Frequently Asked Questions
solearnTM knowledge retention and compliance software
- How does soLearn work?
- I don’t like multiple choice type questions. They are easy to guess and can give misleading and false results.
- This sounds just what I want but surely it must need an army of administration staff to support it?
- I already have a comprehensive human resource admin system with all my staff records – how does this fit in?
- How does soLearn link to existing training materials and procedures?
- What technology is needed?
- How is soLearn licensed?
- Can I share my licenses with other partners?
- Can you offer training and support?
- Can you help us implement our project if we need additional resource?
- How do I find more information?
1. How does soLearnTM work?
soLearn can be used to embed best practice and procedure or can be targeted at individual areas of activity or practice. soLearn can be used across the whole workforce to evaluate knowledge retention (eg Health and Safety Awareness) but is equally useful for targeting a specific or technical issue within a department or small group of professionals and practitioners (eg compliance with a regulatory authority's defined processes).
Using soLearn follows six easy steps. The approach is the same whether you are testing a small but detailed procedure or process on a specific group of staff or evaluating awareness and understanding in the whole workforce on a wider policy or culture change programme
Step 1 – identify the issue, process or knowledge area you wish to evaluate
The organisation would identify this as a ‘campaign’ in soLearn and designate an overall ‘manager’ for that campaign. He or she would take ownership of the ‘campaign’.
Step 2 – identify the target group of staff you wish to assess
The campaign manager would identify the target group(s) of staff and the development needs of that group of employees.
Step 3 – identify what ‘good’ or ‘best practice looks like
soLearn is predicated on the organisation defining what ‘best practice’ looks like in terms of the subject area. ‘Best practice’ can be defined and disseminated through a wide variety of means. That might be traditional classroom training, online training, development meetings with small groups of staff, practice manuals, procedure manuals on your organisation’s intranet and the like. When ‘best practice’ has been defined, and your preferred method for delivering and communicating best practice has been agreed, soLearn is capable of evaluating how well the ‘campaign’ has been understood and the extent to which knowledge has been absorbed and retained by the workforce.
Step 4 – develop multiple choice questions to test the knowledge/process area
Using the identified knowledge and best practice materials (a process, a procedure, a training programme etc) the campaign manager would create (using the easy to use soLearn administration module) a bank of multiple choice questions which would form the basis of the evaluation process for that particular campaign. soLearn will randomly select from this bank of questions a defined number of questions to present to a member of staff in a simple email. Each employee gets a different set of questions and employees subsequently requiring re-testing get a new set of questions (including the question for which they originally gave an incorrect answer) every time they attempt the exercise.
Step 5 – launch your soLearn campaign with the target group of staff
Typically you might run a soLearn campaign a few days or week after a round of training has been undertaken or after a new process or procedure has been implemented and disseminated. Staff are sent a personalised email with a link to a set of questions. They answer these and submit their answers and receive an email back with their results. If staff do not answer or ignore the email the system reminds them and if required escalates this to the line manager or campaign manager.
If the employee has got questions wrong, soLearn links the results back to source training or process materials and steers the member of staff towards this to refresh their knowledge. This triggers a re-test using the same process. Repeated failure can trigger alerts to line managers for further action.
After the initial evaluation round you can create a follow up round of evaluation either on a regular basis (every six months say) or on an ad hoc basis. This makes soLearn a very effective and very flexible tool for assessing how well knowledge has been embedded and retained by the workforce on a long term basis. This approach gives a very robust audit trail of what you as the employing organisation has done in terms of training and assessment and is also a much cheaper and far more effective approach than regular re-training of the whole workforce or group. A key strength of soLearn is that it enables you to identify specific staff or groups of staff who perhaps need targeting for refresher training or follow up. By focussing on these staff you avoid wasting time and money on training competent staff who are already retaining knowledge and showing enduring high levels of knowledge and subject expertise.
soLearn can be equally useful in ‘base lining’ knowledge in particular areas to identify whether there is a need for training and development. This helps an organisation target its training budget more effectively and in the areas of greatest training need.
Step 6 – campaign manager produces reports, analyses results and targets further actions as required
soLearn has very flexible and easy to use reporting functions. There is great flexibility to analyse and drill down into campaigns at workgroup or individual level. You get very quick and easy to understand management information to test how effective a training or awareness programme has been. You can rapidly identify high risk areas, and take specific actions to address these risks based on hard evidence and facts derived from the soLearn competency evaluation results.
