One of the pain points of building courses is obsoletion: just as you hit the “Publish” button, the clock is counting down to the point at which the information delivered in the course becomes outdated or irrelevant.
Thankfully for instructional designers and L&D managers, learning management systems and authoring tools include dynamic “editing” features that allow content to be fixed or edited on the fly — removing the headache (and expense) of having to reprint or re-teach the material.
But the “Editing” feature within the LMS and Authoring Tool is still not enough.
Though courses having an expiration date is no surprise, there needs to be an agile process in which making content updates and iterations are easy, even after the training content goes live. Today’s digital economy is meant to be quick and easy so nobody wants to make updates to courses, then export…then import… having to repeat this process every time an update is made. Updates should be at the push of a button.
“A passionate and committed workforce is your biggest asset in driving continual improvement,” notes Adrienne Erin in the eLearning Industry blogpost, 5 Ways to Build a Workplace Culture of Continuous Improvement. Employees “are perfectly positioned to see where process improvements could help” and contribute meaningfully to your courses and course delivery.
Admittedly, off-the-shelf (OTS) courses are cheaper and faster to deliver to learners and you can avoid all the administrative tasks. But as the clock is ticking on knowledge and relevance — and as knowledge becomes vital to the success of your employees — OTS and ‘one-size-fits-all’ courses simply cannot meet objectives and specific professional needs.
With a proper learning design system, you can streamline administrative tasks and efforts such as updating content or managing inbound training requests, conducting a needs analysis, crowdsourcing training content with subject matter experts, and the like.
