3 easy ways media companies can improve the quality of training content

• 3 min read

3 easy ways publishing companies can improve the quality of their online training materials

Even the best learning management system (LMS) is only as good as its content. We borrowed a few tips from our friends at the learning content authoring tool Elucidat to compile a few best practices that media and publishing companies can use to improve the quality of learning content for partner training, internal employee training and customer training programs.

Today’s journalists and digital media professionals spend more time on the go, away from the office or newsroom, and more time engaging with online content across multiple devices. For employee training programs, it makes sense for organizations to enable their people to make valuable use of their time.

1. Create modern and convenient bite-sized learning modules

In a recent blog for Elucidat, Steve Penfold notes that in a 2014 survey from the Rapid Learning Institute, 94% of respondents said online learners prefer short-form training modules for soft-skills training – in chunks that are about 10 minutes or less. In the same survey, 65% of respondents said the typical elearning module presents too much information.

So volume and complexity play a key role in engagement, and highly engaging learning objects are often considered to be of a higher quality. To take your engaging learning content a step further, it’s important to recognize how your people actually want to access it, and place training within easy reach.

2. Place learning in the workflow, at the point of need

Penfold points out that this can easily be addressed by making bite-sized learning objects available on any device (bonus points if your online training platform allows offline viewing of course content).

Since more employers are placing learning within the workflow (instead of allocating dedicated blocks of training time and requiring learners to stop what they’re doing to get training), it makes sense to break training up throughout the day, in smaller, 10 to 15-minute nuggets.

Penfold notes:
… If people are on the go or are reviewing learning material on small screens, they’ll be less able to watch or focus for extended periods of time — no matter how keen a learner they are! Imagine the difficulty of concentrating on a lesson on a smartphone for 40 minutes while being jostled on the morning commuter train. The obvious solution is to break modules into smaller, more meaningful chunks.

3. Test, rinse and repeat

Are you testing for quality assurance? How does your learning content appear on multiple devices? Services like Elucidat make it easy to see what your training content will look like on different screen sizes.

Penfold argues that companies should test learning content not only for style and functionality, but also for multi-device responsiveness, acceptance and clarity of navigation and intuitiveness.

Engagement analytics can also help you determine how the course is actually performing. Docebo, which integrates with Elucidat, also integrates with Google Analytics to bring you information about how learners access your learning objects, and analytics can help you maintain the competitive edge by finding opportunities for improvement.

Since launching its Docebo learning platform, Trinity Mirror has been able to solve information misalignment that contributes to counterproductivity by delivering agile learning content in a variety of formats across different modalities.

Contact our team to discover how you can best promote a new way of learning to a traditionally classroom-based workforce while improving the quality of your learning content on a cloud LMS.