What is e-learning?

Training thirty people costs a trainer, a room and a day of lost production. Training three hundred costs ten times that, and training them again next year costs it all over. E-learning breaks that arithmetic by separating the cost of creating a course from the cost of delivering it: the second delivery is nearly free, the three-hundredth is nearly free, and the record of who completed what is produced automatically. In practice the term covers everything from a video library with a quiz to a full learning management system that assigns curricula by role, tracks progress, issues certificates and reminds people before an expiry date. Companies arrive at it from three directions. Some need to prove compliance training happened — safety, data protection, anti-money-laundering — with evidence an auditor accepts. Some need customers or dealers to learn a product without a field visit. And some realise the expertise they give away in sales meetings is a product in its own right, at which point the platform becomes revenue rather than cost. The technology is the easy part; whether anyone finishes the course is the part worth budgeting for.