Planning to Switch to eLearning? Here are Your Options!
You have decided to switch to eLearning to meet the ever-growing training needs in your organization. That’s good, but what are the options available in that case. There are few quick solutions and there are others which pay off well in the long run… Let’s look at some of these options:
Get off-the-shelf courses – This is the easiest route for you. There are many companies who provide eLearning content off-the-shelf. They have various licensing models to suit the requirements of small and large companies. You just need to check for the suitability of the content for your organization and you are ready to roll out the courses for the employees. This reduces the challenges of implementing eLearning to a great extent.
Then, why don’t we all follow the same model? The downside of using these courses is that you cannot customize them as per your requirement and you have to go with the generic content. Also, you won’t be able to add your own branding to the courses as they are not developed by your company. Another challenge is that it can become an expensive affair in the long run.
Take help from eLearning vendors – Looking at the downsides of using off-the-shelf courses, let’s talk about outsourcing the courses to external companies for development. All you have to do is discuss your training requirement, objectives and other specifications with your eLearning vendor and they will create customized courses and/or deploy them for you.
This option is good, unless you have budget constraints, as here we are talking about a model, where the ROI should be beneficial for both, your company and the vendor company. Also, once created, you can’t update these courses, unless you have a maintenance contract with the vendor.
Setup an eLearning Team – Though this is the most challenging route, especially in the initial stages, it is great to have your own eLearning dream team. This option is beneficial in the long run, as we can customize the content the way we want and maintenance also becomes easy, as we are the owners of the source files.
If this is so beneficial, why isn’t everyone setting up an eLearning team? That’s because of the nuances involved with setting it up. You have to find the right set of people with the right skillset. Get the required software and infrastructure to create great eLearning content.
Repurpose ILT – What if you already have all the training content in the form of ILT? No problem, you are not alone. A lot of us are sailing in the same boat. So what should we do? The saviors here is the Rapid Authoring tools which help you convert the existing PPTs or slides into eLearning content.
Wow! Isn’t that quick! Hold on… this can be a quick solution but not interesting enough to hold the attention of the learners as the style and flow of ILT content may not be suitable for eLearning mode of delivery. So, you may have to do little/more tweaking. But again, it’s a quick solution…
More later… 
These are purely my views and I would like to know your thoughts about it… Please leave a comment on this blog post to continue the discussion.
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