Custom e-Learning Development – Focused on the Learner’s Experience and Your Company’s Objectives
Custom e-Learning Development done properly is a great way to create an outstanding learning experience for employees across all levels of your organization.
Although some companies choose the less costly and more convenient pre-packaged eLearning courses, there are many advantages to choosing custom e-Learning development instead. In the long run these advantages translate to significant cost savings, better knowledge retention, and more motivated employees.
As the name suggests, custom e-Learning development refers to the creation of tailor made training courses specifically designed for your organization. The e-learning courses begin with your specific learners’ experience and your organizational objectives in mind.
Think of custom e-Learning development as that cool high-school teacher who always dresses stylishly, tells funny stories, and shows awesome videos to complement a generic text book. Did you enjoy going to his/her classes? Was learning a more positive and fun experience? What was it about this experience that you made it better for you? The learning was delivered in a way tailored to a specific audience – your classroom.
Well, by designing your training courses from the ground up, you are able to transfer knowledge more effectively by using real-world case studies from your organization’s history and industry-specific examples to which your learners can directly relate.
Take this scenario for example:
Your company is an airline and its objective is to teach all flight attendants how to deal with challenging customers on long distance flights. It would be a more rewarding and engaging learning experience for your course to:
- Be branded with your corporate logo and colors
- Include realistic and common scenarios that either regularly or or likely occur on a plane
- Present branching scenarios that allow fight attendants to choose how they should react to given scenarios
- Include quotes, tips, and other content from company executives, “attendant of the year” award recipients, and other employees
Keep Your eLearning Courses Up-To-Date and Relevant
Another advantage of custom eLearning development is that you are able modify your courses when structural, technological, product or service changes occur in your organization. This helps to maintain the relevancy and reliability of the information being presented to the learners over time.
Take for example a situation where you need your employees to learn a critical process that involves a certain chain of approval and a list of external service providers. What if you are a growing company with a constantly evolving organizational structure or list of service providers? Chances are, you will need to make constant modifications to your course to ensure that employees are up to date with the process changes.
Additionally, creating custom eLearning storyboards gives your organization more control to alter the information being presented if it is determined that some parts are obsolete or inefficient in facilitating learning. In other words, creating your own proprietary content gives you the opportunity to continuously improve the information and the way it is presented rather than be beholden to external vendors or limited to content provided by off-the-shelf content.
Customize the look and feel of your eLearning Courses
So you have researched and created your content with your end users (the learners) in mind. The information that they are learning has been created based on your organization’s objectives and it speaks directly to them in a way that they can easily relate to. Custom e-Learning development allows you to put on your creative hat and take things a step further. You can design attention grabbing courses that look and feel the way you want them to. From custom illustrations, colors, typography, narration voice overs, video production and much more – you are free to customize every visual aspect of the training course. Not only will your learners know that the course was made with them in mind but you can also convey a consistent message by using imagery and consistent with your brand.
These are only a few of the many advantages of custom e-Learning development. However, as you can imagine, having the freedom and flexibility to create dynamic and engaging online courses gives you more control over how you share information across your organization.
If you think that your organization could benefit from a customized eLearning course, let us know and we can start with an elearning consultation and creating your very own eLearning Storyboard – the blueprint to create a course that meets or exceeds your expectations.