How To Ensure Your eLearning Meets Learner And Business Needs
That's why it's vital to have a plan. Start down the right path with your evaluation by using these tips to keep learning projects useful to your learner and business needs.
Overcome Design Blind Spots With A Dynamic Mindset
When common development processes interfere with the speed of producing and delivering eLearning content, then your Learning and Development teams may encounter blind spots to windows of need and risk missing learner and business needs. Furthermore, poor practices can keep your team from speedily addressing time-sensitive performance needs and the need to shift the direction of business activities. That's why it's essential that your business and audience of learners are able to connect with your eLearning material.
To make sure this connection exists, it's vital to change your Learning and Development team’s mindset from creating static learning content to producing a dynamic learning system that adapts to change and makes project collaboration, testing, and iteration a standard.
Related: 7 Steps to Smarter eLearning, Starting with Collaboration
Start On The Right Path By Identifying Issues And Needs
It's important to identify and begin with real learner and business needs to start on the right path for creating useful eLearning for your business and learners. You can make this happen by going beyond the role of a learning designer. Put your performance consulting skills into action! With a performance consultant mindset, you can hone in on business problems that need to be resolved and enhance your audience’s learning experiences. All you need to do is get into the crowd and start the conversation with your audience. This dedication can result in your delivering true improvements in the long haul.
If you want to get your team, process, and solution in motion and focused on delivering improvements for your eLearning venture, then consider these 5 tips:
1. Take A Step Back.
Identifying the real issue is a critical step in getting started. When you're in the performance consultant mindset, you’ll want to take a step back from the process to evaluate the causes driving the issues. For example, get to the root of why a leader feels his managers need training. Business leaders may require assistance with identifying and expressing problems. It's important to guide them through the process by asking the right questions. Probe the business leader to discover what evidence exists to justify an issue in performance or skills to warrant learning. Also, determine if any other factors play a role in slowing the development of your learning project. Finding out what the business leader deems as a solution can help you move the project forward.
Related: How to Use Smarter Processes To Improve Your eLearning Authoring
2. Evaluate Whether Learning Is The Answer.
Before you jump into developing solutions based on learning only, consider probing to find out the nature of the issue. That way, you’ll know which gap needs to be bridged. Determine if the issue is related to a skills gap, a communication issue, or problems associated with performance support, business culture, behavior, or the learning process. Then discover the depth to which it affects the entire project.
When learning can't fix the issue on its own, it's vital to express this to business leaders and recommend alternatives as a solution. However, make sure to clarify key performance indicators, or KPIs, of your eLearning project for success in issues that require development, education, and performance support.
3. Talk To Your Learners And Get Close To The Context.
The only way you can create relevancy and fix the issues inherent with stagnant learning content is to speak to the individuals that it effects. That's why it's critical to talk to learners who work in the positions that encounter the issues. They can provide you with insight on learning pain points, the times they experience these issues, and their opinions about resolutions. This insight will allow you to distinguish between short-term resolutions, such as performance support, and long-term solutions, including coaching or training. Such awareness will direct you as to the type of content you should create to fit your audience's needs.
4. Locate Performance Heroes.
The people who demonstrate best practices are vital role models for establishing performance benchmarks. Identifying these individuals is important. Learn and watch what the organization’s “performance heroes” do. Find out what helps them with learning and performance, so you’ll have a solid foundation for setting performance measures.
Hold interviews, or utilize another recording method to understand the best practices these role models use. Then apply it to your learning project. Get performance heroes involved in creating your eLearning content. Register them as Subject Matter Experts and content creators so you can enhance the eLearning venture with appropriate information.
5. Identify What Already Works.
Check to see if an existing approach already works to manage eLearning elements before you decide on a solution. For example, you can assess whether mobile learning, collaborative learning, or coaching have been successful ways to deliver relevant content.
Final Thoughts
Providing relevant learning that people can use requires a commitment to identifying your audience's needs and modifying your content. Embrace these tips to get on the right path to eLearning improvement.
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