eLearning is one of the most cost-effective ways of training staff. If appropriate eLearning is implemented effectively, it can contribute to a measurable growth in sales – well trained staff leads to better business, and who doesn’t want that? However, there are multiple pot holes a business can fall into when organizing training for their staff. Attendance, implementation, monitoring and even the course material used can all alter the effectiveness of the training put in place. Although it can be time consuming to ensure that the right training is in place, spending the time to guarantee that the right people are being trained in the right way, at the right time will save your company significant amounts of money in the long run. Here’s how to create successful eLearning that sticks.
Step 1: Consult with your staff
eLearning content development is a necessary process to ensure the training is correct for the whole team. The best forms of eLearning content development will take a consultative approach, asking all the right questions and really looking at your business from a birds-eye perspective. By doing so, the learning styles and needs of your staff can be assessed, allowing for the most effective training plan and content to be put in place. Looking at your existing training set-up (how you implement it, what systems (if any) you use already and how your staff feel about this arrangement), as well as speaking with and observing your learners is the best way to really understand where there can be improvements to your training plan. Taking the time to understand the training objectives and any specific company goals is priceless when creating a successful course. Without knowing exactly what your business wants to achieve from the training, creating content for an eLearning course can often miss the mark and lead to poorly trained staff and disappointed managers.
Step 2: Create a storyboard
Once the key learning goals have been decided, your existing training has been analyzed and your learners have had their say of what they like and what they hate when it comes to the existing training, creating a storyboard of how the eLearning course will look is necessary in saving time and creating focus throughout your staff. Noting the desired goals of your learners and working backwards in how to get to that goal is a great way of mapping the journey that the eLearning course needs to follow to be successful. This journey should include the key milestones that you want your team to hit on the way to training success.
Step 3: Author the eLearning
This is the daunting step. You know what needs to be done, you know the pathway to get there, now you have to actually create the content. From basic text creation, to audio, video and simulations, this can be extremely complicated. The more interactive and engaging the content, the richer the learning experience is; however, this often also means the more difficult the creation is. The creation of content such as gamification and custom graphic design and animation can vastly improve the likelihood of a learner to not only remember the content in the short term, but also to retain the information for years to come. This deep understanding of the content as well as basic fact-retention is what makes for great training and business-improving results.
Step 4: Publish to your platform
Once you have your content in place and know exactly what you need to teach your learners in order for them to achieve your business’s goals, choosing the best platform from which to publish your content is key. There are many different learning management systems available to choose from. Finding the best learning management system (LMS) can be hard, different LMSs offer different levels of flexibility and usability. Having spent time and resources creating the correct content for your team, ensuring you use the right platform is essential in providing the best training for your business. Using an open-source learning management system, such as Totara Learn LMS, for your eLearning content is the best way of preventing vendor lock-in and keeps your content accessible and future-proof.
Step 5: Perform quality assurance testing
Having created your perfect eLearning content and chosen the best learning management system for it, it’s time to test it. Vigorous quality assurance is necessary. Glitches, breaks and flawed systems can all pause or even stop training altogether, wasting staff time and company resources. By running the eLearning content and its delivery through software to ensure its smooth running, you can guarantee that your staff can make the most out of their training time, and you can get the results you expect.
Step 6: Analyze the results
Analytics are hated by many. Getting bogged down in the statistics of training can seem like a waste of time, however, not using the training data is a massive waste of a resource that can help you improve your training. Training should be considered a continual process, one where people are always able to be pushed, can learn new skills and are able to transform how they approach business. By generating and reviewing data provided by the learner, you can glean important information on where they struggled, where they found it too easy and can make significant improvements to both the eLearning content and the way in which it’s delivered.
eLearning content development can be a struggle. It’s an ongoing process that can make the difference between confused, directionless staff and a business-savvy team. If all of this seems too complicated and you just don’t have the time to get stuck into the different stages, we’d be happy to help! Not only do we already work with some of the biggest companies in the US and UK to deliver eLearning that transforms performance, but we can offer you a no-obligation chat to see how we can help. From the eLearning content development, right through to learning management systems, we know how to deliver the best training for your team.
(This blog was originally published on our UK website)