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How to Create eLearning Content: Four Factors to Consider

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Black and white picture of an open notebook
Thought Industries
March 28, 2017
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How do you create eLearning content that learners find interesting and effective? Well, before diving into content creation, it’s important to understand whether or not your organization is poised for success and growth.
“For organizations, it’s not just about the revenue coming in from the sale of content, it’s about the expenses going out.” It seems obvious, but there are a lot of costs and efficiencies that organizations need to consider when creating content.
In a recent webinar, Thought Industries co-founder and CEO Barry Kelly and Talented Learning lead analyst and CEO John Leh asked participants to identify their biggest obstacle when creating eLearning content. Most webinar attendees flagged “lack of staff” (36%) as their biggest hurdle in creating content, followed by “cost” (23%), “technology” (15%) and “interoperability” (8%).

Addressing content creation roadblocks

Lack of resources — staff and money — are two commonly encountered roadblocks in the realm of business. Before diving into launching a fully operational learning business, Kelly and Leh suggest that organizations do a deep dive to address these roadblocks by asking questions like:

  • Are you fulfilling the market opportunity?
  • Are you staffed for growth?
  • Do you have the correct infrastructure?
  • Can you diversity product offerings?

After conducting market research, asking important questions and crafting a realistic online learning business model, it’s time to launch into content creation.

How to create eLearning content of value

“Finding out how to create the highest quality content in the most efficient ways is really the pinnacle of what most organizations are trying to achieve,” say Leh. There are a number of factors to consider when trying to do just this:

  • Instructional design: According to a study, learners forget about 50% of what they learned in a given day. This is a big problem if you are running a learning business. So, how are you going to change this behavior and encourage learners to consume content in a desirable way? To improve knowledge retention, it’s important to improve the instructional design of your courseware. Offering a lesson with 20 flip cards instead of a 20-page PDF file as learning material might prove more effective.
  • Authoring process and tools: You need an authoring tool to create your courseware and learning content. Invest in an learning business platform with creative, unique authoring tools to help execute on instructional design desires. This will not only improve the quality of your content, but make it easier for your subject matter experts to create courseware.
  • Content scalability: With authoring capabilities in place, it’s time to create, update and distribute content. But, can you do so at the velocity your business desires? Address any scalability issues right off the bat. Odds are, scalability is closely tied to your content creation roadblock — whether that be lack of staff, cost, technology or interoperability.
  • Content differentiation: In the market research and business model stages of the process, you should have identified ways to create exceptional, unique learning experience for your learners. Now it’s time to truly make your content offering more desirable than your competitors. If your competitors are offering photos stories, create something more stimulating like animated videos or flip cards (see our Learning Business Platform’s flip cards in the image below). Discover ways to set your organization apart.



For more on how to create captivating online learning content, listen to Leh and Kelly’s full webinar.

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