Digital technology provides innumerable benefits to busy professionals and online learning management systems (LMSs) are no different. An LMS serves to improve the effectiveness of the workforce and lead the business to a visible productivity increase.

In fact, by the end of this year, almost 98% of organizations will use a video-based training program as a part of their digital learning strategies, while 78% of existing LMS  learners regularly use their digital devices to access a training course.    

Most eLearning programs also include some form of gamification as well, and statistics show that this would make 80% of trainees more productive. And 61% of CEOs and CFOs already use it as a tool to unwind.   

The numbers don’t lie, training courses are quite a powerful means of cutting costs, supplying employees with a quality learning approach suitable for each personal style of knowledge acquisition. But the program creation might be tricky if the responsible parties or managers are not sure what to do exactly and how to plan a course. So take a look and follow an easy step-by-step guide to making the learning interesting and engaging.

How to Create a Training Course?

First of all, you need to know your audience. What do they already know and what needs to be taught? When it comes to training course setup using an LMS software , here are a few vital stages which determine the overall success of learning program.

Step 1: Think About the Training Content

What is the purpose of this program? You should first identify the course goals you are trying to accomplish. Define your learning objectives and focus on the skills employees need to learn in order to design an effective course. Seek guidance from customers’ and partners’ requests and look for valuable training content.

However, don’t exclude a worker’s individual characteristics from the process. The most effective training is the one customized to their abilities and learning pace, so take into consideration their flaws and virtues. So the questions to be governed by include:

• Are they self-directed?
• What is their level of knowledge and skills?
• Do they support this type of training?
• Are they goal-oriented?
• Will they feel respected?

Step 2: Gather Materials

Once the training activities have been determined, it’s time to gather the content. Although it can get overwhelming to collect manuals, images, presentations, references, tests, videos, and so on, try to organize everything accordingly. Then go through the content and choose only the most appropriate materials you want to include in the course.

Step 3: Course Outline and Storyboarding

At this point, the learning team members are identified by SMEs, so analyze if there are still some skill gaps the training should target. Moreover, this is the stage where you get to assemble the gathered information into a real learning document. Therefore, use the Goldilocks approach or storyboarding to avoid missing any details and to ensure that the stockholders and your team have easy access to important links, texts, interaction, etc.      

Step 4: Start Building

Your storyboard provides an overall picture of the course design outcome and you will have to work with it to successfully build a prototype. Still, you will need the helping hand of tech tools to complete the course construction. The good thing is that the eLearning field is packed with affordable technology and software.

Throughout team consultations, you should decide upon the most beneficial formats and their combination. From there on, pay attention to incorporating the chosen format appropriately and prepare a draft for further revision.

Step 5: Get a Feedback  

As the course prototype has to get approval from shareholders, send them the created version and ask for feedback. The comments should be thorough to minimize the need for revisions and allow you to detect the issues that need to be corrected. When all of the technicalities are finished, you can finalize the course.

Step 6: The Learning May Begin

Let the team try the designed course and measure its effectiveness. Watch how the course impacts your employees and notice their reaction. Observe them for a while, ask for their opinion, and hand out anonymous surveys. This will give you a better insight into the training productivity since the success rate measures are the final step of your course.

Step 7: Measure the Course Influence on Business

The way to accurately measure the benefits of this program is through an overview of:

• Company’s revenue – Did the profit increased once the course took its toll?
• Cost-effectiveness – Did the costs decrease?
• Quality – Have the product quality and ease of manufacture improved?
• Culture – Is the corporate culture better?

Step 8: Do it All Over Again

In case a training course didn’t make positive changes, there is no need to despair, just do it all over again. When first starting with eLearning courses, no matter how great of an effort you make, it doesn’t necessarily mean the project will be successful. On the other hand, the second time’s the charm, as you will be empowered by profound knowledge of training essentials and team member’s behavior.

Now that you know the requirements, work your way through them. Likewise, simply go back and correct the mistakes from the first trial, whether they might have been misidentified objectives, too little or too much info, and poor judgment of employee’s learning needs.

Conclusion

Training courses are the future of learning and there is no question about it. They provide a great source of knowledge, highly adaptable to every individual learning pace. Having said that, the only thing that can make or break the course is the learning material, poorly designed learning objectives, and not accessing the workforce skill and training requirements. Then again, all of these problems can be easily fixed due to the programming simplicity and the beneficial business outcomes it provides.