Besides getting a BA or MA degree in medicine, pharmacy or any other of the hot science disciplines, people working at the pharma industry, including the clinical research sector, are just like doctors and need to cover many additional professional courses throughout their career. However, training while having our full-time job and additional social responsibilities might be challenging and very frustrating.
What about In-house training?
This is only one of the many reasons why e-learning in the pharma industry is getting even more important. Many organisations, like Astra Nova Ltd., perform onsite training on all kinds of related topics. They use the years of expertise of specialists, who have proven track of working efficiency and practice, so that they can deliver their experience in a form of a training.
What did new technologies change?
Usually the In-house type of learning is a traditional method for sharing knowledge and making sure attendees get actual understanding of the topic. With the advancement of the technology everything in our life changed, including how we get information. People are even busier and cannot afford to spend days on training, unless it is absolutely mandatory. Even if they attend, their focus will be distracted by many other tasks and things to do, like checking their e-mails and social media on the mobile phones.
How is e-learning better?
Whether e-learning is better or not depends on the personal experience and learning methods, but the statistics say that online courses take even greater share in our education. It doesn’t only happen because it is the new modern way of getting knowledge, but also because:
- It saves time
- It saves money
- It is flexible
- It is easy
- It is effective
What about interactivity of e-learining?
We have to admit that even with In-house training the end result depends on the performance of the individual trainer, his/her presentation tools, as well as his/her current mood and ability to be interactive. With the e-learning all of these human-related factors are minimized since the interactivity of the online course depends on the initial idea of the software, how the content has been created, whether you managed to combine theoretical material with practical exercises and what kind of triggers you have used to gain people’s attention.
This is all possible thanks to the software development abilities we have nowadays. And once created, we just need to expand the portfolio of training topics.
Is Online learning the future of pharma industry knowledge
What can Astra Nova say about learning management systems for the pharmaceutical industry?
In the past couple of years we have invested a great amount of time, efforts and resources in the development of our Astra Nova Learning Management System (LMS), which we call Online Training Platform. This is where all of our e-learning materials have been developed and stored. The platform is specifically designed to meet our market – the pharma and clinical research industry – because we are working with thousands of professionals around the globe to meet their requirements. It is designed so that any small and medium-sized company as well as big corporations can easily adapt the LMS according to their internal structure. In order to reduce their budget on training, Astra Nova has developed some of the general training topics which can be easily added in every corporate account by just few clicks. Some of them are:
- GCP
- GLP
- Pharmacovigilance
- Risk Based Monitoring
- Computer System Validation
- Clinical Trials Risk Management etc.
Is it possible for pharma companies to add or create new online courses?
Besides providing accredited online courses and free online training materials powered by the Better Industry Initiative, Astra Nova’s Online Training Platform has the functionalities for creating new e-learning modules with automatic options. The biggest plus pharma companies are sharing is the fact that the online courses can be technically implemented into any existing LMS or software which supports the corporate communication.
We would love to hear your ideas about how you imagine the best e-learning tool to look like.