How to create e-learning courses

E-learning. Or online learning as it’s sometimes known. It’s quick, it’s cost-effective, it’s engaging, it will help your organization stay competitive. This type of learning can have a big impact on business. But if you’re not sure how to create an e-learning course, the task can seem daunting. We know, we’ve been there.

When you decide to switch to e-learning there are many ways you can achieve it. You can outsource course creation to a third-party instructional designer or you can buy ready-made content off the shelf. But since you’ve found yourself here, you likely want to create e-learning courses yourself. Or maybe you’re looking to enable your employees to create their own e-learning courses. This last one is known as Employee-generated Learning, and we’ll come to what it is in more detail shortly.

So, if you want to create e-learning courses or simply improve what you’re doing, this guide is for you. Using Easygenerator’s collective decades’ worth of experience we’ll share our tips and best practices on e-learning course development.

You’re making the move to online learning and creating your own e-learning courses. But should the responsibility of e-learning course development sit within the L&D team, or could you benefit from Employee-generated Learning?

It’s often thought that learning and development are best left in the hands of instructional designers. This may have been true in the early days of e-learning when course design was a complex technical task. Now, thanks to modern technologies, it’s easier than ever for your employees to create their own learning content – Employee-generated Learning.

Using modern course authoring software, employees can now easily write and publish training content to be used by their peers. It’s an ideal way to develop e-learning courses because it uses the knowledge that already exists within your organization.

Since your employees have first-hand, on-the-job experience, they will be able to create highly relevant content.

With this model, your L&D team plays a supportive, guiding role to help employees create relevant, engaging, and effective learning content.

What are the benefits of Employee-generated Learning?

There are many benefits to adopting Employee-generated Learning (let’s call it EGL for short), including:

• Faster and more efficient. Instead of relying on a small number of specialists, you can empower experienced employees throughout the organization to create and share learning content.
• Cost-effective. You don’t have to pay 3rd party trainers, content developers or designers to create courses.
• Agile. It is created by employees who have first-hand knowledge of the business.
• Quickly scalable. It draws from a large pool of content creators: the employees.
• Higher in quality. EGL taps into real-life knowledge and expertise. It educates people on what is truly relevant for them in their jobs. Your L&D team plays the role of assuring the quality of the content and guiding employees to create even more effective content.
• Boosts employee and learner engagement. Content creators can establish themselves as experts among their peers and receive recognition. For learners, the content is more relevant and clearly linked to their everyday work.
• Captures valuable employee knowledge. This means the knowledge remains available to future generations of employees, even after senior employees leave the department or company.

This is only a brief overview of what EGL is and how it can benefit your business. If you’d like to learn more, take a look at our complete guide to Employee-generated Learning.

Identifying business needs

Before you create anything, before you even choose the tools you’ll use, you need to identify and be clear about what need you’re trying to fulfill.

The entire purpose of training is to provide your employees with the skills and knowledge they need to perform better at their jobs. When getting started with e-learning, it is a good idea to speak with employees themselves to gain a clearer view of the areas where additional training is needed.

In some cases, the answers may be obvious. For example, if your organization deals with frequent product updates and new product launches, sales and technical support training will generally be an important training area for your business.

What you want to achieve will also help you decide who will create the e-learning. For example, if you need to frequently create and update product training, then an Employee-generated Learning solution may be better for you. Learn more about the benefits of e-learning.

Selecting your e-learning tools

If your company is just getting started with e-learning, you’ll need to decide which software you want to use to write and publish online courses.

When selecting your e-learning tools it’s important to understand who your learners are and what they require. How will they access your course and do you need mobile optimization? What access functionality do you require? Do you need to update content regularly? Etc.

Most organizations combine an LMS with an e-learning authoring tool. This allows you to benefit from the specialist creation and publishing features of both tools. Alternatively, if you’re on a tighter budget and don’t need all the features of an LMS, you can opt for an LMS-Lite.

Check out our article on e-learning authoring tools for Mac.

Continually gathering feedback to improve your course

Now that you know how to create an e-learning course, it’s crucial to keep it up to date over time.

Once the course is published, it’s crucial to collect learner feedback so that you can tell how effective the content is. This feedback gives the authors valuable insights so they can tweak the course and make sure it is fully catering to the learners’ needs.

One simple yet effective way of measuring the success of a course is a simple survey known as the net promoter score (NPS).

At the end of a course, your learners are asked just one easy question: “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend this course to your peers?” Depending on the number they choose, learners will fall into one of these three categories:

• Promoters (score 9-10): learners who found the course very useful and will likely promote it to their peers.
• Passives (score 7-8): those who thought the course was okay, but are generally neutral about it, so will neither encourage nor discourage others to take it.
• Detractors (score 0-6): those who did not think the course was useful and may even discourage others from taking it.

To calculate your course’s NPS, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

NPS is a useful metric because it gives you a clear insight into how useful your course really is. If a course receives a low NPS, it’s a sign that changes need to be made. After you make changes, you can continue to use NPS to see whether the changes have had the desired effect.

Updating your course

The course creation process doesn’t end once your course is published. In fact, it sort of starts all over again: identifying new learning needs and continually updating the content as topics change over time.

One of the main benefits of e-learning with an Employee-generated Learning model is that it lets you quickly and constantly update course content. This means your training content remains aligned with your company’s real-life business needs.

Be sure that updates are always based on the latest, most relevant facts. Repeat the peer-review process if necessary, before implementing an update. Also, continue to collect feedback, so the content can be adjusted further to ensure good quality.

Lastly, let’s take a look at how you can use Easygenerator to create a course right away.

Easygenerator uses a simple five-step course-creation process:

Step 1: Create. Use the simple authoring interface to add content and create your course. You can easily add text, images, video and audio files and question types, just by dragging these items from the menu area on the left side of the screen.

While creating the course, you can decide to break content up into multiple sections. The built-in Learning Objective Maker helps you define what the course should be about, so you can always determine whether the content fits or not.

Step 2: Design. Next, you can add customized themes, such as your company’s branding, to the course.

Step 3: Configure. Next, you can adjust various course settings. These include features for tracking learner results, language settings, PDF exporting, etc.

Step 4: Publish. Now, publish the course so you can make it available to learners. You can choose any of these publishing options:

• Easygenerator cloud: This generates a private link that you can share with learners
• Embed the course on your own website
• Publish on your own learning management systems (LMS)
• Publish on a custom domain

Step 5: Results. You can track the learner results using the built-in reporting features. This enables you to automatically issue certifications to learners, but also to monitor learner progress and improve the course’s content when necessary.

Come to check the full comparison of the top 4 e-learning authoring tools!