Posted by Ann Fuerst, Ph.D., TCC Chief Learning Strategist
This the next post in a multi-part blog series on the business benefits of training an external audience.
Meet the Needs of the Modern Learner
The expectations of the learners are becoming increasingly sophisticated and they anticipate immersive and engaging learning experiences in all of their training. If your training offering fails to meet their needs, they will quickly lose interest and explore other available choices – competitors’ offerings.
eLearning Development Tools
If you want to create training that is engaging, effective and meets your clients’ needs but also want to build such training in an efficient way to maximize your profits, choose an authoring tool. An authoring tool makes it easier to create training without resorting to programming. These tools help you focus more on content and context rather than authoring.
Using these tools, you can even convert simple PowerPoint files to eLearning. You can add pre-recorded video and audio and quizzes. These tools help create scenarios, case studies, animations, and simulations. They also provide access to inbuilt characters and customizable theme templates. Since eLearning today has to be compatible with many devices, these tools also help develop training for various devices. More and more authoring tools create responsive output that adapts (responds) to multiple device screen sizes. Once you create content, the output dynamically adjusts the layout to the device it’s viewed on. This opens your content to more learners. Authoring software that creates responsive output will usually give you a mechanism to preview the content on different devices during development.
Microlearning
Microlearning helps the modern learners who are busy and constantly on the move. Bite-sized learning of 5-10 minutes duration works well with smartphones and tablets and can be consumed anytime, anywhere. This will allow learners to squeeze training between work periods, during gaps in work schedules, or while they’re on the go. This is one of the biggest benefits of microlearning.
These small snippets that focus on one specific topic provide a win-win situation for both the seller of training as well as the learner. The advantages are:
- Relatively less time to create
- Easy for time-deficient learners to consume
- Can be used as Just-in-Time training
The flexibility and quick development times of microlearning gives the sellers of training an edge over competitors who market large and inflexible courses that require more time to complete.
Challenge Learners
Adult learners will quickly lose interest if they are not challenged. Adult learners like to prove to themselves that they understand what they are learning. There are various ways to do this. For example, challenge learners with questions that have multiple variables so that they can identify the consequences.
To download the entire paper, please visit our website https://www.e-tcc.com/resources.
Technology, Process and Expertise 