Do You Need eLearning Modernization? Why Modernize Your Content?
If you’re not sure if you need eLearning modernization, I’d suggest reading my article on Why every company needs a modernization strategy.
And to help you decide whether to embark on a modernization journey, let’s start with some questions. We’ll call it introspection. These questions ask the bigger question of “Should I even modernize? Do I need to at all?”. Basically, the go/no-go decision. The idea here is to use your gut: Your knowledge, your intuition, your best guess.
5 Questions To Determine If You Need To Modernize
1. How Much Content Do I Have Today (Content Inventory)?
Approximately how many hours of content do you have in your learning portfolio? This includes eLearning, Instructor-led training, virtual instructor-led training, mobile learning, and all modalities. To do a modernization project you need to do an in-depth content audit, but for this exercise, you can just guestimate how much content you have.
The average large company has 1,000 hours of learning content, but you might have more or you might have less.
2. How Much Money Have I Invested In My Learning Portfolio?
There are multiple ways to get a ballpark number here. A simple formula is:
(cost per learning hour) x (total number of content hours) = The total-cost-of-your-learning portfolio
Or to break it down further:
This breaks down the cost per learning hour to the various personnel who come together to create the hour.
So for example, let’s say to develop a learning hour it takes approximately 221 hours including the instructor, Learning and Development professionals, management, and Subject Matter Experts. Multiply the cost per hour of each with the approximate number of hours they contributed to get a more accurate cost per learning hour.
For a large organization, the average cost per learning hour is $18,000.
Note that this is an average number across all the different modalities of learning you may have, and does not include third party content acquired from companies such as library builders or content you have outsourced to an external vendor.
In summary, multiply $18,000 by the total number of content hours in your inventory to get an estimate of the total value of your learning portfolio. Though be warned, if you do this quick calculation, you may be surprised by the numbers.
3. How Much Of My Content Am I Using On A Regular Basis?
What percentage of learning content are you using from all the content you have developed over the last five years? How much content do you have in your learning portfolio that is only used sparingly or not at all?
The average annual training program reuse rate hovers at 50% annually, meaning that on average half of a given company’s training portfolio is not being utilized annually.
In addition, annual expenditure and time investment on new training program development exceeds the attention placed on maintaining legacy content by a wide margin.
4. What Are My Recurring Costs?
What costs do you have on a regular basis? Such as maintenance costs of your learning content management system. What do you pay every year or quarterly on fees?
5. Have Any Assumptions Changed Since I Created My Content?
This will have a big impact on modernization. Have market business realities changed since creating learning courses three years ago? Have technical and learning requirements changed?
Company statistics change, products get updated with new specs, and errors in the original content are uncovered over time.
Should You Modernize?
Once you do these mental calculations and rough estimations, if you feel that you don’t know where a significant amount of your training is, it’s current state, or if there’s an opportunity for optimizing or enhancing its engagement, then you should modernize.
The majority of companies and CLO’s that we talk to state that they could use more interesting content and a modernizing strategy.
Modernize Programs Increase ROI And Engagement
With significant investments in content development, companies need to search for ways to repurpose content across various learning programs. Not only will this increase the ROI, but it will also help increase engagement by modernizing the look and feel of courses to match changes in learner demographics.
Download our eBook Modernize for Engagement to see how in 5 steps we modernize content for better engagement and breathe life back into stale content.
Related articles:
1. The First Step To Modernizing Your eLearning Content
2. 3 Reasons Why You Need An eLearning Modernization Strategy
3. How The Modernize Solution Transformed A Telecom Giant's Legacy Training Portfolio
4. The 2 Parts Of A Successful Content Modernization Strategy