We recently ran a webinar on product knowledge e-learning. They came from from California, Merseyside, the Philippines and many points in between to share views on how to do product knowledge right. Find out what we talked about and check out our slides.

You can see the slides from the webinar below. We used DimDim - great open source web conference tool, over 30 people online, carrying voice, all free. That was the first free tip of the session.

Some interesting points came up in the group chat:

Key challenges that people face with product knowledge:

• "We have new products going out every two months, it goes stale quickly, and we have very few people to do it."
• "Making sure it's engaging and focused on the real world so that learners can apply it in the real world"
• "Not overloading with too much information"
• "Keeping up with ever changing rules [on products]"
• "Making them high production value, motivating, and short"

Sound familiar? They did to us. We talked a lot about how we can address these challenges through: 

• Moving fast: Building rapid prototypes, and iterating until it's right. As one participant said "Don't worry if it's not perfect".
• Building it right: Having a model that's more than 'just the facts' but gives real opportunity to apply learning in context.
• Having fun: Introducing challenge, reward, using video in interesting ways (our secret shopper example got a chat room 'wooooo')
• Keeping it up to date: A lot of discussion about how rapid tools can help you keep content up to date, and lots of interest in the xml method we demonstrated for doing it without even using an authoring tool.
• Keeping it alive: We looked at a sample product portal built for Nikon in Moodle, and then sent everyone off to find out about lenses. And by jingo they found what they were looking for.

You can see the slides below. If you join our webinars, you get access to the recording too - so come and join us for the next one on rapid e-learning and compliance. Coming up in August - check back for dates.