3 Learning And Development Manager Frustrations: How To Choose The Right Software
Persona: A Learning and Development Manager.
Jill is a Learning and Development (L&D) manager who deeply cares about tacit knowledge of the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). She believes in the power of communities, practice, and aims to capitalize the practical know-how of SMEs that can enhance their fellow workers. Given the dominance of several Learning Management System options, she is looking for easy to use, single-purpose tools that appeal to her knowledge creators i.e. SMEs who don’t have the time necessary to learn the rich feature sets of standard heavy-weight authoring tools and create courses from scratch.
Let’s address Jill’s "pain points", and help her choose the right tools:
Frustration 1: Steep Learning Curves. Too much Time Spent On Learning Tools
Similar issue as with teachers, but, in this case, the actual users—i.e. SMEs—are way too busy with their main practice of job, and are too short of time to learn how to use a tool. Rich and engaging feature sets complicate the experience of learning to use the tools.
Choose authoring tools that:
- Appear casual and natural to SMEs and blend in with their everyday working life. The tools should be part of their kit but the tool itself shouldn’t be the kit. Often you end up with single purpose SaaS solutions.
- Are truly easy to use with obvious visual ease to start authoring straight away. The tools shouldn’t make the SMEs fear they’ll need extraordinary didactical and design sense to share knowledge.
This brings us to a rather interesting point about the role of L&D during this knowledge creation process. We envision new roles for learning professionals who need to co-create knowledge capital. SMEs can securely share invaluable information without being deprived of pedagogical sensibilities. This is a gap you can fill with some guidance through structure and direction. Be a coach, mentor, reviewer, or editor for SMEs and assist them in this process. You can use tools like Easygenerator that are built by L&D experts who know what it takes to create a meaningful learning resource, and hence can stay assured of the pedagogical framework that is guiding the content being written. Easygenerator has a built-in Learning Objective maker, a review feature for real-time collaboration, and several course/resource templates that can be put straight to use.
Frustration 2: Not Knowing How To Start, Lack Of Templates
Traditionally, powerful educational authoring software tools are attributed to rich features that will allow the Instructional Designers to create highly engaging courses. However, we are riding a wave of user-generated content where the content is no longer created by Instructional Designers, but is handled by SMEs who would prefer easy-to-use tools with intuitive interfaces and who "don’t have the time to learn the full feature set of powerful tools, which often require a bit of a programmer mindset".
Instead of worrying about choosing a powerful tool, we recommend that organizations think about making the Subject Matter Experts powerful by equipping them with simple tools. Keep it simple and kill the clutter!
Frustration 3: Managing My Team’s Content
Given the requirement of making SMEs the authors of learning content, it is imperative that L&D manage the content and the authors. Plus, few mandatory courses in the form of compliance and regulatory courses mandate tracking to be compliant with SCORM or xAPI or CMI5 standards.
Choose tools that:
- Consider various administrative scenarios - allowing you (the admin) to manage authors and content in various scenarios (for example , authors leaving firms, changing of teams, duplicating, reusing content, working with third parties etc.).
- Host content on any server and publish content in multiple responsive ways according to your organizational preferences.
- Support SCORM or xAPI or CMI5 standards. Need some clarification? If you're interested in findign out more, read here.
If you want to know more about cloud-based authoring software, sign up for a 14-day free trial of Easygenerator here.