s left is to add your training material.
– It can be re-deployed at will, for different army units, or with different courses for the same users, whenever the need arises. It saves you time and effort by making it easy to re-use existing material, or adapt it to cover new training needs.
– It’s cost effective. While the military in general might have a huge operating budget that’s not always the case for all individual training camps. When you need to do the most with little, eLearning trumps traditional classroom based education every single time.
– It’s flexible. The fact that we put the foremost emphasis in ease of use and intuitiveness doesn’t mean that we skimp on features. eFront supports all common (and plenty of uncommon) file formats, can import multimedia files (audio, video, etc), provides interactive quizzes, tons of categorization options for your users and content, instructor-led training and gamification support, and, last but not least, detailed reporting.
– It’s interoperable. eFront can talk to all major Single Sign On protocols (LDAP, AD, SAML, Facebook, etc), can leverage the WebEx and BBB teleconference tools, can integrate the OpenSesame eLearning content marketplace, and has a PHP-based plugin API as well as a REST API that can be used to create custom integrations with any third party tool or service.
Here are a few major use cases for an LMS like eFront in the military:
Orientation
With the constant onboarding of new recruits, officer cadets and support personnel, the army will always have a need for orientation courses to introduce rookies to their new environment and give them the basic information they need to be productive fast – stuff such as basic operating procedures, policies, restrictions and guidelines.
eFront lets army instructors organize orientation material in lesson units, add video and audio, and include any third party content needed (from Wikipedia to YouTube).
Training
The military is first and foremost a huge educational institution, training its people not just in the “art of war”, but in all kinds of skills, from the conventional (cooking, driving, first-aid) to the more specialized (engineering, martial arts, foreign languages, etc).
With eLearning you can handle these training needs in a quick and cost-effective manner, while allowing students to learn at their own pace (after all time is of the essence, not only during the physically demanding training period but, and even more so, when deployed in the front lines).
eLearning also makes sense from a logistics perspective: it lets create and continuously update all your training material without costly textbooks and wasted paper, and share courses between different departments, bases and camps, anywhere in the world.
There’s also the flexibility to choose whether to run all of your eLearning from a central location (for complete control), or use a dedicated LMS instance for each camp.
Whether for onboarding or training, eFront also provides a comprehensive statistics and reporting system that gives superiors quantifiable information and statistics for trainee performance, progress and understanding of the material.
Conclusion
With its emphasis in speed and ease of use, and thousands of satisfied customers (including several multinational companies and organizations in both the private and public sectors), eFront is a great and battle-proven (pun intended) choice for military training.
Take it for a test drive today and see for yourself. Our sales and support teams will be happy to answer any question you might have.
