The quality of educational content is a major challenge for organizations wishing to train with digital technology. This is particularly true for so-called “trades” training. These training are by nature specific to each organization because they translate operationally their strategic orientations. An insurer who wishes to train its salespeople online with new sales techniques will have to offer them specific training.
But the design of effective business training, that is to say, which leads to a rise in sustainable and measurable competence, requires the creation of educational content tailored and quality. It is the heaviness of this investment in the creation of specific content that makes the training managers hesitate between the internalization of the design and the purchase of contents on the shelf.
At Mixintech, we believe that the strategic importance of these business training commands companies to become involved in the creation of specific web development content. To help companies take this path, it is essential to deconstruct the myths that surround the creation of content within organizations.
Organizations can fully delegate the creation of specific content
As we said, these training courses are strategic and specific to the organization. So it goes for the training content. However, delegating the entire conception of these contents, or worse, buying generic content, does not allow to control its educational heritage and thus the quality of the transmission of the strategic orientations of an organization. Content that is too generic or of poor quality will erode the image of the organization among its employees, will not allow optimal engagement of learners and will prevent a real rise in skills.
It is the training managers and business experts who must pilot the design of specific content and even get involved in the creation of content. Indeed, they are the only ones able to adapt the contents to the needs of the collaborators to guide them efficiently towards the rise incompetence. They must be the guarantors of the creation and maintenance of the heritage of formation. We must accompany them by providing them with a method to design their training content, and digital tools that facilitate the creation and adaptation over time.
Of course, part of the design of these training contents can be outsourced, especially in the following cases:
The technical realization of multimedia resources
The generic part of training: A training in digital acculturation contains generic elements available on the shelf. However, it will be important to ensure that it is technically possible to link external and internal content using modular technologies.
The purely pedagogical expertise: An educational engineer can help you to create quality modules respecting all the fundamentals that ensure effective learning, whatever the purpose of the training.
Businesses cannot create their content which is sometimes understood in another form companies do not create training content.
Organizations, on the contrary, are the champions of the creation of training content: according to the latest European Digital Learning Benchmark Barometer, 68% of companies surveyed (114 among the largest in Europe) produce digital content internally. This figure hides two realities:
PowerPoint remains mainly used as a support for internal training (the Digital Learning European Benchmark survey methodology does not indicate whether PowerPoint is included in the definition of “tailor-made digital content.”
SMEs and ETI, they still largely use PowerPoint in their internal training.
So companies are creating a lot of training content. These internally designed media are packed with relevant, reusable case studies for online training on digital platforms.
We cannot fight the obsolescence of digital content
Taking control of your educational heritage, therefore, means investing in the creation of content internally. But we must invest rationally … For this, training managers must take into account two important issues:
Develop sober teaching resources: Multimedia resources are rapidly becoming obsolete. Simple content can lead to excellent results: quiz, schema.
Rely on a flexible and scalable digital platform that allows rapid adaptation of educational resources (image, audio, video, quiz) and marginal changes in training modules over time. Finally, the digital platform must allow the reuse of training content from one training course to another.
Thanks to the progress of digital training platforms (LMS, etc.), effective content creation will become as quick and easy as creating a site with WordPress
There is sometimes confusion about what is involved in creating training content.
First of all, it is important to extricate the transfer of resources on a digital platform from the creation of resources. New web platforms make it easy to transfer content and resources (for example, uploading animated files) and organize them into stories with chapters, but rarely create them directly on the tool.
Moreover, even if a digital platform incorporates functionalities simplifying the creation of resources, there would always remain an irreducible part of human work: the very one that produces the pedagogical effectiveness of the content. This effort requires the meeting between mastery of a skill (expertise) and a structuring work to facilitate its transmission (pedagogy). Just like using WordPress is not a guarantee that your site will be visited, using an LMS is not in itself a guarantee that your training content will fulfill their purpose. Pure and simple automation of the design of resources is not for tomorrow!
Nevertheless, the digital tool does not mean empty shell. Beyond the useful aspect of the interface of transfer and creation of contents, a digital platform can quite simplify the effort of pedagogy, proposing by default a framework which respects all the principles guaranteeing a real rise in competence: content finely divided by objectives, modules focused on practical implementation.
In any case, if you want to train effectively, creating quality educational content will always take a minimum of human time, including with the most ergonomic platforms. The key question is more like this: what is the return on investment for the time spent designing? There are now solutions to rationalize this investment, as we have shown above. Their goal is to free up the maximum amount of time spent on superfluous content (including rehabilitating content) and to facilitate the creation of truly effective content. by scientifically proven principles, to ensure that your employees truly acquire the business skills in which you train them.