Creating premium and customizable content for your clients doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel with each project. But training content creators understand that a tremendous amount of work goes into course development. While that can make for interesting, challenging, and ultimately, deeply rewarding work, it can also create significant inefficiency and substantial process redundancy.
Building scalability into your development process at an early stage will free up time so you can concentrate on what really matters: growing your business and providing exceptional products for your clients and their learners. We’ll show you how to integrate scalability into your process.
1. Focus on Microlearning
One of the easiest and most effective strategies that you can use to ensure scalability is focusing on microlearning as your primary design model. Chunking information into short mini-lessons of five to fifteen minutes is great for learners, as it increases their course engagement, content mastery, and information retention.
Microlearning is also ideal for scalable content development. After all, it is easier to remove or update a small chunk of content if/when it becomes outdated or irrelevant than it is to redesign the entire course. This sort of modular approach also allows you to customize content to clients’ unique needs, goals, and interests without having to build the entire course from scratch.
2. Create and Effectively Manage Your Content Library
Except in specific (and rare) cases, the content elements that you create for your courses will be proprietary material for your business. That means it can be repurposed, in whole or in part and with modifications or without, for future courses.
To make that process effective and efficient, however, you need to create an easily manageable and navigable content library. To find the content that you need for your new project when you need it, you’ll want specific and easy-to-remember naming and categorization conventions in place. This will help you quickly search your content library by asset name and type.
However, as your library grows, it’s essential to keep up with the management. Ensure that you are routinely reviewing your content and archiving outdated or unused material. Don’t discard such content, though—you never know what items you might need in the future!
3. Harness the Power of Analytics
Scalability is all about taking the basic shells of your courses and building on, modifying, and otherwise enhancing them to ensure their applicability and utility for the evolving needs of your clients and the ever-changing nature of knowledge and information available today. You will need to ensure that you take advantage of reporting tools and regularly use them to optimize and streamline future development projects.
For example, these reporting tools will enable you to monitor learner data, including rates of completion versus rates of abandonment. You can get even more granular; for instance, you can review how much time learners spend on each module, how they perform within a module, and whether they successfully complete it.
Analytics such as these can enable you to spot potentially problematic trends over time. For example, if you find that a once highly successful course is now experiencing higher abandonment or failure rates, that could indicate an issue either with the content or with the emerging technology. Technological challenges can be especially problematic when developing courses for a multinational clientele or those with a geographically distributed workforce.
This ability to understand what is working and what is not within a course will give you the power to successfully modify and “repair” elements in already deployed courses. At the same time, you can preemptively incorporate corrections or improvements in future courses built from the master course shell or pre-existing assets. That will enable you to continuously improve your product and increase the appeal, utility, and functionality of your courses for your clients and their learners, no matter who they are, where they may be, or what learning or technological constraints they may face.
4. Get Social—Engage Your Customers
Incorporating scalability into your development process isn’t only about streamlining the course-building process or using analytics to optimize present and future courses. It’s also about client engagement and product promotion. After all, how will you scale your business if your clients aren’t aware of the innovations that you have to offer?
Routine engagement with your clients in diverse forms, from newsletters and trusted emails to blogs and social media marketing, will help your clients keep abreast of industry standards and identify the content solutions that your business can provide. Your clients’ learning needs are unlikely to be static, after all. In this context, scalability means creating a client communication and product education strategy that ensures that your relationships with your clients grow alongside and align with their changing goals and requirements.
The Takeaway
In an era of surging demand for e-learning content, incorporating scalability into the course development process is essential to ensuring efficiency, growth, and quality. The good news is that scalability is not that difficult to achieve if you have a strategy. By incorporating scalability into your development process, you’ll be ready to provide top-tier, customizable content by focusing on what matters most to your clients and their learners.
Here at Firmwater, we don’t just sell an LMS for training providers. We partner with our clients, giving them the tools and insights they need to implement the best practices in e-learning course development, growth, and delivery. We care too much about our customers’ businesses to have them wade through forums and chatbots for help.
Ready to use an LMS that’s designed for the way YOU work, with a team dedicated to YOUR needs? Book a no-obligation consultation directly with our team today!