Across an organization, there is a continual need for providing product knowledge internally and externally. Many layers of staff need to know the business products from various perspectives. In addition to the internal audiences, an organization's clients and product end users need to understand more about the product to use it effectively.
Moodle can be a key component in meeting the challenge of providing efficient and cost effective knowledge training to this diverse set of constituents. This chapter covers some of the techniques that you can employ to meet this business goal.
In this chapter, the reader shall:
- Understand how to set up a Moodle course to cater for the wide range of roles which need product knowledge
- Learn how to create terminology glossaries to help accustom the participants to the new key phrases
- See how to organize a real-time role-playing chat between participants
- Learn how to create a Product Knowledge Sheet database using Moodle and how to use this in the knowledge program
- Use the Random Glossary Block to provide extra context to your course content
So let's get on with the show.
Tip
Using Moodle to support rolling out products and services
Developing and maintaining product knowledge is core to the success of a business in many departments but especially in sales and support. This chapter will focus on some techniques of using Moodle to help deliver product knowledge training and development of a product knowledge community.
As already discussed, there are a wide range of roles in an organization which require adequate product knowledge to be effective in supporting the rollout of a product.
The sales force needs access to up-to-date product knowledge, descriptions, and benefits, so they can be effective in providing solutions to existing and new customers.
The support staff needs access to not only product knowledge used in sales, but also a deeper knowledge in other areas so that they can respond effectively to internal and external queries.
The finance department needs access to the underlying principles of the product, the costs of creation, delivery, and support, so they can manage and understand the impact to the bottom line.
The marketing staff needs access to the whole range of product knowledge to deliver supporting advertising and promotion.
The end users need product training on how to use the product effectively.
While going through each of the sections, keep in mind all of these different target audiences and how this could work for them as well.
To cater for this diverse set of constituents, you have two options:
- Create a different Moodle course for each target audience
- Use the Moodle topic structure to allow each role to focus just on their needs
In this section we will implement the second option, creating a course which takes advantage of the new navigation options in Moodle 2.0 by focusing on just one topic at a time.
In previous chapters we have touched on adding in resources and uploading content files to the course. So we won't be covering this during the rest of this chapter. We will focus on laying out the course in a structured manner, and on implementing three activities which help support product knowledge learning.
The sample course outline will be available throughout 2011 for all purchasers of the book on http://www.moodleforbusiness.com/.