What If Your New eLearning Authoring Tool Provided Gain Without Pain?

Switching To A New eLearning Authoring Tool
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Summary: What if switching eLearning authoring tools actually produced benefits? What if the switch created cost savings and even new value?

Real-World Value, Real-World Benefits

Switching to a different eLearning authoring tool might seem like it will require some pain. There’s always a learning curve. You need to learn where features are located in the new authoring tool and how they work differently. And sometimes there are other learning curves as well, even changes to how your team actually creates. After all, tools are something we use but they also inevitably shape how we work.

But what if switching eLearning authoring tools actually produced benefits? What if the switch created cost savings and even new value? Here are 3 examples of how our clients realized dramatic value when making the switch to dominKnow|ONE as their eLearning authoring tool.

1. 40% Budget Savings On Development Cost

Vital Learning [1] has been providing skills training and development courses and content for more than 25 years. Over that time, the type of content they need to offer has obviously changed. A few years ago, they had to make another new change, switching to produce content that was mobile-friendly as Flash began to be rejected by mobile devices and modern browsers.

They had a collection of 25 online courses—with more than 1,000 pages of content in total—that needed to be created from scratch to meet the delivery needs of mobile devices. To do this, they needed a new eLearning authoring tool. Their choice was our eLearning authoring tool. Our authoring tool gave them an ideal solution to meet the technical content need of effective mobile delivery. It also provided the team with some bonuses as they worked. The platform’s content reusable workflows saved critical development time.

Vital Learning was able to create its own set of template pages and use these as the basis for all its content. Since our eLearning authoring tool is web-based, those templates were available to all authors immediately, no matter where they were located. There was no need to send source files back and forth, authors could simply select the template page and immediately use it.

Using our web-based authoring tool gave them easy ways to collaborate, such as providing simple and quick reviewer access throughout the development cycle of each new course. Reviewers could provide feedback from anywhere, and authors could easily track feedback comments as they completed the required changes.

“If we weren't using dominKnow, this process would have been very lengthy and tricky, but [this] platform made remote collaboration seamless,” says Todd Macey, who led the project for Vital Learning.

Making the switch to a new eLearning authoring tool was also pretty easy. Their team had no issues getting up to speed quickly using the available self-study training guides and our industry-best support. And switching eLearning authoring tools was made even more painless as they looked at how well our authoring tool worked for them—the 25 new courses came in 40% under budget.

2. Easy Content Conversion And Unexpected 50% Translation Savings

UL Environment, Health, Safety, and Sustainability (UL EHS Sustainability) [2] has been offering safety training options and employee health management solutions since 1999, building on the 120+ year history of its parent organization Underwriters Laboratories role as the premier independent safety science company. More than 2,000 organizations take advantage of UL EHS Sustainability’s course content libraries.

About five years ago, UL EHS Sustainability had to phase out its use of a Flash-based authoring tool and faced big concerns about the effort required to move a collection of 200 completed courses into a new eLearning authoring tool. They chose our authoring tool for their HTML5-based content publishing. And to help them with the transition, our services team created an XML-import solution that parsed the original course content packages component parts then re-constructed on our platform.

The process took care of almost 80% of the effort of content conversion compared to making new content from scratch. Their authoring team was able to focus on reviewing the converted courses and making minor adjustments. Switching to our eLearning authoring tool also produced direct cost savings for the UL EHS Sustainability authoring team.

Our platform’s authoring features are robust and easy to use, so team members no longer need to spend time doing complex and time-consuming programming to achieve many tasks. That expertise can now be focused on creating more engaging and effective learning experiences.

The platform’s built-in translation workflows make it easy to duplicate a course, set the copy to a second (or third or fourth or more) language, and export out all the text to give to a translation team. When the translation team returns the completed file back to the authoring team, a simple and quick upload automatically swaps the new language text in for the original text in the copied new-language course.

The UL EHS Sustainability authoring team has done hundreds of course translations.

“We estimate a 50% reduction in translation costs with the dominKnow platform compared to our previous methods and tools,” says Susan Murphy, who was director of Professional Learning Services at UL EHS Sustainability when the team chose us and is now head of Professional Services at UL.

3. 25% Development Savings Plus Cutting Review Time In Half

The Society of Actuaries (SOA) [3] is the world’s largest actuarial organization with more than 27,000 members in more than 75 countries around the world. To support its membership, SOA creates a tremendous amount of learning content to support pre-qualification as well as continuing education. When that volume of content became impossible to create and manage effectively using their original eLearning authoring tool, SOA turned to us.

They immediately saw development time decrease as they were able to reuse content for one audience to also meet the needs of their second audience. “We easily repurposed the content of our pre-qualification courses to create most of our professional development material—saving 25% of our development time,” says Leslie Fausher, SOA’s eLearning manager.

Once the content was built, using our eLearning authoring tool also made it easier for SOA to carry out updates. Since all assets used in their courses are stored in the central media library, they can confidently make changes and know they are tracked and applied to all uses of an image across all courses.

“With the vast amount of content we have, it would be very time-consuming to have to manually replace images and documents as they change on a very regular basis. With dominKnow, it’s very simple and straight-forward, with versions and history all tracked for us,” Fausher says.

Choosing our authoring tool also streamlined SOA’s course review process. Reviewers can add comments from any geographic location and it automatically tracks and assembles the review comments in a to-do list.

What Will You Gain By Switching eLearning Authoring Tools?

What these three teams experienced isn’t unique. We see many clients turn to our authoring tool to solve one main problem and then recognize that it also solves other problems for them in the process.

References:

[1] Leadership Training With Real Business Impact

[2] UL EHS Sustainability

[3] Society of Actuaries (SOA)

eBook Release: dominKnow | ONE
dominKnow | ONE
dominKnow | ONE is a robust collaborative Course Authoring solution with responsive, traditional & software simulation authoring functions making it easy enough for SMEs yet powerful for advanced designers all in one central system.

Originally published at www.dominknow.com.