How to Choose An eLearning Development Company
In order to ensure that you are selecting the right elearning development company, regardless of your level of expertise, you should ask several important questions.
Elearning development companies should function as an organic part of your existing team. If you’ve ever watched a NASCAR race you will see the car go into the pit area and all the members of the pit crew rush out to do their job as quickly and as precisely as possible.
An efficient and effective elearning development company should be a part of your company’s pit crew; a collaborative solution to your needs, engaging your staff and quickly bringing them up to speed on the subject at hand. The education that they facilitate should be immediately noticeable.
Like the NASCAR driver you should not have to worry about the level of accuracy and quality the guys changing the tires are working at, the pit crew has it all under control. With a quality elearning development company, you will not need to be concerned about educating your staff since the process is in expert hands.
The following questions are key to the selection process:
1. Does your content need to be specialized, do you need custom courses, or will existing elearning templates suffice?
Of course, industry experts will always lean towards recommending custom content creation and highlight its benefits. However, sometimes such course development is unnecessary as your elearning requirements might not be so stringent.
One must clearly identify the needs of the business and act accordingly in order to make the most of the investment. Basic business certification courses might be easily developed using off-the-shelf content. However, for courses that involve industry-specific issues such as educating your employees on your industry specific safety regulations, all-inclusive custom content will aid learners in understanding, retaining and applying the information more effectively.
2. Does the elearning provider align with your brand and provide significant value?
An experienced company will create an educational roadmap with you to ensure that your goals will be realized. With a company that shares your values, it will be easy to see the overall benefits of the program once you begin working together. A flexible and effective company will construct education that relates to real-life work situations.
3. How involved does the program need to be?
I.e., does an asynchronous program fit the bill, or is it worth investing in an integrated course with video conferences, etc.? There may be certain situations in which you will need to implement a day of traditional, hands on training that is supplemented by the elearning course. Most serious elearning development companies will have options for both, depending on your needs and location.
4. Around which platform is the course based?
Specifically, which tools will you need to implement the course? Different platforms will have different benefits. Do you need a tablet for each employee or software that is specific to Mac OS or Windows? Perhaps a projector will be involved or a webcam setup. These questions are most important to ask with off-the-shelf courses that are not specifically tailored to your business.
If you go into a course blind and do not have all the required technology, you are wasting your time and money. Make sure that the company knows that tools you have to work with before you make a purchase. The point of elearning is efficiency, and this is something you wouldn’t want to negate because you didn’t ask enough questions about how the course will be implemented.
5. Is the instructional design user-friendly?
This one goes hand in hand with number 4. Creating e-learning memorable and easy to comprehend in the fast paced corporate environment requires an expert hand. A good elearning development company will make sure that the curses are well written, indelible and fun for the learner.
When you hire the experts at eLearning.net to support your project, we become an integral part of your content development pit crew. We know that the race is long and requires for us to work as a partner with you, committed completely to your project. We invest in understanding about our clients’ organizations and always work towards continuous improvement. What’s more, we are the eLearning development company that other eLearning companies call when they need help. We never outsource projects, so you can count on us to get the job done on time, on budget, and with exceptional quality.