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Published in Chapter:
Analysis of Platforms for E-Learning
Maribel-Isabel Sánchez-Segura (Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 13
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-014-1.ch004
Abstract
Although they are non-educational institutions, financial institutions have specific training needs. The greatest priority in employee training arises when the bank launches a new financial product or service. The difficulty, in such cases, lies in training the employees in all the regional branches so that they can offer good service to meet the clients’ demand for the product. In developing the training program, two factors have to be considered: • The department responsible for developing the new financial product keeps it secret during the development phase. Therefore, the technical details, tax treatment, and other issues relating to the product are known only after it has been designed and is ready to be launched. Consequently, it is impossible to train employees until the new product has been completely developed; and • Traditionally, employee training is pyramidal. First of all, the trainers in each training center are trained. These, in turn, train the managers, in groups, from the most important branches. Finally, these managers are responsible for training the employees in their offices. Considering the specific needs of the employees, and to obtain the maximum profitability from new financial products, we defined the pilot project called Factory to minimize time and cost spent in the development of e-learning courses for financial institutions. This project was conceived to cover the abovementioned weaknesses detected in the training process of an important financial institution. The pilot project goals were: • To improve the spread of knowledge, and • To minimize the course development cost and time. The remainder of this article is structured as follows. A summary of the main concepts around e-learning are analyzed: concepts, definitions, and platforms. After that, we present the results obtained from a project to develop ad hoc e-learning courses with what we call the Factory tool. This pilot project consisted of two main parts: developing the Factory tool, and developing the courses with and without this tool, in order to compare the cost/benefit for the institution.