Virtual training has taken center stage at business enterprises across the country as the fallout from COVID-19 continues to place in-person meetings on hold. Roughly 90% of in-person activities were delayed or canceled this year.
Businesses cannot afford to suspend productivity or employee development indefinitely and must rely on virtual learning and training as never before. Retraining the workforce and transitioning the company culture to embrace inside-out digital transformation must continue. Pushing the pause button on either activity would be analogous to hitting the kill switch on a business.
Employers in this unchartered territory operating during a pandemic have wondered how effective and productive employees would be working from home. Companies that would have otherwise trained large groups of employees on-site had to figure out how to seamlessly train employees here and abroad while making sure the employees comprehend each topic.
Working from home is proving to be the start of productivity increases, as opposed to declines. Companies are empowering their employees to host online meetings, training, and education in an effective way. This is where CoSo can help.
“Before COVID-19, many traditional companies did not understand the true value in leveraging virtual technologies to conduct training and education online,” said Glen D. Vondrick, CEO of CoSo Cloud, a global software company with its own secure private-cloud operated as a managed service.
Since 2007, large enterprises and government agencies have entrusted CoSo Cloud with securing their high-consequence virtual training and e-learning sessions. “We’ve partnered with Adobe Systems to extend the capabilities of their state-of-the-art learning management and virtual classroom solutions”, Vondrick said. “With data centers on three continents providing secure, private-cloud hosting services, our eLearning infrastructure, and software solutions are available to customers around the world,” he said.
These symbiotic partnerships have allowed CoSo to customize, extend, and complete the solution for Adobe Connect and Captivate Prime. CoSo’s solutions can seamlessly integrate with most leading learning management systems, providing an end-to-end learning and delivery solution.
Behind the scenes, CoSo’s Secure Private Cloud platform adds a scalable layer of security and compliance technologies to defend the integrity of the solutions running across several networks. “We build and manage a customized secure private-cloud and operate it as a managed service – providing the highest service level agreement in the industry,” Vondrick said. “CoSo’s superior security, compliance, and value-added products and services ensure a higher level of safe engagement which extends and adds significant value to an eLearning experience.”
A more engaging session leads to higher participation and an increased level of training success resulting in better productivity. CoSo provides several of these highly engaging solutions, including EduGame cloud, a gamified interactive tool that improves interactions between instructors and students. CoSo’s YouTube video player allows the user to embed YouTube videos into online instruction. Closed captioning for the hearing impaired is becoming a requirement for many organizations, and CoSo has an application to provide that service. An automated MP4 application provides fast and seamless video translation from other formats into MP4, eliminating the manual process. Additionally, pdf smart whiteboard is a popular enhancement for modern learning environments.
Perhaps most important is a “Persistence” feature that freezes content within web sessions and courses while the web conferencing “room” remains as it was left. Think of a multi-day training session in a hotel conference room,” Vondrick said. All notebooks, materials, and whiteboards are in the same place with the same content as the day before. This is a unique differentiator in the industry,” he said.
CoSo helps customers manage, mitigate, and eliminate inherent risks and high costs associated with unwanted regulatory compliance violations, proprietary information exposure, and human mistakes from complex tasks. Zero-Failure is the goal, and it’s vital for customers to eliminate unwanted variability because the cost of a security breach, a compliance violation, or business interruption could hurt an organization and its constituents.
Examples of such high-consequence use cases are military plans and preparedness, financial compliance penalties from information exposure, health care and pharmaceutical development privacy, OSHA training for the workplace to prevent accidents and injury, litigation, and brand protection.
One example is CoSo’s customer Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. FLETC is an important component within the Department of Homeland Security that provides career-long training to law enforcement professionals. Over the past 46 years, FLETC has grown into the nation’s largest provider of law enforcement training including firearms, driving, investigations, crime scene and arrest best practices, and legal training. Due to the extreme nature of their training, FLETC was tasked with finding a secure solution for its high-consequence training needs. CoSo Cloud was chosen as the secure platform and Adobe Connect as the application to deliver its extensive worldwide training mission.
With the help of CoSo, FLETC was able to save thousands of employees from traveling to their training centers which greatly reduced the education costs. Trainers are now offered the flexibility of virtually training law enforcement officials across the globe, receiving the same instruction as they would in person. Amidst the pandemic, FLETC was able to seamlessly double the number of training sessions, leveraging CoSo's reliable and secure virtual classroom solution.
CoSo strives to be the leader in providing the most secure and compliant cloud-based eLearning solutions, extending and completing the solution for a customer’s training needs.
“CoSo Cloud ensures customers can safely and securely conduct their virtual high-consequence business in the cloud. All this without costly downtime, failure of compliance, and any issue that challenges flexibility and performance,” concludes Vondrick.