Tips Every eLearning Team Manager Should Follow To Save Time And Money
There is a notion among eLearning managers that cutting cost in eLearning development would bring down the quality of the courses. This concept comes out of the fact that the lions part of eLearning investment goes into purchasing tools and technology. Even if we agree that modern eLearning tools are costly, we need to consider the effectiveness of those tools before jumping into conclusions. With the right use of eLearning automation and collaboration, eLearning teams can considerably bring down the eLearning development time. This, in turn, would help you save a lot of money.
Let's look at these best practices that would help you:
1. Work On Your Policy Document
Create a policy document for the entire eLearning team to follow. Write down the best practices, including branding guidelines, design rules, process chart, reporting, and backup methods all at one place. You would save a lot of time reworking, redesigning and troubleshooting if you do it the right first time. When the entire teamwork based on the same policy document, you would be able to do just that.
2. Standardize The Process
Make sure to follow a standardized process in eLearning development. Assign tasks to team members based on their experience and make sure to stick to the plan. The simpler the process, the easier to get used with. Fine tune your process, and make sure the team sticks to it every time.
3. Use Collaboration Tools
Each member of your eLearning team plays an important role in the development process, and research has shown that the lack of collaboration or ineffective communication is one of the major reasons for project failures. Make sure to use collaboration tools, to improve communication and better coordination between the team members. Choose tools that support teams, rather than individual installations. You would save a lot of time developing eLearning if your team collaborates well.
4. Use eLearning Automation Tools
Automation is no more a fancy word in eLearning. Gone are the days, when designers and developers sit for weeks developing the courses page by page. There are automated course authoring tools that can help you create eLearning courses automatically from content documents. Use tools that best suits your needs. You can automate most of your development steps, like creating menus and assessment questions if you have the right tools. Use templates to create slides and activities, and you would be able to reuse these templates later. Effective eLearning automation can help you bring down eLearning development time from weeks to a few days.
5. Make The eLearning Team Think In Terms Learners
It is important to create eLearning courses that your learners love. The first priority for the developers should be to engage your learners. For this reason, ensure that your developers understand your learners and their preferences. Reworking on the course to make it acceptable to the learner would take a lot of time. Make sure the courses developed by your team is an instant success among your learners.
6. Reuse, Recycle, Rehash
Most of the resources created during the development process could be reused for other projects. Make sure you keep all the resources created for projects cataloged and stored in a common folder. Images, infographics, audio, backgrounds and many other resources could be recycled with little effort and used in other projects to save time. Ensure that you have a plan for reusing and repurposing the resources.
7. Invest In Skill Development
It's no secret that better skills can save time and money. Do your team members possess the skills required to develop eLearning courses for the modern leaner? How often do you update your team’s skills? In today's rapidly changing technology landscape, updating the skills has become all the more important. Ensure that you are investing enough in upskilling your team members and this, in turn, will ensure faster development time.
8. Update Tools And Technology
Keep an eye on the technology landscape. New tools are introduced almost every day, and technology is changing rapidly. Make sure that your tools are updated frequently. Outdated tools could easily cause a lot of trouble and to avoid losing precious time and data to ensure that you are updating your tools as updates appear.