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2. I don’t like multiple choice type questions. They are easy to guess and can give misleading and false results.
soLearn has a powerful additional dimension we call ‘confidence limits’. As well as being asked to choose a right answer the person answering also has to indicate on a sliding scale how confident they are of their answer. Ranging from “totally confident” to “not really sure”. This is a powerful feature as it means that you can assess staff more subtly and precisely when compared with a more basic multiple choice approach. Staff who get the answer right and are very confident of their answer are what you are aiming for. Other answers would be a cause for concern. For example staff who get questions right but lack confidence that they are answering correctly might benefit from some managerial support or additional training to remove their doubts and raise overall confidence. Staff who get the answer wrong but are confident they are right would be a particularly high risk group as they would not only lack basic knowledge but also demonstrate an arrogant and possibly reckless attitude which could be dangerous or high risk in certain circumstances.
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3. This sounds just what I want but surely it must need an army of administration staff to support it?
Definitely not. Many training systems fall into disuse because they are just too ‘admin hungry’. soLearn is genuinely innovative and different. soLearn is fully automated and driven by a very sophisticated ‘workflow engine’. In practical terms what this means is that you simply configure the campaign with some simple rules at the start – who to send to, what questions to ask, how to mark the questions, what to do when someone fails, how often to send retests etc. You then press the ‘go button’ and forget it. The system deals with everything with virtually no further intervention needed. The campaign runs automatically and when it concludes you analyse a simple set of very clear management reports. With soLearn you invest time and energy in delivering effective training and learning outcomes NOT on paperwork and administration.
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4. I already have a comprehensive human resource admin system with all my staff records – how does this fit in?
soLearn can receive records from a wide variety of popular packages and bespoke systems. This means you can simply upload basic information from your core systems eg name, department, email address etc without the need to retype or rekey data into soLearn. Fuller integration with your other systems can be achieved if required but is likely to need some additional onsite customisation – please enquire if you need more information.
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5. How does soLearnTM link to existing training materials and procedures?
soLearn associates all questions with ‘source material’ from where the answers can be derived. If a respondent gets an answer wrong in their personalised feedback email they are told where they have gone wrong and are provided with a direct electronic link to the relevant reference material. We provide an optional module called soLearn Virtual Learning Environment (soVLE) which can be your own repository for training materials. Training materials can be located on your intranet, your web site, or within an internal file directory system. soLearn is completely customisable to link directly to the material considered most appropriate by the questionnaire author. It therefore links knowledge retention with direct and easy access to source material and documentation for current and future reference.
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6. What technology is needed?
soLearn (and soVLE) is provided as a fully hosted service. There is no need for servers or complex technology at your premises. Your system is located in our secure data centre located on the outskirts of Bristol. Your data is safe, confidential, secure and backed up regularly. All you need to use soLearn/soVLE is a web browser and access to the internet (broadband or corporate link).
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7. How is soLearnTM licensed?
soLearn has a very simple licensing model. You identify how many staff and managers you want to use the system and you buy a block of licences. Those licences can be re-used and/or transferred as staff leave or change roles. You can add additional licences at any time to meet your needs and pay just for what you need. There is a simple per user annual licence fee with nothing more to pay. As an illustration 100 licences which you can use for an unlimited number of questionnaires and campaigns would be £25 per user licence per year – so that’s just £2,500 to deliver a very effective and robust knowledge evaluation system amongst a group of 100 staff. You can run as many campaigns in as many subject areas as you like with unlimited follow ups and retests or reassessment. There are no hidden costs and no nasty surprises for hardware upgrades or technical changes.
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8. Can I share my licences with other partners?
We fully appreciate that these days many organisations need to work closely with other partners on joint initiatives and projects. Examples might include an outsourcing partner, a major contractor, a joint venture partner or government agency. As long as you have enough licences to cover the total number of staff who are using the soLearn system you can freely share these licences for use by staff working in other agencies/partners so they too can benefit from the features of the soLearn system.
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9. Can you offer training and support?
soLearn is extremely easy to use and needs minimal training. Your first block of licenses comes with an online training course and your system administrator will have ongoing access to our fully staffed Help Desk which is open Monday to Friday 8am – 6pm.
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10. Can you help us implement our project if we need additional resource?
Yes. We can offer consultancy and practical implementation support if you need additional help to get a project in quickly or at short notice. We can act as your ‘proxy’ campaign manager, help you develop questionnaires and knowledge evaluation material and even help you analyse and develop action plans based on the management information soLearn produces. We have extensive experience of working in many sectors and industries both public and private. Our team includes Prince 2 qualified project managers as well as business analysts and process experts so we can help you at every stage of the project if required.
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11. How do I find more information?
You can contact us on 0117 986 2194 and ask to speak to the soLearn team or email us at info@solearn.com. For more specific enquiries or to arrange a demonstration or detailed quotation/pricing enquiry ask for Stewart Long, Projects Director.
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