Custom eLearning course development: What it is and how to implement it

Custom e-learning course development. What is it?

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to training employees. Each organization has its own learning needs, and what kind of knowledge your employees are looking for can vary. That’s where custom e-learning course development can help.

Custom e-learning course development refers to the process of creating tailored learning content to meet the various learning needs throughout your organization. There are several ways to carry this process out. You could involve an instructional designer to create custom content, or you can empower your in-house subject matter experts to create it themselves.

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At Easygenerator, we recommend the latter — an approach known as Employee-generated Learning (EGL). Enabling your subject matter experts to create custom content for their peers comes with several added benefits, which we’ll cover in more detail later.

How to custom your eLearning course development

Here’s a generic process to go about custom e-learning course development and design:

• • Discover

    Have a detailed conversation with your key stakeholders or even learners to understand their performance or learning context, goals, and gaps.

  • Analyse

    Classify the needs as Cognitive, Behavioral, and Social Needs. This will aid in further designing the learning content accordingly.

  • Design

    Create a rough storyboard that works like a blueprint of the course. It clearly indicates the outline, the flow, design, and technical elements that would go into the course.

  • Validate

    Get your stakeholders to review and confirm the plan before you delve deep into content creation.

  • Develop

    Start authoring the first draft of the content along with visual elements using an authoring tool.

  • Test

    Get your team to review the content for language and UX across devices while you may ask your stakeholders for technical accuracy.

  • Publish and Maintain

    You can publish your custom e-learning module on the cloud or platform of your choice. You would update or refresh the content in case of any future changes.

Don’t forget to check out the top 5 e-learning examples to enhance learner engagement.

Benefits of custom e-learning course development

Designing custom eLearning courses is actually one of the best practices in e-learning and comes with many advantages, including:

• • Personalized learning experiences

    Unlike generic, off-the-shelf content, custom e-learning courses are designed with your employees’ unique needs in mind. That means they stand to benefit from a more personalized learning experience that fulfills their knowledge gaps more accurately.

  • Better learner motivation and engagement

    With more specific learning objectives targeting your organization’s unique needs, learners don’t have to wonder what value they’ll be getting out of the content. They’ll be more likely to have a meaningful and relevant learning experience, which would increase their motivation to engage.

  • Time and cost savings

    While off-the-shelf content may seem like the timeliest and cheapest solution, it can also lead to more costs down the line. Providing tailored e-learning from the start allows your learners to access the exact knowledge from the beginning, reducing the need for follow-up content. And, when e-learning is created in-house using a user-friendly authoring tool, you can keep content up to date over time. This prevents the need to create entirely new courses on the same subject all over again, saving you both time and money in the long run.

Customize your e-learning courses with Easygenerator

Traditional methods of creating e-learning tend to take too long. Not only can this be expensive, but it also poses the risk that the content will be outdated by the time it reaches the learner. That’s why we recommend an Employee-generated Learning approach to develop a custom e-learning module.

By putting the content creation process in the hands of your subject matter experts, you eliminate the need to involve instructional designers who would have had to validate their content first anyway. This not only speeds up content creation but also ensures that learners are getting trained by people who know their needs first-hand: colleagues.

But to ensure your employees can create engaging content, you’ll need an authoring tool built for subject matter experts — one with zero learning curve. That’s where Easygenerator comes in.

Between our user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, in-app support, and personalized onboarding sessions, anyone can start creating custom e-learning solutions without a background in instructional design.