There are a number of approaches you can take with online induction for employees, contractors, visitors or volunteers to your organisation. We outline some of these as well as some potential issues that we can manage for you.
Authenticating Users of your Online Induction
In terms of enrolment, we always recommend authenticating users. We recommend that all companies and organisations adopt an authenticated user approach to online induction. Requiring an email address to get started helps to ensure that it isn’t a person’s friend, partner or any other number of people doing the induction in their place. The inductee must sign up for a student account and use their email address to either send the password or an authenticated link before they can progress. This is the best way of guaranteeing the person is who they claim to be.
The User-Pays Approach
It’s very common in the building and construction industries for all contractors to pay a small fee to have each of their employees inducted onto a site. The benefits of this approach include enabling you to recoup your original cost of producing your training materials and managing the online delivery and assessment of it.
Managing Spam
Issues can arise in any situation where you have strangers enrolling into and using your online induction system. Any community of people can be an open opportunity for spammers to ‘share’ their messages and often spammers will explore learning sites, including online induction systems, for this very purpose. To this end, it’s not unusual to need to have spamming accounts removed on a regular basis and take other measures to ensure that your system remains clean. The user pays approach, highlighted above, is a means of generally safeguarding this. Another method is offering contractors a voucher number for your induction course. This means that only contractors who have your unique enrolment voucher codes can access the course.
Unique Enrolment Voucher Codes for Online Induction Enrolment
Some clients prefer the controlled environment of offering enrolment vouchers. With this method, you have specific enrolment codes or vouchers that are purchased and then handed out, and you can then keep track of everyone (new staff members, or contractors) who receives one.
