Overview
Online learning (or Elearning) has drastically altered the education and training systems. Since it provides extensive virtual learning opportunities, many businesses are proactively seeking to develop Elearning programs to continue the learning process for their employees.
Elearning programs are customizable options. That means any business can develop customized learning programs for a particular department or company.
So, by designing custom Elearning programs, businesses can achieve their particular organizational goals and train their employees better.
A custom Elearning program can be developed in just nine steps. Learn below about these nine stages of the custom Elearning development process in detail:
Stage 1. Defining Goals and Constraints
Like any other project, for developing a custom Elearning program, you need to plan where you are headed. Defining the purpose of the program, its success, and measurements of that success can help you prepare some groundwork.
While specifying your goals, you should also define potential constraints to the project, such as scheduling, budget, and timing. Combining the list of goals and constraints will give you a detailed view of your training needs and constraints.
Stage 2. Identifying Cultural Fit
Once you have determined the goals and constraints, it is time to consider your company’s culture. Since you want a new curriculum to fit in with your organization’s learning landscape, you must be mindful of the visions and values your company holds. The Elearning modules should also reinforce these fundamental messages.
At this stage, you must seek consent from stakeholders. If you roll out the program without considering the opinion of managers, it will fall apart when managers express disapproval.
Stage 3. Learner Needs and Knowledge Gaps
You must take adequate time to study your learner’s needs, learning problems, and knowledge gaps. Also, figure out how you can measure gaps and hindrances of learners from learning and applying what they know.
Besides gaps, you must get to know your learner’s demographics, experience with the content, know-how to technology, and motivation to learn. You must also consider how the content will be delivered and if the learners will prefer just-in-time micro-learning modules or extended learning time.
Fitting the content to the company’s culture and the learner’s expectations are important things. So, you can set up your expectations for the learner experience and evaluate the experience in the end.
Stage 4. Planning Content and Strategy
Having looked at the organization collectively, as well as your learner base, you can now focus on content. You can talk to your Subject Matter Experts and think about the topics to be taught to bridge the learning gap.
After developing a list of topics the learners want to learn, you can create separate modules for each topic.
Your aim of developing a custom Elearning platform is to help learners with the learning gap. So, the content should be the right fit for the knowledge your learners are looking for.
An important selling point of Elearning modules is that they can take any content format of the virtually available formats. For example, teaching a longer lesson may become tedious, so you can make it more interactive by utilizing videos, slides, quizzes, and beyond.
Stage 5. Creating Storyboard and Design
Planning, analysis, and organization that you have done in the preceding stages will influence the design of the storyboard. You must arrange your content to follow logical progression by adding topics and subtopics sprinkled with examples and real-life scenarios to increase learner
engagement. If the content is engaging, delivering it with some additional visual elements such as videos and animations can help your Elearning modules succeed.
Stage 6. Development
Before finalizing content to put on the storyboard, consider how the content will appear on the devices your learners will use, like mobile phones or laptops.
Next, using your writing software, you can add visual and audio elements in the modules and make sure to align animations with audio narration.
At this point, your Learning Management System (LMS) specialist and developer should be in contact to discuss how the Elearning program will be published and set up in the LMS.
Stage 7. Testing and Revision
Once development is complete, it is time for revision. You can ask experts such as members of the HR team, department heads, or learning specialists in your organization for their feedback on the LMS. You can ask them to highlight the areas of improvement.
To keep input digestible and constructive, you can develop a draft of questions to ask each member of the testing team. The questions can be like what they learned at the end of each module and if any concept was unclear. It will help you to keep feedback relevant and precise so that you can easily implement the gaps and improve your modules.
Stage 8. Launch and Promotion
Preparing for launch and promotion is an essential part of Elearning development since all your efforts and hard work can pay off at this stage. If your modules are designed for your company only, you can promote them among your departments through internal marketing. You can
promote your course through HR, via emails and company chat boxes, or at the meetings.
If you have developed learning modules for external learners, you will need to promote them through paid search ad campaigns, content marketing, and social media marketing. The promotion will help you get more feedback, more views, and better ideas for future developments.
Stage 9. Tracking of Performance
For your Elearning program, you can use an LMS to get more accurate performance tracking of modules. With analytics in LMS, you can track the course performance and success.
Though there are many metrics you can track, you should keep an eye on the completion rate of modules and courses, the proficiency of learners with the course, and course ratings. These metrics will help you track that the modules you have developed are not arduous to understand and are helping learners acquire new skills.
Conclusion
With Elearning, you can offer your employees customized courses based on their needs and knowledge gaps. Following the nine stages of the custom Elearning development process, you can successfully create courses that will target your particular audience.
Besides this, you can customize those eLearning programs for all devices so your employees can access them anytime, anywhere.Â
