If your company has been involved in delivering in-house training to staff for a while now, or if you are a freelance trainer or instructional designer who has been developing and offering Instructor Lead Training (ILT) to clients over the years; chances are that you may be sitting on a wealth of existing training materials.
With the new workforce circumstances, the evolution of eLearning, and modern learner new expectations, wouldn’t it be great to start moving some (or all) of that content into the online training arena?
If you are interested in making that leap, here’s how you should proceed:
Successfully moving existing training content to fit the eLearning model requires some prep work. If you just start the transformation process by doing a one-for-one conversion (i.e. taking each slide or presentation deck and making an exact digital representation of it); chances are that you’ll end up with an eBook without delivering an enhanced learning experience to your learners.
Here’s what you should consider when preparing for the conversion:
1) Prepare a detailed inventory of what you have:
Instructor Lead Training (ILT) usually comprises of projected slides (either transparency-based or digital media like PowerPoint), hand-outs, workbooks, course notes, audio and video files, and worksheets. There may be other auxiliary materials too, like answer sheets, student guides, and feedback forms. As your first step, you need to assemble all the material together for a successful eLearning conversion.
Read more: The Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Content Inventory for eLearning
2) Understand why the course was originally created:
Every successful “How” is preceded by an in-depth understanding of the “Why.” By understanding why the eLearning course was devised in the first place, you may be able to get some vital clues about how you can ease its transition into the digital age.
For instance:
If existing Flow Charts were meant to help learners understand and then apply process flows to the proper procedure; then perhaps an interactive component may be developed where students can drag “flow” elements, and drop them into corresponding “procedure” elements online?
On the other hand, if those flows were meant to serve as reference material to use on-the-job, then a digital re-creation, complete with hyperlinks and interactivity, and stored in a central repository, may serve the purpose.
3) Review and revise before conversion:
Now that you have all of the “raw materials,” it’s often tempting to immediately start transcribing what you have and converting it into digital media. Don’t!
Instead:
Also read: Best Practices to Convert Instructor-Led Training to eLearning
4) Observe a session…if possible
If there is a training session in progress, that uses the current materials, it may be very valuable for key members of your conversion team to sit-in and observe it. Doing so will:
Your prep steps have set the stage to carry out the actual conversion:
1) Get organized
To make the entire ILT To eLearning conversion process highly effective, you need to get yourself organized first:
Read more: 7 Factors For Ensuring a Successful eLearning Implementation
2) Reinvent…Don’t just convert
Conversion is an excellent opportunity to rethink the purpose of all of your existing content. You might be pleasantly surprised at how much opportunity there is to reconfigure existing content to make it more user-friendly and better adaptable to eLearning.
3) Restructure…Don’t just adopt
Don’t blindly adopt the same course flow that your existing ILT content uses. While ILT is trainer-driven, most eLearning courses are self-driven. As a result, you need to put more control into the hands of the learner.
Read more: 3 Big Don’ts When Converting Instructor-Led Training to eLearning
4) Reduce…Don’t just repeat
The easiest thing to do in a conversion exercise is to repeat existing content verbatim, and put it on a server for consumption. Good instructional design practices, however, don’t support that approach.
While “conversion” is your ultimate goal, moving existing learning content into the digital era shouldn’t be about transcription. The objective should be reuse, repurpose and recycle, but also to leverage newer technologies and good instructional designing practices in doing so.