Creating a Stellar eLearning Course for Corporate Training

This article was written by Tanya Galton, a global eLearning expert and director of iSpring Academy, an eLearning software provider. Leading a team of more than 30 professionals, Tanya drives the development and launch of courses and certification programs for a range of digital professions.

Often, there are significant operational challenges that working with a Learning Management System (LMS) and eLearning solutions can address for businesses.

First, an LMS digitizes accumulated domain knowledge and expertise, turning it into learning materials. It also offers the ability to streamline learning processes and scale your corporate learning efficiently. And then, it also decreases your dependency on instructional designers and professional coaches.

But of course, businesses want to have some tangible data and a clear understanding of what exactly makes an eLearning course they have created successful.

In this article, we will look closely into the criteria that allow you to estimate the value and usefulness of your eLearning course.

Obvious Success Metrics

Of course, there are very clear metrics that allow you to assess how well your eLearning course is performing.

For instance, you can easily measure the quality of your onboarding course by looking at the increase in the number of employees who have successfully passed the trial period. Alternatively, it can be a completion rate: unless legally or otherwise obliged, users tend to only complete the courses they genuinely enjoy and find useful.

Success could also be assessed via test scores upon course completion. If your learners are not doing too well, perhaps the course material is not adjusted for their reception. Of course, it’s also about how well your trainees apply the new knowledge in their work and the increase in their varying performance metrics after the course.

All of the discussed metrics speak rather eloquently about the quality of your courses and training materials, but there is a key caveat. You can only measure them after your course is made, launched and completed by trainees. Sometimes, only long after its release.

Keeping this in mind, are there any criteria you should strive for, and considerations you need to factor in to be able to create a successful course? The short answer is yes.

Let’s take a look at some of the things you should consider before starting to work on your course to increase its chances of performing well.

Define Your Target Audience

Obviously, corporate training is designed to solve existing problems and fill in skill gaps. However, when you analyze which problems you mean to solve, it is very important to correctly define the target audience of your course.

For example, if you deal with very high turnover rates of new hires, it could be that your onboarding course and procedures are poor quality, thus improvement in this area is needed.

After all, according to research, strong onboarding improves new hire retention by 82%. However, the problem may not only be in your onboarding. For instance, if you employ a mentor or buddy system, it could be poor mentor training that influences your new hire retention, hence you need to improve that as well.

It would be a mistake to think that your corporate education should start with training your C-level executives.

Your primary task here is to very precisely define the operational and human resource sphere of your business that needs improvement and can benefit from professional training. After this, you research and determine the tasks that your employees have a hard time coping with, and here you have it, the answers to questions such as “Who do we teach?” and “What do we teach?”

Set Clear and Realistic Goals

Speaking of questions, “Why do we need to teach that?” is no less important and relevant than the aforementioned.

You need to have a very clear understanding of what it is that you hope to achieve by offering training. Then, you also need to formulate the goal as precisely as possible.

For example, “I want my sales specialists to perform better” is very vague. But “I want my customer care specialists to learn and actively use an effective script to work with customer reclamations which would help reduce the number of reclamations and improve customer satisfaction by X%” is much more precise, therefore serving a targeted purpose.

Another important quality of a well-set goal is being realistic. It is important that your goals don’t jump from point A to point Z, skipping the rest of the alphabet in the process.

Setting up your goals this way will help you to structure your course material so that it aligns with the goals and solve your problems with more precision.

Set Up Quantitative Metrics

It is advisable to think of implementing quantitative metrics to measure your success early on in the process. If possible, make sure that your goals include the metrics which you will later use to measure your success.

For instance, “I want my front-line customer support to be able to handle certain typical cases to reduce the support load on developers and QA”. Through this, you will be able to measure the load reduction later, how well your course helped in that.

Offer Material that is Relevant to your Target Audience

Once you have determined your target audience, it is time for a detailed analysis of its learning needs and capabilities.

Drawing a detailed User Persona may help here. This will help you to establish the typical learning habits of your future trainees, assessing their average skill level, technical background, computer savviness and other factors that may influence learning.

Offering a course that is too easy or not challenging enough will make your trainees bored and disappointed. Offering a course that implies too steep a learning curve can easily leave learners discouraged, doubting their abilities.

Define Criteria for Business Alignment

A successful course should be well-aligned with your company’s business goals. Aside from addressing particular learning needs of your trainees, it also needs to alleviate the pains and pressure points of your business.

For instance, an eLearning course can eliminate the problem of inconsistent training quality across various company departments. This problem is quite common with traditional on-site corporate training, where much depends on the mentor and organization.

Clearly showcasing a clear set of business benefits that your course offers will also help you when you communicate with stakeholders in your company to justify the need for certain courses or eLearning solutions.

Check your Course for Accessibility Features

Another thing that is vital to understand: what are the means through which your trainees will access the course?

Do all of them have access to a PC, or designated time to use it at work to study? If not, your course needs to be mobile-friendly.

Think – are your learners accustomed to reading large amounts of texts? Or perhaps, it will be easier for them to listen to an audio version when commuting or taking a walk? It’s best to plan for a wide range and availability of features from the inception stage, so that you can create course content accordingly.

Potential Mistakes to Avoid

Of course, to create a successful course, you need to know what pitfalls to avoid and what factors in course creation can make your learning process go awry.

We at iSpring host our own iSping Academy, where we help our customers with no specific instructional design background to create professional and educationally sound courses.

We have an entire checklist that businesses can work with in order to make sure that they don’t make any common and easily avoidable mistakes. Here are a few important points to consider:

Understand the costs of training, direct and indirect, and compare them against the predicted ROI

It’s best practice to clearly calculate the costs of creating and implementing your eLearning course from the start. Very carefully study the capabilities of your eLearning provider. Check if there are any software or other limitations that will prevent you from making your course exactly what you envision.

Do not overload your courses with content

A course is much more likely to succeed if it’s focused on a particular goal and business need. For instance, in your onboarding course you should include only the essentials that will help a new hire to jumpstart their work with your company. Don’t overload them with information or details they don’t immediately need, particularly when they are just starting out.

Do not underestimate the importance of learner engagement

Regardless of how serious or important your course material is, you need to keep your users motivated. Dull presentation can easily kill motivation. Incorporate interactive elements like quizzes, simulations, and scenario-based learning to keep learners engaged.

Make sure the course doesn’t lack practical application

Theory is great, but a truly successful course should always offer learners the ability to practice their new skills in a safe environment. For instance, if you are training your frontline sales staff for a new seasonal promotion, give them an opportunity to try out the new material before they do field work.

Do not leave the course out of your learning infrastructure

Any course you create should add and complement other learning materials. Do not make it a standalone feature. For more advanced learners, courses should reference more complicated cases or materials. It should also make use of your knowledge base, case studies, and should be a solid and fully-fledged part of your corporate learning infrastructure and information exchange ecosystem.

Even the best learning content is far less effective when it’s isolated from your corporate context.

Conclusion

Creating a successful eLearning course for corporate training or onboarding involves more than just digitizing information and making it available online or through an eLearning app. It requires a strategic approach.

Following the guidelines above, you will be able to create stellar-performing courses that respond to the needs of your business and your trainees very precisely.

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Featured image: Jacob Wackerhausen, iStock.