It is widely considered that effective use of learning technology can help to deliver greater efficiencies within the workplace and can also deliver value added benefits. Annecdotally we we know that learning technologies can help to deliver more for less when used well and have had excellent impact on important business metrics such as customer service, revenue, responsiveness to change.

However whilst many talk about the opportunity, clear factual evidence about the benefits to both business and individuals is hard to come by.  We have a number of great case studies across this site but when you are looking for hard and fast facts to support your business case for change, you may need to access the evidence at your fingertips.

Supporting the wider community

The focus of the research plan for Towards Maturity CIC since September 09 has been developed in response to the feedback of wider community experts working with us to help inform Becta's Next Generation Learning initiative.

The expert view is that there already exists a wide body of evidence of success. However organisations need to be able to access a more consolidated evidence base so that those new to technology can have the confidence to invest and have a basis on which they can build their business case. 

As the lead Ambassador within Next Generation Learning in the workplace, we wanted to do our bit to help bring this evidence together.

Building the evidence base

Towards Maturity plan to investigate the cost efficiencies and value added benefits from the implementation of learning technologies in the workplace in 2 ways –

• Consolidating the current evidence base to provide a source of verified facts and figures about bottom line business benefits and efficiencies gained through the adoption of learning technologies.
• To launch a new online impact indicator to measure the broader the perception of value amongst employers who have already invested in learning technologies.

We also will be supporting Becta's own work in this area.

Consolidating the Evidence Base

Our aim is to provide a single place for evidence (both ours and others) that will support learning and development professionals who are looking to build their own business case for change.

All of the outputs of this project, including detailed case studies and ongoing research can be found by clicking on the Evidence for Change tag on this site.

Supporting Research:

• The Towards Maturity Impact Indicator - value identified from 200 organisations looking at efficiency ( cost, time and volume) and business agility ( responsiveness, time to competency and businss impact).
• Becta's Delivering Results report - 8 key business improvement themes identified by analysis of 48 case studies from the workplace.

We will also work with partners such as e-Learning age magazine and Learning Technologies to share our findings and to support their work in this area.

Get involved

We will be constantly adding new case studies and stories to our Evidence for Change Programme. We know that many of you have measured the success of your learning technology implementations and/or are aware of research that has helped you build the business case and we would really welcome it if you could get in touch with us via this site.

We have already started to gather some great stories and would love to hear and share yours as part of this programme.

Last updated March 31 2010

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