How To Update Your E-Learning Content

E-learning can play a key role in your business development and success. Research has shown that e-learning in the workplace improves employee retention rates by up to 60%, in comparison to traditional learning which is roughly 8-10%. Reports also highlight that 20% of individuals believe that e-learning has a positive impact on revenues and sales. 

In our current digital era online and e-learning are being utilised more than ever. Updating existing e-learning content is a critical part of promoting learning in your workplace and supporting the success of your business. 

At Virtual College, we work with individuals to overhaul their legacy e-learning content and evaluate how it can best be revised and improved to deliver up-to-date and relevant learning to readers. Based on our experience, we’ve highlighted a selection of key considerations to make if you’re considering updating your e-learning catalogue and shared the best ways to revise your content in this article. 

What is E-Learning Content Development?

For those that don’t know, e-learning content development is a process that many companies undergo, whereby they create structured content in a digital format that can be accessed by learners online or by using technology. 

E-learning content can come in various forms, whether that be bite-sized or long-form videos, interactive resources like quizzes and games, audio content, or traditional written content. Depending on your learners, the format of e-learning content might be more effective than others, which is something we touch upon later in this article.

Why Might You Need To Update Your E-learning Content?

To offer the best E-learning content, you must be continuously reviewing and updating these resources in response to the needs of your learners. Below, we’ve broken down several core reasons why you might need to update your e-learning content:

It’s No Longer Relevant 

If your e-learning content is no longer relevant, it’s a surefire sign that it’s time to update singular resources or even your entire catalogue. The reasons for your content being irrelevant may include new laws or regulations coming into play, or perhaps changes to best practices in your field of work.

If any type of development has occurred that directly impacts your e-learning topics, chances are that your content will need a refresh. 

Your Workplace is Evolving

As your business grows by gaining new employees and implementing new processes to streamline your procedures, it’s important to consider how e-learning content can support these developments.

E-learning can play a big role in helping you reach your business goals quicker as your organisation continues to evolve. Your e-learning content can do this by supporting your employees in developing critical skills and by keeping your team up to date on any industry changes. 

Technological Advancements

In our constantly evolving digital world, it’s no surprise that a lot of e-learning content can become outdated because technology has advanced. 

When e-learning content was originally developed, it was made for laptops and PCs. Now, we have tablets and mobile phones at our fingertips, meaning you have to be more conscious of your user experience when producing your e-learning content now more than ever.

Retention Rates Are Poor 

One primary indication that your e-learning content needs a revamp is if your learners simply aren’t engaging with it. Reviewing your e-learning analytics is essential to see whether it’s successfully teaching your learners and whether it’s worth its cost. 

Therefore, monitoring the engagement and completion rates of your e-learning content are important indicators which will tell you whether you need to reevaluate and develop your content for e-learning.

Dated Format and Aesthetics 

People are lured into engaging with something if it appeals to them aesthetically, and e-learning content is no exception. The way you present your e-learning content to audiences can make or break in determining if they will engage with it. So, ensuring that your content for e-learning is up to date and in an engaging and appropriate format suited to your learners’ needs is critical. 

Employee Performance Isn’t On Target

If your employee performance isn’t where you want it to be, then it’s likely that you need to reflect on your e-learning resources. After all, training plays a core role in the productivity of employees, so ensuring that you’re investing in e-learning content that teaches the knowledge and skills that teams need to perform better in your company is important. 

Individual Learning Needs Aren’t Considered

People learn in different ways, so to create great e-learning content you need to ensure that you’re taking the differences in people’s learning needs into consideration and are developing e-learning content to suit this.

Whether your learners need more interactive e-learning content, or thrive when provided with video content, tuning into these preferences will ensure you create great content for e-learning that your learners will love. 

There are several reasons why you might need to update your e-learning content. By doing this, you ensure that your learners develop the knowledge and skills they need to thrive and that you are taking steps to achieve your business goals. 

On a more serious note, if your e-learning content is not up to date, there may be an issue of ethicality and legality, which can place your business at risk. Also, when it comes to your credibility as a company, providing information that is not accurate to your learners may make them question your reliability and trustworthiness.

What to Consider Before Updating E-Learning Content

There are several considerations that we’d recommend you make before updating your e-learning content. By bearing these in mind, you are ensuring that you put yourself in the best stead to develop e-learning content that is as engaging and useful as possible to your learners.

Gaining Business Buy-in

When developing e-learning content, this stage comes first in our recommendations for a reason. Whether you are resourcing your e-learning content internally or are working with an external supplier, it’s a relatively large investment in both time and money to create your e-learning content. So, make sure you get this signed off and that you have genuine executive support to help you update your content for e-learning first and foremost.

Review Your Catalogue

It’s important that, before making any changes to your e-learning content, you set aside a day to sit down with your team and compile all of your modules and assets. 

Once you’ve done that, consider the following three questions for each of these: 

• What was it built in?
• Is the look and feel ok?
• Is the core content ok?

