The good news is that eLearning has many benefits to both learners and companies, so it’s not a bad thing if you have to adapt your current instructor-led training (ILT) to eLearning because of COVID-19 or other factors. While it can feel like you’re starting all over again, in fact, there’s a lot you can do to convert your content to an eLearning format. This is also an excellent opportunity to take a look at what’s working and not working about your current training and make some changes.
It can be hard for instructors to find the time to update training materials and content, and when training has been delivered consistently over a long period, it can get stale. Before you rush into simply dumping old content onto a new platform and asking learners to run with it, you need to audit your content and evaluate what will work for an eLearning context.
How?
Delivering online content requires a Learning Management System (LMS) like LearnDash or Moodle. While you can use a tool like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or GoToWebinar, for example, to record online components like webinars or lectures and email these to users, if you don’t have an LMS, then you won’t have a way to enroll/register learners or track their progress. If there are certain requirements learners need to meet in a course, then the LMS helps you keep track of this information. An LMS also allows you to set up activities and interactions and deliver text, along with handling multimedia content.
Just as much as it’s a no-no to put all your materials online and assume it’s eLearning, you also don’t want to go to the opposite extreme of adding too many bells and whistles through the need to “make it interactive.” It’s a fine balance, and it may be useful to engage an Instructional Designer to help you with this. However you decide to go about it, take another run through of your materials to evaluate what might be better presented as visuals, narration, video, or activities for learners. Think about meaningfully engaging learners through quizzes, scenarios, and other interactions. Do they really need a complicated gamification of the material or just good visual elements that highlight key pieces of information? Find that balance.
Some tools you might be able to use include:
With any luck, we’ll return to some kind of normalcy eventually… and that means that you may be returning to instructor-led training. This doesn’t mean that you have to toss out the eLearning components you’ve created. This can be a great opportunity to offer blended learning, where learners complete some aspects of their training on their own time online and then in-person sessions can be used to reinforce certain topics, address questions and concerns, work on group activities or other pieces that will work better in person.
Although this can feel overwhelming at first, it’s actually an amazing opportunity to re-evaluate and refresh your current content and adjust your training objectives. It will take some time to make the conversion, which you need to factor into your planning, but with a little bit of upfront effort, you can ensure that your training continues to be relevant, easy to consume and focused on the needs of your audience!
If you’re feeling stuck in this process, contact PathWise! We’ve worked with lots of companies and organizations who’ve found themselves in the same place you might be in and will be happy to work with you to find the best solution for your needs.