What is High-Consequence eLearning?

by Glen Vondrick

June 8, 2017

At CoSo, we talk a lot about high-consequence eLearning and collaboration.

What is that, exactly?

It’s eLearning or collaboration that could have devastating consequences if improperly conducted. We’re talking about failures that could sink a company. Mistakes that could take a life.

For many, virtual training can sometimes be a periodic and relatively non-critical affair. I’m talking about “Brushing Up on Best Practices for Customer Service” or “New Goals for the Business in 2017.” Important? Absolutely. Life threatening? No. Something could come up, and such sessions could easily be rescheduled with very little if any negative impact.

But, what about hastily arranged web conferencing sessions like, “The Food Protection and Defense Institute: Update on Our Response to the Ebola Crisis?” Or “TSA: New Security Vulnerability Uncovered?”

Military training courses. Power grid operation training.  These are high-consequence virtual training and collaboration sessions. They have to occur on time. They have to occur without a hitch. If they don’t, rapid knowledge transfer is disrupted, putting the health or existence of certain organizations and even people at risk.

Protecting an organization’s ability to conduct their eLearning sessions without fail sounds easy, but it isn’t. These are incredibly complex projects. Powering them not only means meeting perfect reliability and performance standards, it means providing a layer of security and compliance that ensures the information being discussed, digitized, shared and stored is safe. It means ensuring sensitive data never falls into the wrong hands.

It’s a difficult task. But it can be done. How?

When considering private cloud managed services providers for your secure virtual training or collaboration needs, ask yourself:

• Are they SOC II Type 2, HIPAA, HITRUST, Personally identifiable information (PII) and Federal Government FedRAMP certified?
• How well can they customize to meet your organization’s specific needs?
• How well can they integrate with your LMS or third-party applications?
• How well can they scale?
• How much can they provide in terms of IT support?
• Can they provide real-time data and analytics to measure the health and performance of your eLearning infrastructure?
• Reduce their IT support burden in managing eLearning infrastructure so they can focus on content creation and delivery

For many, secure and reliable virtual training and web conferencing is absolutely critical.

How important is it for your organization?