“Distributor-Modeled” Training
Print
By Steve Pena, Instructional Designer and Implementation Consultant for SyberWorks, Inc.
Can your distribution partners access your training-services infrastructure, to quickly train their employees about your products, while also building a university-like organization to deliver and track training of their (and your) end customers? In a distributor-oriented organization, your LMS should be able to support many levels of such “Distributor-Modeled” training… and deliver benefits to you, your distributors, and your customers.
At the simplest level, your distributors would be able to send people to your LMS training site, and have them registered as customers of each distributor (as shown in Figure 1). This would allow you to generate reports about courses delivered, classroom scheduling, and training results for each distributor’s customers over the past month, quarter, and year. It will also allow you to create more complex training solutions for heavy users of your training services, while being able to identify distributors who might benefit from special training promotions.
Figure 1: Distributors push their customers to your LMS.
The next logical step would be to give distributors themselves restricted administrative access to your LMS (Figure 2). In the simplest implementation of this model, the distributors would be able to:
- Modify training accounts for their own customers.
- Assign online training.
- Enroll customers in your LMS' scheduled classes.
And on a more advanced level, distributors could:
- Assign Training Certificate Competencies and their related learning events to their customers.
- Create and run their own onsite training sessions.
Figure 2: Distributors have restricted administrative access to your LMS:
This model will improve your relationship with distributors, enable you to provide them with more services, and reduce the training-administration overhead for your company. Some of the advanced services it also enables are:
- Linking a class with a specific distributor, so that only that company can enroll its customers in the class.
- Customizing training catalogs, with a reduced set of courses/classes and/or individualized course/class pricing for specific distributors.
- Offering these catalogs with either a prepaid training-account that end customers can tap, or a standard e-Commerce “customer pays” set up.
- Allowing distributors to order training for their customers.
- Creating special reports to track the training and certifications of distributors’ customers.
- Setting up customized user-interface paths for distributor-administrators, to control their access to specific LMS functions.
This model also allows you to create a “Super Administrator” role for more advanced distributors, which allows them to perform such functions as:
- Creating classes.
- Entering class results.
- Creating user accounts.
And finally, to extend this Distributor Model to an advanced level, think about branding separate campuses for each distributor (Figure 3). This allows you to create completely separate, distributor-branded training sites for each distributor within your LMS, while still permitting you to do complete rollups of all their training information and results.
Figure 3: An advanced distributor-branded implementation
Among this model’s advantages are that it allows distributors to:
- Keep their corporate branding throughout all customer training materials.
- Create one-to-many levels of structured reporting, allowing each distributor to produce hierarchical training reports for its own operation.
- Receive a single point of contact in your company, with Registrar rights and privileges, to help distributors maintain their training operations.
So if they fit into your operation, these three levels of Distributor-Modeled training can improve your relationships with your distributors and provide them with much better levels of service, support, and training functionality. These models can also both save you money (through reduced administrative costs) and increase revenues (through branded training campuses).
About the Author:
Steve Pena is a Senior Instructional Designer and Implementation Consultant at SyberWorks, Inc., Waltham, Mass.
About SyberWorks
SyberWorks, Inc. is a leader in providing Learning Management Systems and custom e-Learning Solutions for Fortune 1000 corporations, higher education, and other organizations. Located in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company serves the multi-billion-dollar e-Learning market. Since 1995, SyberWorks has developed and delivered unique and economical solutions for creating, managing, measuring, and improving e-Learning programs at companies and organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe, and other countries.
