Successful eLearning-based corporate training starts with the effective planning and development of your courses and curriculum. For maximum effectiveness, your courses should be relevant, engaging and informative. And they must be built in a way that creates a logical learning structure with each piece of training material delivered with content that is best-suited for that lesson.
While this may seem like a daunting project, newer eLearning authoring tools and Learning Management System technologies are making the development of effective corporate training courses much easier, to the point where very little technology know-how and training is required. In this way, responsibility for course development is becoming more ubiquitous while course development and eLearning management costs continue to decline.
Creating Effective eLearning-Based Corporate Training Courses
Corporate eLearning and training can impact most every area of your organization. Because of this, there are numerous potential topics to share important knowledge and teach critical skills. Yet even with all the potential diversity, there tends to be a standard set of best practices that can help to ensure the best outcomes from your program.
Start with a Needs Analysis
A Needs Analysis should serve as the first step in defining your program goals and determining the courses that should be included. To be effective, analysis should focus on the organization’s, as well as the training needs of your employees.
Define Your Goals
Once you have completed your needs analysis you can set your goals for the program. As with any goal-setting exercise, each goal should be measurable, attainable, and have a set deadline. Including these elements will enable you to easily review and revise your program goals, as necessary.
Know Your Audience
As you begin to plan the structure of the course, the type of content you will include, and potential supporting elements for each course, you must consider the type of audience your employees represent and any restrictions they may bring to the learning process. For example, very busy employees (such as clinicians and Financial Services executives) might benefit from microlearning types of formats. And relatively young staff members may be looking for gamification and social elements to support eLearning activities.
Create a Logical Course Structure
According to experts, one of the biggest benefits eLearning brings to corporate training is the ability to divide learning activities into small, easily digested segments. This structure not only helps to ensure high levels of comprehension and retention, but it also supports busy schedules of employees. Consider this as you build out your course structure and divide course segments into logical sections, each with its own unique learning objective. This type of structure also offers natural stopping points for workers as they move through the course.
Include a Rewards System
Most every learner, including employees engaged in corporate training, will respond to rewards and incentive programs, such as completion certificates, gamification elements, and other methods of calling out those workers who exhibit great performance and dedication to your learning program and activities.
Evaluate and Revise Over Time
It is best to consider your corporate training program as a “living thing” that can be revised and expanded over time. For this aspect, you should include company executives and stakeholders who have vested interests in the skills development and growth of your employees, so that they can provide feedback and input into your course development and overall program design.
An LMS for Corporate Training Course Design and Rapid Authoring
The core technology that supports all types of eLearning programs is a Learning Management System, or “LMS”. An LMS is the application that is used to build, deliver, and track your corporate training program.
Our LMS Portals platform is a cloud-based, multi-tenant system that provides our clients and partners with powerful course design and development tools that allow you to re-purpose existing training and learning content, such as videos, HMTL5 files, PDFS, documents, images, and more. The system allows you to build logical course structure and to divide each of your courses into segments of any size. The LMS Portals platform also allows you to launch private, branded eLearning environments (portals) to create a unique and customized experience for each of your corporate training audiences.
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