How To Revamp Your Outdated eLearning Content
This article will go through a few strategies that you can utilize to revamp your obsolete eLearning content into highly engaging training material. However, before we get started, let us look at why transforming your outdated content is essential.
Reasons Why You Should Convert eLearning Content
There are many reasons why you should convert your outdated eLearning content, but here are 4 reasons that you might find helpful:
1. Irrelevant Content
This is the most obvious reason for revamping an eLearning course. Most of our courses have become outdated and irrelevant due to the digital revolution and rapid technological evolution. There is always a need to make these materials more engaging and enticing.
2. One Size Does Not Fit All
Deliver content that is tailored to the user’s learning preferences. Most users have different learning styles and preferences that work for them. Thus, providing personalized training that caters to each user’s learning needs is critical.
3. New Technologies
The majority of these courses were previously limited to laptops and desktop computers because they were the only machines connecting to the internet. Smartphones and tablets are now widely used to access information thanks to technological advancements. Thus, organizations must adapt their eLearning courses to new technologies.
4. Aesthetics
While this might not be of high priority for revamping, the way content is presented has the biggest impact on learners. The courses should feel as if they are designed specifically for today’s learners. You can accomplish this by making your content easy to navigate and placing other design elements like hyperlinks, buttons, and icons in the right place.
Just-In-Time Learning Is The Need Of The Hour
Even excellent content is useless if employees cannot access it when and how they need it.
So, how can you take advantage of this opportunity? How can you give your outdated eLearning content a striking makeover? Only then can it help transform your learner’s behavior and give your business the impact it seeks.
Well, here are 4 strategies that you can utilize to revamp your legacy eLearning content into highly engaging training materials.
1. mLearning Or Mobile Learning
To be relevant in today’s day and age, organizations across sectors are undergoing a digital transformation. Today’s workforce is required to multitask, making it impossible for them to devote time to learning. They crave more engaging, relevant, and immersive training that suits their lifestyle and is accessible within their workforce. Mobile learning is the answer to this as it lets them pick it up on the go, in between work/meetings, or even during commute.
You can convert your outdated eLearning courses into mobile-friendly HTML5 format. You can use the latest authoring tools such as Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, iSpring Suite, and Lectora Inspire. Authoring tools like Lectora and Storyline have responsive features that ensure your eLearning course looks good on all types of devices, offering mobile users the same access and comfort as desktop users.
2. Bite-Size Is The Right Size
With desktop computers, eLearning was largely confined to a closed environment with allocated learning and training time. On the other hand, mobile learning necessitates eLearning content in the form of micro-nuggets, which are self-contained and ready to be consumed anywhere at any time without having to wade through a sea of information. It is in tune with the needs of today’s millennial learners, whose attention span is extremely short. Thus, repurpose your existing long, text-heavy, graphics-heavy content into short, bite-sized microlearning assets in the form of infographics, animations, simulations, and videos that can be accessed on mobile phones.
3. Engaging And Interactive Learning In Social Learning Context
Simply put, social learning is learning from and with others. This form of learning can take place through both direct (face to face) and indirect contact (online). The latest learning trend is to use social learning methods in eLearning. Organizations are inventing strategies to keep their employees motivated and learning outside of their scheduled training sessions. Here’s how you can recreate social interactions in the eLearning context:
- Utilize gamification
You can incorporate game-like elements into non-game practice and add elements of competition like rewards to the course (both for teams and individual learners). - Focus on short nuggets
For abstract or very complex topics, focus on 5 to 10-minute short nuggets in the form of videos/animation, infographics, charts/diagrams/graphs, and other relatable content with real-world examples. - Provide an opportunity for the learner
Create specific opportunities for the learners to express and defend their ideas. Examples include virtual classrooms and video conferencing; online discussion on Twitter, Basecamp, Yammer, Google+ private communities; and, blogs. - Consider group communication
In an eLearning environment, group communication and feedback are critical. Consider techniques like personal responses via email or chat, reflective responses to set questions, and shared online comments in blogs and forums. - Promote collaboration
Encourage collaborations by creating an instructor/facilitator presence and enable learners to express themselves without fear.
Organizations that learn together grow together!
4. Immersive Learning
Immersive learning is a technique that uses a virtual or artificial environment through which learners become fully immersed in the learning process. It can bring abstract learning scenarios to life, making the crucial yet daunting task of recreating experiences for learners a reality. Immersive learning incorporates gamification into the learning process and makes use of cutting-edge technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and 3D immersive learning (3D). Immersive learning encourages personalized learning and focused immersion. You are so engrossed in it that there is no room for distractions. It eliminates all distractions by immersing you in a beautiful virtual world.
Summing It All Up!
Your legacy or outdated eLearning content still has a lot of value. Instead of abandoning your outdated eLearning and training content, you can breathe new life into them to suit the needs of your modern learners. Many authoring tools such as Articulate Storyline, Lectora, Adobe Captivate, and iSpring Suite can help you get the job done quickly and efficiently. So, follow the strategies mentioned above to get started right away and revitalize your outdated eLearning courses.
At Tesseract Learning, our learning and visual architects are constantly innovating and reinventing their approaches to design, develop, and deliver effective L&D programs. To learn more about how you can effectively revamp your outdated eLearning content and help improve the performance and productivity of modern learners and employees, contact me or leave a comment below.
