Wouldn’t it be nice to have a bottomless budget and an army of eLearning cyborgs tirelessly creating effective learning content 24 hours a day. On the other hand, that’d be a bit too easy. There’s no thrill of the chase, no epic quest, no glory.
But then again, you’re probably busy enough without turning your working day into an action extravaganza. Chances are you’re working with prohibitive funds and limited resources.
Well, don’t throw in the towel just yet – there’s plenty you can do to stretch what you have to the max. You just need to be a little more creative.
As the learning company that never stops giving, here are four top tips to help you get the more with less when it comes to creating effective learning content.
Four Top Tips to Create Learning Content
Rapid eLearning
So you want to deliver training material to your learners, but you’re lacking one small detail: an eLearning department. It’s not the end of the world – you don’t actually need an eLearning department!
With a Rapid eLearning solution, you can turn your existing content into an effective eLearning unit. Instead of pushing documents and slideshows to your learners, you can incorporate these assets into a fully functional piece of eLearning. You can also add questions within the units to add an extra level of engagement
Aside from being more engaging, these units have the added bonus of being reportable. In conjunction with a learning management system, you can have full visibility over who is completing the units which is essential if you want to gauge how effective they are.
More effective Learning content
It’s one thing to combine your learning assets into an eLearning unit, but it’s quite another to ensure that your learners retain this information. The major challenge with online learning today is securing learner engagement. Even learners with the best intentions will lose concentration when faced with a boring eLearning unit.
The way to get the best ROI from your Learning content is to give your learners something that they want to do. When you create something that’s more like a game than a piece of compliance training, you’ll trigger off a whole galaxy of natural reactions. They’ll want to beat the game, they’ll want to collect the prizes and they’ll do whatever it takes to get what they want!
Check out our white paper on gamification to find out how to hack your learners’ brains and make them love learning again!
Better Collaboration
Let’s say you’re not a lone ranger, battling the odds on your own. Maybe you have a team at your disposal but somehow still end up fretting yourself into a tizzy with every approaching deadline. Sure, life would indeed be easier with a bigger crew at the helm, but until your next recruitment drive, you’re going to have to make do with what you’ve got.
Ask yourself this – are you making the most of the team you have? In a lot of cases, the reason your deadlines seem so scary is that you’re just not working effectively enough. It just takes one silly miscommunication to throw a project off and give you another unexpected problem to fix.
Guys, trust us on this: collaboration is the key to effective project management. You can’t afford to segment your team and isolate them in tiny cubicles away from each other.
Give your team thorough visibility over the whole project, from start to finish, and they’ll have a greater sense of what their contribution means to its’ success.
For more ways to boost collaboration in your eLearning development, check out these handy tips.
User-Generated Content
Imagine if your learners created their own learning assets – wouldn’t that just save you a whole bunch of time? Let me introduce you to a little thing we like to call ‘informal learning’.
‘Formal learning’ covers all of the material you create for your learners to consume and it makes up only 10% of everything they learn at work. This gives the learners a good foundation but what about the other 90%? This they’ll pick up from actually doing their jobs and (here’s the important part) interacting with their colleagues.
You see, there’s knowledge flying around in your workplace right now! It’s everywhere you turn – you just need to find a way to harness it. If you’ll excuse the shameless plug for a moment, our Academy LMS is designed to do just that. We’ve included ‘insight groups’ which are like virtual water coolers where your learners can congregate and discuss the nerdy minutiae of their jobs.
When you give your learners a platform (real or virtual) to discuss the things that matter to them, it’s like planting a seed in the ground. Over time this seed grows into a huge repository of information that should be accessible to everyone. Not only that, you’ll be able to identify experts within your company – and what are experts..? Why they’re honorary members of the L&D team that can do your job for you!
Final Word
So the next time you find yourself on your own in a bathroom cubicle, silently crying to yourself in desperation – just take a deep breath, look at what you have, and figure out how to get the most out of it.
Tantalised at the thought of effective eLearning that engages your learners?
Why not give Genie a go?
Our game-based authoring tool is completely collaborative and lets your whole team come together to craft awesome learning journeys that your learners will love!
Want a free trial? Click here to get started today!
