How To Lead A Winning eLearning Team
What does ‘good’ look like in terms of digital learning for your business and your end users?
1. Set Out Clear Goals And Objectives
Get talking to end users, business managers, and review data analytics from past projects to work out what works, what doesn’t, and define where you need your team to be in a year’s time. It might be using more video, more curated content, less long-form learning, and more on-the-job performance support. Whatever it is, make sure your team is crystal clear on the shared vision and the reasons behind it.
Check out the 3 steps that will help you to align eLearning with business and personal goals.
2. Communicate Your Vision
Once you’ve defined your vision and goals, put together an eLearning manifesto for your team, and ensure they are all on board. This applies to your in-house learning team, as well as any freelancers and third parties. This shouldn’t stay fixed, but be a living and breathing target that is reviewed and updated once or twice a year, based on new data you’re all uncovering about the success of your projects and their usage.
3. Think About Skills, Not Siloed Job Roles
By this point, you’ll all know what you want to achieve, but you still need to consider how your team is going to meet the goals set out. Think about which members of your team can do what, and be open-minded about it. Do you have any skill gaps? Consider bringing in people with key skills from outside, such as a copywriter from the marketing team to add some flair to certain projects. Can you buddy certain people together so they can learn from one another and make a fantastic micro-team? Read this article to discover 4 ways to structure your eLearning team.
4. Invest In Development And Peer Learning
Equip and empower your team to do a great job by ensuring they have the right tools, support, and skills to do what’s required. If skills training is needed, look for practical, hands-on solutions where people can learn while doing. Consider go-to places your team can go to develop themselves. Are there key online resources, examples, forums, coaches or experts you can guide them towards? How can peers learn from and support each other? Are they looking at outside examples? Why not set up an eLearning community that regularly meets and shares knowledge, virtually or face to face?
5. Provide Examples
Set standards and cut time waste by providing a showcase of best practice eLearning examples that can be added to over time. If you want to really inspire your team and spark ideas, consider creating prototypes that match your eLearning vision. If you use Elucidat, ready-made demos can be duplicated and used as a basis for new projects – this is a great time saver and will help you maintain consistency.
6. Create Personas
Make end users everyone's number 1 customer. Use real data and insights to put together a set of default user personas that can be used by the whole production team as a reference point for their designs. Also, pair your best practice examples with personas to demonstrate the different learning and user situations in which they can be used. Personas will also help your team think of your audience as individuals, encouraging them to personalize content and ensure it’s truly people-focused and value-adding.
7. Encourage User Research
Of course, every project and its audience are unique. Empower your team to carry out their own research; encourage them to speak directly to end users and identify user behavior and needs for themselves. This could be via conversations, observations, surveys, and learning analytics. Make it part of your process that they create their own user profiles as a starting point for their project.
8. Make Data Available
Provide your team with the data they need to monitor what does and doesn’t work for your eLearning. Ideally, make this available in a live dashboard, so your team can refine and improve published projects. After all, if your team can’t see how your eLearning is being used, how will they assess if the objectives have been met? This works really well for prototypes, as lessons learned can be worked into the final product. Read this article about the top 10 learning analytics your team should be tracking.
9. Enable Everyone To Design Smarter
Enable your team to focus on what adds real value and will make a real difference to end users. Remove all the unnecessary steps in designs by enabling teams to use ready-made interfaces and branded styles, duplicate page layouts or even use whole projects as starting points so they can focus on the learning experiences and fantastic content. With Elucidat, you can store templates and media in a central hub so everyone can reuse resources.
10. Foster Commercial Thinking
Whether your content is for sale or not, encourage your team to think commercially. This will keep everyone focused on the value of their eLearning, resulting in greater results and smarter working. Encourage a consultative approach to design where team members are considering the value-add, shelf-life, audience size, business need, and weighing these up against the justifiable investment that should be put in, and where. Why create a course if a simple page of expert top tips will do the job?
Nothing Can Stop Your Team Now!
The key is to put users at the forefront of your team’s minds – including the data and insights you gather about users as they interact with your projects. A people-centered approach to eLearning helps teams stay motivated and focus on value-adding, commercially viable designs that meet the needs of the business. It’ll be a moving target, so as a leader, it’s important to keep on top of your user trends and feed these in!
If you’d like even more practical advice, you can find more tips on how to structure a killer eLearning team here.
