In Spite of advantages and easy use of e-learning, Instructor led training(ILT) still plays a vital role in majority of enterprises. With ILT’s instructors have many responsibilities to effectively manage besides offering an engaging learner experience. New gadgets and technology can make the learner experience enlightening and easily manageable for the instructors. Most of the instructor tasks can be efficiently managed with use of the technology.
One of the common and at times daunting for the instructor is to track the attendance. With use of sign-in sheets, excels etc and updating them back into your learning management systems adds more burden and time on the administrators and instructors. This process is eased with use of training beacons integrated with learner mobiles to track attendance. Employees will have their attendance taken automatically without the instructor’s involvement as they walk into the class.
Beacons
Emerging technology always offers comfort in doing things. The process of attendance tracking can be effectively done by deploying the beacons like Google Eddystone or to the matter any kind of beacons programmed to track your training attendance.
These beacons broadcast a small amount of data every few seconds to receivers who are tuned to its specific address. During ILT sessions, each classroom will get its own beacon that broadcasts the building and the room number of the classroom.
When a phone comes in contact with the beacon’s signal, it will then wake the custom app up and give it 10 seconds to do its work. This works even if your app is not running.
The app transmits the beacon data and the employee’s identity to the cloud. This information is gathered and communicated with your learning management system using the required API’s.
Taking Attendance
Taking attendance becomes pretty simple using beacons. There will be multiple pings recorded as when the employee mobile device gets in close proximity to the beacon. Initial pings are validated to make sure the class is part of the employee training schedule in communication with your LMS using the unique id that is communicated by the ping to identify the employee.Once that is validated all the pings will be validated for that unique id, if there exists a registration for that class, if not all the pings will be ignored. Ignoring the ping often happens as employees can easily come into contact with beacons from other classrooms.This would allow only to track and monitor the registered learners activity. All the pings tracked are stored and once the ping stops and meets with class end time, then that particular employee is marked as attended.
Users are also provided with a choice to enable or disable this feature using their app.
These training beacons can also be configured to effectively deliver upcoming training,electronic agendas, training content, extended classrooms and augmented spaces to the attendees.
The Future
With benefits of better semantic context and precise location, a single hardware for multiple platforms and wide range of flexibility, beacons can also be placed at workplaces to perform various tasks. The opportunities of deploying beacons are endless and they also don’t have to be stationary.
Thus training beacons become efficient digital solutions that truly reduce the administrative costs, enhancing the effectiveness of your training and positively impact the bottom line.
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