5 Tips for Getting Started with Corporate Elearning
If you’re in charge of developing your company’s eLearning programs, you probably feel both excited and overwhelmed at the same time.
This can be especially true if this is your first time working on corporate eLearning, or if you’ve been tasked with creating new digital courses from scratch without any existing resources to work from. But don’t worry—we have a few tips to help you succeed at this task, whether it’s your first time or not!
Also you need a creative next generation e-learning platform!
Set Goals Before Creating Your Corporate Elearning Course
Setting goals is absolutely critical to your success. Make sure that you are setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound). Once you have those set, use a corporate eLearning tool to help you track your progress.
A good eLearning program will make it easy to monitor how far along you are in meeting your goals by creating checkpoints along your journey. Using an eLearning software such as TheLearning LAB can help keep you accountable and committed to reaching your goal so that you don’t fall off track as easily.
In addition to keeping you on task, corporate eLearning software like TheLearning LAB can save you money through improved performance. Since it provides a range of methods that enable employees to increase their knowledge over time, they encourage them to consistently develop their skills—reducing overall costs related to training and onboarding new employees.
TheLearning LAB also gives managers better insight into employee competencies—which makes it easier to identify areas where additional training may be needed—or recognize exceptional work from team members.
Start Small When Creating a Corporate Elearning Program
It’s tempting to throw yourself headfirst into eLearning development without stopping to think about what makes it different from other forms of development. There are lots of differences, some of which can make learning more effective, but others that might hinder your progress if you don’t start small.
For example, instead of building an online course in its entirety before releasing it to participants, you could use a single-serving module approach where you build each section as needed and release them separately. This way, users get their training immediately and don’t have to wait for all sections to be built. When they like what they see, they’ll keep coming back for more.
Also, giving your entire company access to new eLearning content at once is best when it’s something everyone wants to learn about; going piecemeal lets everyone start right away. That way, people will have time to digest individual lessons over time. No matter how many tips you pick up, there will always be something new and exciting in eLearning development – so take it one step at a time!
Make the technology work for you
As mentioned earlier, eLearning gives you plenty of opportunities to incorporate interactive tools into your training. Make sure you take advantage of them! For example, using a multimedia element can keep learners engaged and make a lesson more memorable.
By integrating basic quizzes, polls, and statistics graphs (like pie charts), you give learners a chance to interact with content in ways that traditional presentations simply can’t offer. This gives them an opportunity to make choices and engage in activities that are tailored specifically to their learning styles.
But be careful not to add too many bells and whistles—too much technology can actually have a negative impact on training effectiveness. Studies show that taking in information from multiple modalities helps promote long-term memory retention by engaging all kinds of different senses, but only if you don’t overwhelm your audience.
Plus, it’s important to keep things simple when incorporating eLearning into a corporate environment so everyone involved is able to use it effectively.
Get everyone on board
If you’re working within a big organization, it’s important to have your stakeholders buy into eLearning. You can’t just force people to watch videos or sit through online training. In fact, that might make them hate you and/or eLearning. So explain what eLearning is, how it will help them in their jobs, and how much time they’ll actually spend using it (probably not very much).
Once they understand what you want to do and why you want to do it, they should be more willing to get on board—especially if you give them an opportunity to provide input on content or style. This gives them some ownership over the final product.
The bottom line: Don’t push eLearning if no one wants it; sell it so they beg for it.
Create short demos, build interest
Even when everyone is on board, creating corporate eLearning isn’t easy. Sometimes getting started with employee onboarding means making a couple of demo modules to show off all of its benefits (without going overboard). This gets other people interested and also makes your job easier because now there are some checkpoints along the way as opposed to having to create everything from scratch. Or maybe what works best for you is creating something relatively quick that covers whatever pain point or productivity gap your audience currently faces at work.
Monitor results after deploying your corporate eLearning course
If you’re serious about tracking results in a systematic way, then start with your own goals. Write down which ones you’d like to focus on in 2022 and use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of whether or not you hit them.
If there are areas where you aren’t quite hitting your goals, set intermediate goals and continue to break it down until you get exactly what it is that you want out of 2022. That process will help ensure that everything is moving forward smoothly, but also give yourself checkpoints along the way. When things go off-track, you can quickly figure out how to shift back into working mode without having to wait till your review date rolls around.
The entire point is progress, after all! Don't be afraid of failure: In order to learn from failure, first, recognize that failure exists—then realize that everyone fails at something sooner or later. It's part of life.
Experiencing failure in one part of your business doesn't mean you're a failure as an entrepreneur, but if you have failed consistently over time or have had similar experiences across multiple ventures and industries then it may be time to ask why that keeps happening and consider making changes before jumping into another new venture.
Conclusion
There are many benefits to developing and launching corporate eLearning, but it’s critical to keep your employees top of mind when you’re starting out.
By clearly communicating your goals and actively listening to employee feedback along the way, you can make sure your eLearning efforts will be successful from day one.