Why is Investing in Custom eLearning Courses the Right Choice?

eLearning has been the talk of the town for quite some time now, considering the various benefits it offers – be it the fact that eLearning courses are extremely immersive to learners or the fact that they help in cutting down a lot of training cost and time for your organization. As a training manager, you must be keen on implementing eLearning in your organization. And I am pretty sure most of you would have initially tried off-the-shelf courses to test how eLearning works. Why should you switch to custom eLearning courses?

Off-the-shelf or catalog courses can be brought and are readily accessible. But there are a few issues with off-the-shelf courses. Since they are developed for a generic audience, they might not address your specific learner needs, leading to extremely ineffective learning.

Well, how does custom eLearning help? Custom eLearning courses are ones in which every single aspect of the course can be completely customized based on your organizational goals.

Differences between Custom eLearning Courses and Off-the-Shelf Courses

Why Invest in custom eLearning Courses?

1. Align training with your organizational training needs

Every single organization will have its own business goals and training needs, which off-the-shelf courses cannot cater to. Investing in custom eLearning ensures the content included in your eLearning courses is aligned to your organizational goals and training needs.

Unlike off-the-shelf eLearning courses that are generic, customized eLearning courses can be personalized according to specific organizational needs, with well-defined, pertinent learning objectives. Aligning learning objectives according to the training needs will provide learners with a clear and transparent idea of the takeaways of the course, leading to better focus.

For example, a generic compliance course on data privacy might not include the problems or policies specific to your organization. But by developing a custom eLearning course, you can ensure everything is included.

2. Align training with your branding guidelines

Does your current online training program reflect the true brand identity of your organization? By opting for custom learning, everything such as the logo, color schemes, and font styles, can be customized to be aligned to your organization, creating a true brand identity.

This is indeed a huge advantage to the organization but wondering how this will benefit employees? The most important way this will positively affect your learners is due to the consistent experience that is provided to them. Also, once a customized eLearning course is delivered to your employees, they will realize the amount of care you have taken to customize learning for them. This will automatically lead to an overall increase in their seriousness and higher engagement in training.

3. Incorporate a wide range of digital formats and strategies

What if the off-the-shelf course you are using to train your employees contains a lot of videos, but most of your learners happen to be auditory? Generic courses might not cater to your learners’ interest or learning styles. Custom eLearning lets you choose from a wide variety of digital formats and strategies.

• Do you want to make learning a little more fun? Try game-based learning.
• Do you want to provide learners a risk-free platform to practice all those actions performed in your ERP software? Try simulation-based eLearning.
• Do you want your learners to relate more to the content? Try scenario-based learning.
• Is ‘not having time for training’ the most heard excuse from your learners? Try microlearning.
• Are most of your learners’ auditory learners? Try podcasts.
• Are most of your learners’ visual learners? Try videos.
• Does your global workforce prefer learning in their native language? Translate your courses.

And this list goes on and on. Integrating these formats and strategies will ensure a holistically effective learning experience to your learners.

4. Foster a longer shelf-life

Let us say you have been training your employees on the prevention of sexual harassment using an off-the-shelf eLearning course. After a few months, the policies in your organization or the complaint process have been updated. Now, can you train your employees using the same course? Of course, you can’t. Off-the-shelf courses cannot be updated or enhanced easily. As vendors retain the source files of the courses, updating them or any small change will need you to invariable approach the vendor.

But this is not the case when it comes to custom eLearning courses. With custom eLearning, your vendor passes on the source files to you along with the course. So your in-house team will be able to go ahead with changes/updates, and you might need to approach the vendor only if you need additional work such as designing a few extra slides. Thus, in case the content within a course is outdated, fresh content can be updated easily and used further. Thereby, the shelf life of custom eLearning courses will definitely be longer.

5. Accommodate within your budget

When you think custom eLearning, it’s quiet common for you to assume that the cost of having one developed will soar through the roof. But that is not the case. Initially, yes, custom eLearning courses might seem like a huge investment compared to off-the-shelf eLearning courses.

But in the long run, you get more returns as the course is reused, and it turns out to be inexpensive compared to off-the-shelf courses that have subscription and per-user fees. Also, as mentioned previously, custom eLearning courses have a longer shelf life due to which they can be reused; not having to spend money on developing more and more courses.

Besides this, custom eLearning courses can be developed for any budget – be it big or small. Once you let your custom eLearning provider know of your training needs, they will provide you with the best solution based on your budget.

Now that we have discussed five reasons opting for custom eLearning courses would be the right choice you might be wondering, “Custom eLearning is indeed the right solution for me, but where exactly do I get the content to develop these courses from?” Once you decide who your target audience and their training needs are, most of the content can be taken from your classroom/ILT sessions.

This blog addresses just the ‘why’ of custom eLearning. Interested to know the ‘how’, and the various other aspects of custom eLearning? Download this free eBook which will definitely guide in every step through your custom eLearning journey.