Authoring tools deep dive: What do users create with Easygenerator?

If you search for courses or look at MOOC sites, such as Lynda or Udemy, the outcome differs a lot to what people make in Easygenerator. People look for skills they need or think they need on MOOCs.

The content created in Easygenerator, however, is much more specific to a company (culture), an industry (regulations) or job title (tutorials).

Content Breakdown

Content created in Easygenerator can be divided into four categories:

• HR / Formal training (40%)
• Product Training (23%)
• Work instructions (20%)
• Other (17%)

HR / Formal Training: (Remembering) (40%)

The more formal courses are mostly there to serve as documentation. Think company values, compliance, company guidelines, and policies. If we look at Bloom’s Taxonomy (the standard model in L&D of classifying the complexity and specificity of learning), we are looking at the lowest stage: “Remembering”. Formal training is often created by Instructional Designers, as its outcome is less prone to change and it is top-down.

• Onboarding Training
• Compliance Training
• Guidelines

Product Training (Understanding): (23%)

The content we find in the product training category mostly give the learner a frame of reference to do their job:

• Product Training
• Partner Training
• Product Certification
• Software Training
• Customer Support Training

Product Training always solves a need for information to be interpreted, exemplified or explained. This is the “Understand” stage in Bloom’s Taxonomy. Content created in this category gives the learner/consumer a frame of reference to be able to do their job.

Work instructions (Applying): (20%)

The three content types within the work instructions category are:

• Customer Support Training
• Sales Training
• How-tos/Tutorials

Work instructions always solve a basic question: “How do I do X”. If we look at Bloom’s Taxonomy we are looking at the “applying” stage. Work instructions allow employees to either execute or implement tasks. Ninety-nine percent of the time, work instructions are user-generated content, i.e. employees create this content themselves. This is especially true for how-tos and tutorials.

Learning nudges: (Creating) (17%)

The only course type we saw recurring in this category are branding guides and fun quizzes. These would fall into the “Create” stage of Bloom’s Taxonomy. The courses here also serve as documentation, but always to create something. Although fun quizzes might not directly help employees in their day to day objectives.

TLDR:

The content created by Easygenerator users (authors) consists of 40% formal / hr driven training, 23% product training, 20% work instructions and 17% of small learning nuggets.
60% percent of content is created by subject-matter experts (employees) and 40% is created by traditional instructional designers.

*Based on Blooms Taxonomy, we also created the Easygenerator Learning Objective Maker, to allow everybody to easily create instructionally sound learning objectives.