IBM Workplace Collaborative Learning

Efficiently managing intellectual and human capital is a significant challenge. To deliver the best performance, your employees need to know and understand the latest business processes, products and policies. Sometimes your employees need to learn something new while already doing a task. This need to blend learning and work activities is contributing to a transition from traditional learning programs to learning integrated with portal solutions, which delivers just-in-time access to learning tools to employees in the context of the business applications they use daily. This approach allows learning and business activities to blend, which supports your employees’ ongoing professional development and effectiveness.

IBM Workplace Collaborative Learning software can help drive organizational productivity by allowing your company to manage its entire training program worldwide from a single platform. IBM Workplace Collaborative Learning software is an essential enterprise-wide application that delivers and tracks training activities.

IBM Workplace Collaborative Learning software can help you to:

• Streamline you training programs by providing training managers with flexible administrative tools that help to ease courseware creation and management
• Empower employees to improve their skills by providing tools to help identify skills gaps and build individualized learning plans
• Create courses to distribute vital company data by providing an authoring tool that can be used by subject-matter experts to design custom courseware without learning complicated programming skills
• Track student progress and help to facilitate and meet ever-changing regulatory compliance challenges with reporting of worker training activities
• Reduce travel and training costs with an online learning environment that supports remote and mobile workers
• Improve productivity with the right learning tools in context of users’ roles and the business activity on which they are working
• Accelerate business processes by providing people with access to the information and people they need to solve a problem, reducing the time it takes to perform a task

IBM Workplace Collaborative Learning software empowers students to manage their own learning activities directly from their desktops. Using the My Learning portal, students can:

• View recommended courses and/or courses in which they are already enrolled
• Search the course catalog to find courses and display course details
• Create and manage personal learning folders to store and quickly access learning resources
• Enroll in a course from a recommended list based on interests or job requirements
• Check their progress in courses, certificate programs and curricula
• Review their learning history
• Launch a self-paced course
• Read announcements pertaining to course-schedule changes and new courses
• Attend a team discussion for a course  

Workplace Collaborative Learning supports a number of different content formats. A single course may contain a variety of different formats.

Web-based content

Web-based content is designed to be displayed in a Web browser. It is usually delivered as HTML files, but may be delivered in a proprietary format that requires clients to install a plug-in before they can launch the content. Web-based content needs to be stored on a Web server running HTTP.

File-based content

File-based content is content that usually runs from a local machine. The files may be accessed from CDs, file servers, or local client machines. Workplace Collaborative Learning launches file-based content from a Web browser.

Virtual Classroom content

The Virtual Classroom contains activities that students and an instructor work on simultaneously at a prearranged time. They are associated with Virtual Classroom sessions created in the authoring tool or in the IBM Lotus Virtual Classroom interface (available as a separate IBM product). Virtual Classroom sessions are run in a Web browser and the files are stored on a Lotus Virtual Classroom server.