It’s also a challenge to keep up a rigorous course schedule while always offering our workforce fresh content regularly. So let’s talk about how we can make great courses on a budget.
It’s important to keep your course brief. The briefer the course, the cheaper and quicker it will be to produce. A workforce can benefit from a concise course as well, as your people can consume and finish a course much quicker, this leads to far more effective eLearning. Shorter courses also allow people to learn in bursts and at their own pace.
Delivering shorter courses more frequently takes away the pressure from trainers and managers around producing big courses on specific dates of their training agenda. Frequent micro-courses also provide our workforce with a certain momentum and clarify the expectations we have of them in terms of how much learning they will need to complete at any given time.
Video, audio, and images can make a course experience so much better! Think of all those long text-based courses you’ve had to do throughout your career. They can be boring and not captivating enough. Producing video and audio content does not mean spending all your training budget on production. Nowadays, trainers can use their personal phones or affordable HD cameras to produce good quality content quickly and cheaply. Simply share your thoughts by talking into the camera, then upload the content straight into your LMS!
This is probably the most important point in this article. Use your own voice—be authentic, original, and yourself. This is how content can resonate with people and is the only way to truly connect with your workforce. But best of all, when we are ourselves, content becomes faster to produce! Professional production is not always required, and it often leads to a contrived piece of communication. Think of the last time you mentored a team member over a cup of coffee—was it effective? It was probably the exchange that changed the way that person looked at their role for the better!
Make sure your courses are working. When we build courses, we must ensure that our money and time was spent correctly. So get some feedback and make sure that the course is built in such a way they enjoy. Perhaps, your team prefers images over text or video over audio. By getting some insights about a certain course you can build something that is going to work.
Validate the needs of your workforce. Make sure that the course is of the right standard. By running a simple poll or pre-assessing your team, you can build a course that aims at developing your team members around the right skill-sets. Some team members can come prepared with skills that they would not require training for—by knowing this, we can provide them with the knowledge they need to reach their next level of skill.
Tools that provide ready-made content and courses can be very beneficial. These tools help you hit the ground running by not having to create all of the content yourself. Ready-made courses can be duplicated and edited, and assigned to the right employees within seconds. This can save a considerable amount of time and money.
Motivate other managers to get involved in building content and courses. By getting people to collaborate, you can build courses faster and have much stronger insight into the topics in question. This can allow us to pool multiple points of view and wisdom into one course—which leads to a much richer course experience.
Create courses that can be used by different departments and remote workers. Build flexible courses which can be reused into the future, in other words always try to build for the long-term. This might take a little bit more time today, but you’ll be able to reuse that course time and time again into the future for months or even years. Think of the ROI!
Make sure that what you need is indeed an eLearning course. Sometimes employees prefer blended learning, such as online eLearning and physical classroom sessions—perhaps purely online courses are not what your people engage with and an LMS or eLearning tool that provides a blended learning feature is the way to go. This can often allow us to be resourceful and cut down on the video production requirements.
I hope this helps you in building courses on a budget—if you have any questions feel free to get in touch! We’re always very happy to share our tips and advice.
Originally published at www.innform.io.