Any organisation with experience in learning and development will tell you that perhaps the most challenging aspect of creating a successful LMS is populating it with relevant, engaging and useful content.
Striking the right balance between meeting your business objectives and keeping your content suitably engaging is no easy task. In fact, the wrong approach will mean you’re in danger of wasting your learner’s time, not to mention a big chunk of your training budget.
In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the fundamentals of eLearning content development in an attempt to make your future learning and development plans more effective.
What is eLearning Content Development?
As one of the most cost-effective ways of enhancing your team’s overall skill level and a great way of sharing company values throughout your organisation, investing in an LMS has become an essential part of many successful businesses.
eLearning content development is the process of crafting relevant course material, which not only complements your strategic learning objectives but helps your team attain higher levels of job satisfaction.
Of course, there’s no one size fits all approach, every company has its own goals and objectives. Having said that, the process of creating content typically involves a number of key stages such as discovery, creative and review. Working with an experienced eLearning company like Titus can take away many of the headaches surrounding content development, but if you’re considering a DIY approach, there are several key parts of the process you don’t want to overlook.
Why you should care about creating great course content
There are a number of off the shelf options where content is concerned, which I’ll talk about later in this post. However, in many cases, this won’t cut it. A personalised induction course or an industry-specific compliance activity will need more of your attention and require a bespoke content development process. In these cases, there are countless benefits to investing in content development.
Firstly, as a business or learning organisation, bespoke content poses an opportunity to pass on values and ways of working to your team. This will mean that you can create consistency in the way your team approaches their jobs. Although the outcome varies from industry to industry, an example can be found in any customer-facing business.
Consistency among your team members
One of our clients, Wasabi, is a popular restaurant chain in the UK. Part of their induction process involves a course on company values. This ticks a lot of boxes where company objectives are concerned. Ensuring their team is well informed about rules like dress code and how they should greet customers is important in maintaining consistency across their business.
Because every company is unique, and values differ the only solution here is to create custom content.
Compliance training
Another of Titus’s customers uses their custom-built LMS to deliver compliance training. Previously, training thousands of team members would be a significant piece of work and have to be carried out regularly by a training team. By creating custom content our client now has a digital course which all employees access
Where previously, passing on these values and enforcing them within the workforce would be left to those in managerial positions – through their bespoke course content, they’re able to pass on these values to new employees in a cost-effective and time-sensitive way.
Challenges of content development that you should watch out for
We often see aspects of eLearning content development being overlooked. These include things like the quality of copywriting, the relevancy of subject matter, maintaining brand consistency and misjudging the appropriate level of detail required to deliver the desired message.
In isolation, each of these elements may seem like they’re not important or simply be forgotten about. Unfortunately when this happens, it can have a negative impact on your training programme.
A word of warning. It may be tempting to outsource your content requirements to a low-cost provider. However, what you get in return may be poorly written, overly complicated, off-topic or inconsistent with your brand guidelines. In the end, this will do more harm than good.
That’s why working with a company like Titus means you can be confident that the content you develop is high quality and will allow you to meet your learning objectives more effectively.
What alternatives are there to bespoke eLearning content development?
When working with a platform like Moodle or Moodle Workplace, there’s a global network of organisations who are working towards the same goals as you. With this in mind, there are a number of content aggregators which can help greatly with your content needs, including Go1 and H5P to name just two.
They allow organisations to take advantage of high-quality, vetted course content without having to produce everything from scratch.
For example, GDPR training has become an essential part of many organisations in recent years. The process of creating a bespoke course for this subject would be extremely costly, and would require in-depth knowledge and compliance sign off in many cases. However, companies like those mentioned above have countless “off the shelf” courses available, which take a lot of the work and expense out of the process.
How to get started
Whether you’re in the initial stages of developing a completely new approach to eLearning in your organisation or you’re simply looking to improve how your current setup works, we can help you in many ways. We offer a fully managed Moodle service, which means that all aspects of your platform are taken care of.
If you’re embarking on the content development process on your own, the best place to start is by defining what you want to achieve through the content. Do you want to share company values? Do you want every member of your workforce to be fluent in a particular new product? Carry out an exercise to identify your own objectives and work from there.
After that, a checklist of all the different aspects involved in content development would be useful. Outline all the key elements of your project, including the level of detail required and any source material you plan on using. Make sure you invest some time in understanding this as well.
When you’re ready to get started, make sure you’ve established the best format for your content. Is it a video, series of articles or even an ebook? How will you measure success and what grading requirements will you set alongside it? There’s a lot to think about, which is why it’s recommended to work with a company with experience in the field.
When it comes to eLearning content development, we’re on hand with years of experience to advise, devise a plan and finally implement your content. We can assist at every stage of your journey. To find out more, please get in touch with us.
