Many learning and development (L&D) teams are under increasing pressure to respond quickly to new training demands. As organizations seek to pivot quickly to adapt to change, training teams need to find ways to keep up and support performance.

In response to this need for speed, the age of eLearning is now well and truly established, and learning technology is rapidly expanding to fill gaps. The majority of training teams are now creating eLearning in one form or another. Whether you’re new to creating eLearning or looking to speed up current processes, here are some strategies you can begin implementing today to quickly create eLearning:

Leverage Agile Learning Principles

Although it was originally created for software development, the agile framework has taken the business world by storm across industries and functions. Corporate training teams can choose from different models and frameworks that combine agile and existing learning design processes.

While it might take a high level of commitment from you and your team to implement agile learning, the benefits are worth the initial time investment. Agile learning empowers you to:

• Decrease the time it takes you to launch eLearning courses.
• Improve and speed up collaborative efforts among stakeholders.
• Establish more predictable costs and resource needs.

Agile learning incorporates speed, flexibility and collaboration so that you can quickly create, deploy and iterate eLearning courses, with plenty of continuous feedback.

Create Microlearning Courses

The benefits of microlearning for learners are well known. It helps increase engagement, improve knowledge retention and meet the needs of the modern learner by enabling learning in the flow of work. Microlearning strategies are particularly effective when created in tandem with agile project management frameworks.

Microlearning also has benefits for the training team, especially when it comes to the speedy creation and delivery of courses:

Faster Turnaround Times and Deployment

Microlearning courses, typically defined as content that’s between two to 10 minutes in length, take less time to develop. Many corporate training teams use microlearning to break down larger learning projects into smaller chunks that are more manageable for both learners and learning professionals.

Single Learning Objective

Each piece of microlearning should focus on one learning objective. This single focus streamlines the creation of learning goals, content and assessments.

Faster Reaction to Feedback

If a longform course receives negative feedback, identifying and fixing the issues can be a daunting task. The brevity of a microlearning course makes it easier for L&D teams to identify and then implement ways to improve it.

Provide Course Templates

Working with subject matter experts (SMEs) is a necessity for most training teams. Their expertise is valuable, but working with them on complex learning projects can result in frustration and friction. One of the best ways to improve collaboration with your SMEs is to create detailed eLearning templates where they can “data dump” the information you need and leave the instructional design up to your team.

Templates can also help your instructional designers speed up the creation of eLearning courses. By creating templates for different types of training (e.g., compliance training or sales enablement) and knowledge levels, your team will have a jumpstart on gathering resources and generating content.

Create Content Repositories

Creating content in authoring tools is one of the most arduous aspects of building eLearning courses. You may be able to use a lot of your eLearning content across multiple courses, or you might have a media file that only needs small tweaks to be suitable for your current training project, so you don’t have to start from scratch.

When you have a content repository for all your eLearning content, your instructional designers will have everything they need at their fingertips rather than wasting time hunting down the right images, videos, graphics or audio files. The key is to build an intuitive folder and labelling system within the repository so content is easy to find. Depending on the type of eLearning courses your team creates, you might group and label content by:

• Theme/topic
• Learning audience (e.g., sales, production, etc.)
• Learning objective
• Media type
• Type of training (e.g., sales enablement, compliance, onboarding, etc.)

A small upfront time investment to create a content repository will save your team hours of development time down the line.

Lean on External Resources

Sometimes, you have to weigh the time and budget costs of creating content against that content’s importance to the eLearning course. Other times, the training will be so urgent that creating content from scratch just isn’t an option. If you don’t have time to create the content, source media externally, and embed it into your course. That content might be a YouTube video, an infographic or any other type of media, as long as it helps you meet your learning objective.

Training teams need to speed up their eLearning creation for many reasons. It could be that you need a quicker training turnaround in a time of crisis, or you might be seeking a more streamlined approach in general. Either way, these tips will help you on your way to a more efficient, effective eLearning content development process.