Is Your eLearning Team Fast And Responsive? What Makes A Competent eLearning Team
eLearning teams are under pressure to constantly to produce more, faster, and smarter eLearning. If your eLearning processes are slow and complex, you may lose the flexibility and responsiveness to produce and update eLearning fast enough to react to changing business needs. Here is what makes a competent eLearning team:
1. Staying Relevant
Some courses you offer will be evergreen, such as basic company orientation and training materials. These will need little or no updating after the course’s first few iterations, and the updates you make will generally be straightforward.
But in the business world, you don't call the shots; your business does. You will spend most of your time and attention developing courses to educate employees about new compliance regulations, emerging technologies, or industry developments.
To stay relevant, you’ll need to produce courses as soon as new products, regulations, and changes emerge – if not before. Otherwise, your training materials will be hopelessly outdated.
Do you have smart processes in place to keep your eLearning content relevant?
Related: How To Accelerate The Production Of High Quality eLearning
2. Seeing Learning As A “Living Thing”
Many eLearning teams fall into the trap of overdeveloping a given course. You need to be able to adapt an individual course to ensure that learners are understanding and retaining information, and you should adapt individual courses to reflect changing business needs. That might be a new product under development, new compliance regulations, or emerging changes in the financial market.
If you use smart processes and smart authoring tools, updating courses with new information can be fast and simple. But you may need to retire some courses in favor of wholly new materials, particularly when a sea change has occurred in the industry. Part of being a competent eLearning team means being able to tell when you can modify an existing course, or when you should completely revise or even retire existing course materials.
Related: Profile Of The Modern Learner (useful facts and stats)
3. Staying One Step Ahead
It takes time to create valuable, useful eLearning materials. If you’re doing a good job of anticipating your business's learning needs, you’ll generally have enough time to create impactful courses that meet learners’ emergent needs and arm them with the skills they need to succeed in a changing industry.
But every so often a new development might take you by surprise, or your course development process might take too long. You may find yourself providing eLearning courses that you feel aren’t ready for prime time, so to speak.
But this, too, is part of the process of developing new learning materials. While you should always focus on creating professional, well-composed offerings, very seldom will your first iteration of your learning materials be perfect. By gauging your learners’ comprehension as the course progresses or as they engage with your materials, you’ll determine how to adapt these materials on the fly so your first batch of learners will walk away with the knowledge they need. You’ll also figure out how to perfect the course’s subsequent iterations.
By being open to change in this way, you’ll meet learners’ emergent needs without sacrificing course quality. You’ll create learning materials that are as adaptive and versatile as the industry itself.
Final Thoughts
Modern eLearning takes a number of forms, but one of the factors that describes all eLearning is that it meets pinpointed needs.
You should strive to constantly revise and update your eLearning content. You can’t afford to grow complacent. As a learning professional, your job is to determine emergent needs and then meet them effectively. Without looking ahead to determine emergent needs, your courses will be yesterday’s news – and at that point it doesn’t matter how great they are.
Next step: How To Accelerate eLearning Production So You Can Respond Faster To Learner Needs
