It’s tough enough figuring out what learning and courses employees need. Then, the L&D team needs to build them.
Responsible for ensuring that employees are acquiring the skills they need, today’s learning leaders are tasked with delivering all necessary learning — quickly and at scale.
For broader or more fundamental knowledge, many L&D leaders have turned to off-the-shelf courses created by online unversities or learning portals, like Lynda.com or Udemy.
Pro tip: Lynda.com is part of LinkedIn, which was just purchased by Microsoft for $26 billion. If you are an enterprise customer of Lynda.com, ask your account rep about any goodies, such as free or discounted Microsoft certification exam registrations for your employees.
But packaged courses only go so far. Content can get stale, or the online university may go out of business.
More importantly, your employees need to succeed based on specific knowledge and processes carried out by your organization. They need to be introduced to and trained in this knowledge, and the only way to do this is to create courses. A lot of courses. The learning leader may find that he or she needs to create dozens of courses at once. What to do?
Instructional designers use the tried-and-true ADDIE model when developing courses: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation.
The Analysis is often the most time-consuming part, as learning leaders need to first figure out what type of learning is needed, and what the training requirements will be.
We at Cognota® do not suggest skipping this most important step of course design — though there do exist ways to make it easier, thereby accelerating development and getting courses out the door to learners more efficiently.
Technology promises to remove the drudgery of repetitive tasks. Shouldn’t course creation be made easier through technology?
