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Enable anyone to create impactful elearning with Guided Authoring from Elucidat

4 minute read

Sam Windsor
By Sam Windsor

Head of Product Marketing

Elucidat

Today, we launched Guided Authoring — a powerful new set of features within Elucidat that helps you to capture and share internal expertise, improve content quality, while reducing external spend.

Research shows that the demand for content from Learning & Development teams is at an all-time high. However, teams don’t necessarily have the time, resources, or people to tackle it all. This means that there is a growing learning content backlog that businesses just can’t address. The alternative? Outsourcing to agencies — which isn’t cost-effective at scale, or sourcing ready-made content — which isn’t personalized or adapted to your organization.

51% of teams don’t have enough budget

With Learning & Development teams maxed out, as well as a lack of budget to deal with the backlog, and ready-made content which isn’t specific enough — the backlog just gets bigger and bigger — or it means stakeholders take things into their own hands!

The good news is that’s all about to change.

With Guided Authoring, teams can empower anyone to create impactful content that’s specific to the organization, fully on-brand, and meets your standards — all powered by Elucidat.

Why We Built Guided Authoring

Elucidat customers shape our roadmap development. Our own research showed that our customers had a huge desire to open up production of elearning to those outside of Learning & Development, but the risk of things going wrong was too great.

Working alongside our customers, our Product team designed a workflow that would enable teams to open up, whilst maintaining control of quality. Giving Learning & Development the ability to tackle the backlog using colleagues from across the business.

There is a mountain of untapped expertise within organizations, so we decided to work with customers to determine how they could tap into that expertise and empower colleagues to share their knowledge, with minimal risk and effort from the Learning & Development team.

We worked with a set of customers throughout development on a dedicated pilot to help us shape the functionality to meet our users’ exact needs. Here’s what one pilot user, who’d never used Elucidat before had to say:

I found Elucidat really straightforward to use, I’ve used similar L&D module programmes previously but this was much more intuitive in my opinion.”

– A new user from Pret a Manger

Hear what nCino thinks about Guided Authoring

Discover more about how nCino empowered three novice authors deliver effective learning modules in no time, to the right standards.

A Powerful Set Of Features

Guided Authoring is powered by a mixture of Elucidat features, which when combined unlocks a workflow that enables you to achieve Collaborative Content Creation:

  • Utilize company templates – don’t just rely on pre-populated course templates that come with an authoring tool, use Guided Authoring to create your own library of templates that are specific to your organization and meet your standards.
  • Ensure projects are on brand – leverage Elucidat’s Styles functionality to ensure all projects created from your templates are automatically on-brand and adhering fully to your brand guidelines. No chance of wonky branding here!
  • Guide new authors with a dedicated workflow – set up any user with your Guided Author role, to push them down a guided pathway for content creation, so they can’t go wrong. Let your colleagues focus on what matters most; sharing their expertise.
  • Limit user permissions to remove risk – utilize Elucidat’s Advanced User Management functionality to tailor the exact set of permissions your guided authors have. Remove things they shouldn’t edit and give them exactly what they need so you don’t have to fix mistakes!
  • Support users with built-in explainer text – pre-populate your templates with specific guidance text. Make it easy for anyone to create a piece of elearning, even without prior experience by giving them tips and tricks in the moment.
  • Maintain quality with easy reviews and sign-offs – ensure quality by getting your guided authors to share their completed projects with you using Elucidat’s Review feature. You have complete control over when a project is launched, so you can collaborate with your users and provide that final sign-off.

Try It For Yourself

We’re excited for our customers to get their hands on Guided Authoring and we hope this encourages users to feel more confident collaborating with colleagues to create impactful content.  

For Elucidat customers, our team is ready to help you get started with Guided Authoring. Keep an eye out for the next steps in your inbox, or if you can’t wait to get started — contact your Customer Success Manager.

If you’re not already an Elucidat customer, but interested in learning more, we’d love to show you! Book a demo with our team to learn more.

Written by Sam Windsor

Sam works with teams across Elucidat to push forward our product marketing and define our message. Often referred to as the Elucidat 'guru', Sam always has his ear to the ground to ensure the company stays informed and up to date on shifting trends, events and best practice.

Read more articles by Sam Windsor