eLearning has slowly expanded and become one of the most cost-effective ways of carrying out training for the workforce. When eLearning is carried out in an effective manner, it can certainly do wonders by increasing sales for your business. How? When your staff is well-trained, they will feel more confident in performing their job and be capable of tackling every challenge they come across.
But before managers can lead to the stage of effective training, there are several hurdles they might come across in terms of attendance, motivation, monitoring, or the content material that is being offered.
It is important that you ensure that you are offering the right training to right people and at the right time with relevant content. This might seem like a time consuming task, but this is what makes your training effective.
This is where you need the eLearning content development process. This process ensures that the training that you offer is perfect and right.
There are certain steps that your content development process for employee eLearning should definitely undergo. You can find them below.
Step 1: Analyze the learning content
The first step, like for every other process, is identifying and analyzing the gaps and other significant aspects. To develop the right content for the right audience, you should start by analyzing the learning content that already exists. This will help you find areas of improvement.
After that, you should take an in-depth analysis of the roles of people that you are targeting and their objectives of learning. When they know that their objectives are being met, the chances of your employees attending the training sessions increase.
Once you have all the required information, you should create a proper instructional strategy to figure out the best way to present content.
Step 2: Create the Instructional Design Document
As discussed above, after analysis comes instructional strategy. You can start by creating an IDD which is nothing but a detailed, high-quality plan of your approach.
Some commonly used procedures for creating an IDD are involving real-life scenarios, solving problems, or using avatars. You also decided at this stage on how to break your content. You can choose between screens, courses, or modules. It is best to avoid offering lengthy sessions as hardly any employee would be able to sit through the entire program otherwise.
Make sure that you are using a unique Instructional Design strategy for each course.
Step 3: Finalize content
Once you have the basic framework ready, now comes the need to finalize what content will be developed and for whom. It is also the stage where you divide your work into different modules or courses for employees to consume.
Then you decided the content that will go on each screen. This process is known as scripting and it is usually carried on using a word document.
Step 4: Develop prototypes
Protoypes help you figure out what needs more work and what don’t. Here you will work on presenting your entire course with the help of just a few slides. It is at this stage that you give the final draft for not only your content but also the audio.
From colors and animations, to images and text, each and every type of content is finalized at this stage. There might be a lot of editing, writing, and re=writing but is important to ensure that you are offering what’s right.
Step 5: Get course approved
Now, once you have everything finalized, you will first share the content without audio with the stakeholders. This way, they can easily make changes to the content or the narration before you get the audio recorded.
Since creating audio is a costly affair, it is best to get it done once everything is approved. Once the audio script os final, get the audio developed. Just make sure of the quality, pronunciation, and its sync between text and animation.
Step 6: Create the LMS version
This is more of technical step than the creative one. With a learning management system, everything becomes easy. From creating the course to executing it and then finally tracking it.
Stakeholders should confirm that the course is compliant to AICC/XAPI/SCORM. Once everything is compliant, you can host on the learning platform and easily deploy your course to the workforce.
Conclusion
eLearning content development process might seem like an overwhelming task. But when it is carried out in a systematic manner, it becomes easier to carry out the process.
