Is your eLearning in need of a refresh?

Is your eLearning in need of a refresh?

We love spring. It gives you an opportunity to dust off your goals and start afresh. Temperatures are (almost) into double digits and signs of green are literally springing up everywhere, but have you fully embraced the new season and spring cleaned your eLearning?

Unfortunately for many of us, daily demands and distractions defer us from staying on track and laying those best laid plans of revisiting our goals.

Often eLearning courses and training materials only get updated when new software is released or when new budget becomes available! So to help inject a little spring into your learning and development, we’ve highlighted a few things to help refresh your training plans.

Review

If you’ve multiple courses, resources and programmes all on the go, it can be hard to know where to start.

But if you don’t take a step back and review your current eLearning offering, you won’t be able to tell the wood from the trees and you’ll easily fall into the trap of doing more of the same.

• Review your current courses, programmes and resources and ensure that they are still relevant and doing the job intended.
• Make sure your content is up to date.
• Have you got the right learning technologies for the job in hand?
• Are you making enough of your existing eLearning materials and resources? Many can be re-used in multiple forms or similar areas.
• De-clutter – determine what you want to keep and what you want to archive –  less really is more!
• Have you completed your organisational needs analysis – if you have all your training ducks in a row, brilliant – you know what to prepare for the year ahead. But if you have the difficult task of reactionary training, then now is the time to find out what training requirements are expected of your organisation for the year ahead.

Prepare

Once you reviewed your current inventory, resources and assets, start compiling your next stage – preparing for what needs to get done.

• If you are developing a new E-Learning course or programme or updating an existing one, do you have the necessary content ready? If you have a scary amount of information and training materials that are in raw form, it is worth taking the time to define the key learning objectives.
• Have you got your subject matter experts ready to rock? When starting a new eLearning project or reviewing an existing one, your SME’s are so important. Be clear with them from the start of the project and communicate what you need from them and more importantly, in what format is required.

After reviewing a programme, you may find that it is in need of a restructure or there are elements that you’d still like to keep, but you are unsure if it still educationally effective. Know when to delegate!

If you have the time, resources and skills in-house to treat your programmes with sound instructional design – fantastic!

If however, like many, you run the risk of overwhelming yourself with this task, knowing when to outsource and delegate certain areas or tasks can be hugely beneficial, allowing you to concentrate on the task at hand.

Engage

Having buy-in and engagement for eLearning in your organisation is key to its success. Inform and involve your managers and team leaders about your eLearning.

Don’t forget to sell the benefits of the training and of eLearning as this will help you get buy-in and support. Similarly, don’t forget to report on the success of your new revitalised eLearning programme!

Whether you want to update an existing course, create a new programme, transfer classroom training materials online or looking to develop new skills to design and deliver eLearning in-house, we can infuse a little spring into your learning and development. Get in touch with us today.