LMS 101: 4 Tips for Your Own E-Learning

Learning Management Systems 101 is a weekly blog series exploring how employers can rethink traditional employee training and move toward e-learning solutions, which are faster, easier to access, and more cost effective. “4 Tips for Creating Your Own E-Learning” is the sixth post of the series.

LMS 101: 4 Tips for Your Own E-Learning

Today’s workforce is increasingly comprised of people who are paid to think and learn. In order to provide the best new content for your employees, your online learning course needs to be a carefully crafted mix of relevancy and entertainment to ensure employees retain the information. Here are four tips to generating online learning content that can help today’s learners.

On-Demand Webinar: Higher Education, Engaging Employees Through E-Learning

1. The Reason(s) Why

As you build new learning content, ask yourself:

What is RED today that needs to be GREEN tomorrow?
- What report margins am I looking at, and which elements need to increase or decrease?
What are the c-suite level stress points, and how can this training course impact those business needs?
Who is my audience? All employees or just a select department, possibly a management level or maybe this course is just for clients?
What is the deadline for employee implementation of this new knowledge?

These questions are relevant to every business, no matter your industry, and by identifying the reasons why you want to build a new e-learning course, you now have your purpose.

2. The Call to Action

At this point, you know the purpose of the course, so how are you going to grab your audience’s attention? Will this course increase chances of promotion, or maybe provide the audience with tools to close more sales? What is your call to action (CTA), meaning, what is the stimulus to achieve this aim, what is the reason to sit through an online training class?

Factual research is particularly important when crafting your CTA, whether you’re administering training that deals with government regulations, industry guidelines, selling tactics or customer service improvements. Be sure to revisit company policies and procedures – such as those pertaining to employee benefits – to ensure learners receive the most current and relevant information as they set aside this time to learn.

3. Design the Training Experience

The ability to learn fast is a dynamic competitive advantage in business; and a good learning management system (LMS should allow you publish online training materials incorporating different tools, which all need to answer the learner’s unspoken question, “How fast can I see success?

Videos
Podcasts
Webinars
Text
PDFs
PowerPoint presentations

The current generation entering the workforce, the millennials, are tech-dependent and expect to learn on the job, with modern tech, and quickly. Use their expectations to your businesses advantage. By utilizing a mix of media you can increase information retention and engagement, and will help your audience, no matter the generation, to learn fast. So, choose the mediums that best allow you to convey your message, and the motivation behind the learning opportunity.

4. Measure the Outcome

Producing effective e-learning content is meaningless if you can’t report it. If you can’t automatically survey to learn the effectiveness of your new 20-minute course, then what did you really do? A sound LMS should provide metrics by region, manager, percentages and a centralization point to access data that leads to productive reporting of the learning process.

With these online learning tips, you can design meaningful and helpful content to enable your employees to reach their career objectives and your business goals. And, if implemented effectively, e-learning can lead to a happier and more engaged workforce.

To learn more about the evolution of corporate learning, employee training, why tech is crucial to onboarding, how to boost employee engagement and the latest teaching trend in the workplace, be sure to check out our entire LMS 101 series.