Learn Why You Should Convert Your Outdated eLearning Content
What if I told you that converting your obsolete eLearning content into engaging training doesn't have to be difficult and that all you need to do is to follow a few tips, and you'll get it all done? In this article, we'll be exploring a few methods that you can utilize to convert your outdated eLearning content into highly engaging training. However, before we get into that, let's first take a look at a few reasons why it's essential to convert your obsolete content.
Why Is It Essential To Convert Your Outdated eLearning Content Into Highly Engaging Training?
While there are many reasons why you should convert your outdated content, here are 4 reasons that you may find helpful.
1. Make The Content More Relevant
I'm sure you know that we are in the digital age and that technology is evolving quickly. While that has a positive effect on the eLearning industry, there are also some negative effects. One of them is that most courses become obsolete and irrelevant. So, to make your outdated content more relevant to your audience, there's always a need to make it more engaging and appealing.
2. Make Learning Accessible On The Go
During the initial stages of eLearning, most courses were developed to run on laptops and desktop computers alone. That's because they were the only devices compatible with the internet at that time. However, with the evolution of technology, different devices, including smartphones and tablets, have become common for accessing information. Hence, the need for organizations to update their existing courses in order to be mobile compatible.
3. Deliver Content In A Format That Caters To Employees' Learning Needs
Another reason to convert your outdated eLearning content into engaging training is to assist you in delivering content that meets your employees' learning styles. Without a doubt, one-size-fits-all is not a good fit for online training. That's because most employees have different learning styles and preferences that work for them. So, by converting your obsolete content, you tend to provide them with personalized training that caters to each individual employee's learning needs.
4. Make Courses More Appealing
One other reason to convert your obsolete content is to enable you to deliver more appealing content to your learners. That includes making your content easy to navigate and placing other design elements like hyperlinks, buttons, and icons in the right place.
Methods To Convert Your Obsolete eLearning Content
1. Carry Out A Training Needs Analysis
The first step to updating your obsolete eLearning content is to know the present condition of your courses and what they are lacking. However, to do that, you'll need to carry out a Training Needs Analysis in order to create an action plan.
You can carry out your needs analysis by giving out surveys to your audience. Ask them how they feel about the specific course and what elements are missing from it. By so doing, you are able to generate data that can assist you during the conversion process.
2. Enhance Your Learners' Engagement
One way to enhance your learners' engagement is by adding curated content, including images, videos, or infographics, where necessary, to your outdated content. Doing that not only helps make it more visually appealing, but also makes it highly interactive and engaging. Apart from adding curated content, you can also work on the assessment and assignment aspects of the courses. Most obsolete eLearning content usually focuses on static learning when it comes to assessing learners. So, to make it more engaging, it's best to avoid using the same case study over and over again.
As an L&D professional, the following tips will help you enhance your learners' engagement:
- Lengthy legacy eLearning content is always boring and disengaging to most learners—especially the Generation Y employees. So, to make it more engaging, consider converting the content into microlearning nuggets, including videos and infographics.
- Since most learners prefer to access information on the go, you should consider converting your eLearning content to deliver mobile learning.
3. Boost Learner Retention Ability
Although the traditional approaches, including essays and quizzes, help one retain knowledge, they're not that effective with Generation Y learners.
So, to make your obsolete eLearning content more relevant in order to help learners retain knowledge, you should consider converting it to scenario-based learning. Apart from that, you can also introduce micro-challenges as they can be handy in helping improve employee retention ability.
4. Make Training More Practical
The main objective of online training is to ensure that employees are able to acquire knowledge and apply it in real life. But that's not the case for obsolete eLearning content, as it is only good for teaching theories. So, to make training more applicable to real life, ensure you repurpose your outdated content by using branching simulations. This will help improve your employees' decision-making abilities. Apart from that, experiential learning through gamification is also a good strategy, and it enables learners to relate knowledge to real-life problems.
Conclusion
Now that you've gone through this article, I'm sure you'll agree with me that revamping your outdated eLearning content is not that difficult to do. It's a gradual process and requires that you take your time while doing it. So, follow the above-listed strategies and start making headway today.