Once you’ve asked yourself these questions, you’ll have an accurate picture of exactly what e-learning content you need to develop, and to what extent. Equally, this is an important step to ensure that you’re disposing of any e-learning content that is no longer relevant.

Consider your Learning Landscape

If your content library features a lot of Flash-based content, you’ll need to look at how your learners want to access your content. To do this, you could run focus groups or send them a survey to hear their thoughts on the matter. It’s essential that you involve your learners in this process, after all, they’re the ones who are going to be using your e-learning content. 

During this step, it’s also vital to understand how you need to tailor your e-learning content to your learners. Everyone learns in different ways, so knowing exactly how your learners would benefit most from receiving their content, and in what format, is important. This ensures that your learning remains personalised too. 

Don’t forget to also ask your learners what they generally like, dislike, or want to see more of from your e-learning content, which will guide you as you update this. 

Decide What ‘Good’ Looks Like

Think about what you are trying to achieve with your e-learning content and how you’ll reach the KPIs in your business case. Are you trying to change employee behaviour? Tick a box? Impart knowledge? Or a combination of all of these things? These factors should all influence your decisions when it comes to redesigning your e-learning content.

Select Your Authoring Tool

If you’re resourcing your e-learning content internally, consider the pros and cons of the different authoring tools available on the market. These authoring tools are software that are used for developing e-learning content and distributing this to learners. 

On the other hand, if you’re resourcing your e-learning content externally, ask the vendor to articulate why they are recommending a certain tool and what made them arrive at that decision.

Appoint a Project Manager

External suppliers should have trained project managers who will manage the process of developing your e-learning content end-to-end, from scoping right through to implementation. If you are going to do this in-house, you really need to appoint a project manager who will take ownership and monitor the progress of your e-learning development project.

How to Update Your E-learning Content

There are several key ways that you can update your e-learning content. We’ve delved into five of the most significant, helping you to begin the process of developing e-learning content that your learners will appreciate and adhere to.

Make Sure Your Content is Accessible to Main Technologies

Nowadays, both computers and mobile devices are used to access e-learning content. Thus, it’s important that you ensure that your e-learning content is updated so that it can be accessed and completed on a wide range of usable devices, from tablets to smartphones and PCs. As technology advances, you want to ensure you’re updating your e-learning content too. 

Make Your Content Visually Appealing

One of the biggest updates you can make to your e-learning content is to modernise and improve its visuals and style. As years go on, styles and aesthetics become dated, so you need to ensure that the aesthetic of your visuals is modern or timeless and contemporary.

This may require you to have conversations with graphic designers, whether that be in-house or externally, to ensure that any content you’re producing is visually enticing to your learners. 

Ensure That You Vary Your E-Learning Content, and Make It Digestible

Varying your e-learning course content can play a crucial role in keeping your learners engaged. As such, it’s important that you incorporate lots of different elements in your e-learning content, whether that be videos, images, or even offering tests and quizzes.

Equally, ensuring that you’re not just offering long-form written content, but are producing bite-sized, easily digestible content too is important to make your e-learning library as diverse as possible. As micro-learning is growing in popularity, keeping your e-learning content short and digestible so that your learners remain engaged is essential. 

Test Your E-Learning Content 

Before you relaunch your e-learning content, make sure you get some user acceptance testing sessions in the calendar to test your updated material on various devices before you officially launch. The last thing your CEO is going to want after they’ve invested in this project is for it to flop on day one due to a lack of testing. Ultimately, whether you undertake this in-house or contract with a third party, this is one of the most vital steps in updating your e-learning content. 

Continue to Review Your E-Learning Content

It’s not enough to just update your e-learning content once, this needs to be a continuous project that you undertake regularly to ensure that your content always remains relevant, engaging, and of the highest quality. Develop a plan for how often you want to review your e-learning content once you’ve done this for the first time to make sure that this isn’t forgotten about. 

FAQs

What is the Difference Between E-Learning and E-Content?

E-learning refers to any learning that is delivered and undertaken online through the use of digital resources and content. E-content is used during the e-learning process and can be defined as structured content in a digital format that can be accessed using technology. Both e-learning and e-content are interlinked, but distinct at the same time.

What Are The 5 Parts of E-Content?

There are five parts of e-content, which refer to the different formats you can deliver to your learners in your e-learning content. These include images, animations, simple text, videos, and audio. Using a variety of different formats to implement your e-learning content can help you to create more engaging content for your learners.

What is Interactivity in E-Learning?

Interactivity in e-learning is all about creating a more immersive and tailored learning experience for an individual. It involves the interaction between the content and the learners themselves, in which the learner’s learning journey is influenced by the responses and input that they give. 

Summary

Updating your e-learning content is an important process to undertake in your business that will benefit both your learners and your organisation’s success. We hope that this article has answered the question of how to update your e-learning content by highlighting the core considerations and steps you can take to do this.

If you need an external resource to help you convert your content, why not get in touch with our team here at Virtual College and learn more about how we can help?