5 key questions to consider before converting your live training to eLearning

Instructor-led training (ILT), whether in-person or virtually over a webinar platform like Zoom, can be a good solution for organizations. The training can be incredibly personal; learners interact with instructors in real-time, and knowledge comes directly from the experiences of the subject matter experts.

However, there are downsides, so complementing or replacing your live training is a smart decision.

We help organizations from many industries and all sizes move to eLearning. They come to us wanting to achieve one or more of these goals:

• Reduce costs – offering instructor-led training includes hard costs like salaries, rental of classroom space, and time costs. Your ILT expenses will continue to climb for every employee hired.
• Improve repeatability – every instructor-led training session you offer is one-and-done. While you can record your in-person or virtual training sessions for playback, learners get video fatigue pretty quickly.
• Increase convenience for learners – every ILT session must be scheduled for a specific date and time, which makes it difficult to accommodate everyone’s schedule.
• Validate knowledge transfer – with live training, it’s challenging to gauge your learner’s comprehension or retention of training material.
• Improve scalability – with ILT sessions, your organization requires an instructor to be available to conduct the class. Rescheduled sessions due to instructor absence are a considerable cost for you and an inconvenience for your learners.

You may also want to capture your instructor’s knowledge, improve delivery consistency, or improve content quality.

We’re certainly not saying all training should be eLearning – instructor-led training is still a valuable component of a comprehensive training strategy. However, most of your content may be very well suited for eLearning delivery, allowing you to use your valuable live training time for discussions or other activities that are challenging to deliver through eLearning.

One way to answer this question is to consider your instructors and learners.

Instructors

• Does your training include topics the instructors deliver with minimal learner interactivity, so it’s more like a lecture? Instructors can get quickly bored giving the same presentation repeatedly, leading to less engaging experiences.
• Are your instructors subject matter experts who aren’t trained to deliver live training?
• Do you have substitute instructors in case of sickness, vacation time, or personnel changes?
• Has your shift to virtual instructor-led sessions presented challenges with your instructors being able to deliver with the same effectiveness online as previously in-person?
• Assuming your instructor is a subject matter expert (SME), they likely are passionate about their topics – wouldn’t their time be better spent engaging with your learners in live discussions or scenarios?

Learners

• Do all your learners have the same level of knowledge? The instructor has to prepare content with a certain expectation of foundational knowledge. If they design content for a lower level of knowledge than a learner has, then they can get bored and tune out. If the instructor designs content for a higher level of knowledge than a learner has, the learner can quickly become lost.
• Is it challenging to schedule in-person training with everyone's schedules, or does holding long training sessions with large groups in your business have a negative impact on your business or customers?
• Do your learners struggle to retain the depth and breadth of content from training sessions? An instructor-led training session, whether in person or online, leaves your employees without the course content materials they can use later to refresh their knowledge. This effect of forgetting knowledge is compounded the more time there is between training sessions or applying what they learn.

By content

Another way to determine if you should move to eLearning is by considering your content.

The training you offer is an extension of your organization’s identity. You may be concerned that if you move to eLearning, your training message won’t have the same impact as when your instructors deliver it in a classroom or virtually. However, there are ways to conserve the “face” of your training and to improve the learning experience as you move from ILT to eLearning.

Video

Using video to deliver demonstrations, key technical details, and multiple-step processes can enhance your eLearning. Offering short video clips and recordings of your instructor or subject matter expert delivering the information can also help ensure that your organization's spirit and personality come through in your eLearning.

Narration

Like video, you can add narration throughout your course to give your eLearning slides a human touch. Your narration helps explain complex concepts or visuals, teach pronunciation, and add an element of storytelling while providing the learner with extra details.

Activities

There is no shortage of ways to stimulate your learners as they move through eLearning. Sprinkle activities and exercises throughout your content to break up the monotony of slides and to put what they just learned into practice with informal knowledge checks.

Interactivity in your courses can range from simple animated sequences to fully immersive virtual environments. Some of the more common ways we add interactivity to our client’s courses are:

• 360° virtual environments
• Branching scenarios
• Click-to-reveal
• Drag-and-drop
• Fill-in-the-blank
• Flashcards
• Interactive images or videos
• Matching
• Simulations

When building interactive components into your eLearning, they must be relevant to the material and not hinder learning.

In addition to using video, narration, and other interactivity, we can help you transition to eLearning, no matter your previous expertise. For less experienced organizations, we offer fully guided solutions, assisting with everything from planning to launch, including defining a curriculum, gathering subject matter experts’ knowledge, and organizing content into logical courses. Organizations with experience creating eLearning can also benefit from our expert instructional design and digital design services and our ability to expedite your eLearning creation process.

No matter your experience level with eLearning, our team works closely with you and your stakeholders to realize your organization’s interactive, asynchronous eLearning vision, resulting in an extraordinary learning experience.

Want to try our interactivity examples?

Get hands-on with various interactivity samples, demonstrating how interactive elements can help transform your live training into engaging eLearning. 

Here’s a checklist to help you decide:

• Do you have internal digital designers and instructional designers? Do they have expertise in converting live training to eLearning? Knowledge of instructional design theory and best practices?
• Does your team have the expertise and proficiency to use various eLearning authoring tools?
• Can your team create interactivities, animations, and simulations, if needed, to ensure your course meets your learners’ needs? What about video and audio editing?
• Do you have a process to capture the knowledge needed to build the courses your learners need? Does your team have experience interviewing SMEs?
• Do you have experience building storyboards and turning them into interactive, engaging learning experiences?
• Have you created courses to upload to a learning system? What about quality assurance testing – both for the course content, to make sure it is correct, and the course build itself, to ensure that it works as expected when launched in your training software?
• Does your team have the capacity to complete the project on your desired timelines?

If you’ve answered no to one or more questions, you should consider partnering with an eLearning specialist to convert your content.

Buying eLearning services? Read our guide

We cover training goals and outcomes, learner needs, source content, course authoring tool options, course development costs, and more – so you have the information you need to make a sound buying decision. 

Read the guide

Along with the cost of developing eLearning, there are also cost savings – let’s explore them both.

With live training, you may be paying for

• Instructor costs to prepare, deliver, and evaluate learners after the training
• Facility-related costs, including technology, food and beverages, and other supplies
• Travel expenses
• Lost productivity in travel time
• Employee wages during training

Cost savings from eLearning

• Reduced instructor cost to deliver the sessions
• Reduced facility expenses
• Reduced travel expenses
• Reduced learner time and wages (learners typically spend half the time in eLearning as a live session while also benefiting from better recall of the training material)

Generally, eLearning development can cost between $3,000 and $25,000 per module or course. However, the cost depends entirely on your course or module needs. The costs illustrated below are merely reference points—to give you a sense of the budget required.

Here are some custom eLearning development cost examples:

It’s very typical for a module or course to have only 15-20 minutes of seat time. You may require multiple custom courses or modules to build your eLearning program.

Want to learn more about custom eLearning in general? We’ve built several resources that can be valuable to you.

Custom Learning Buyer’s Guide

Go deeper with our buyer’s guide, which covers desired outcomes and training goals, your learners’ relationship with your training, working with source content and SMEs, tools to build courses — and how we can help you with every aspect of your custom courses.

Read the guide

Neovation’s Learning Hub

We’ve amassed over 150 articles and resources across ten categories that you can read for free. Select the topic you want to learn more about at the Learning Hub and start your journey down the L&D rabbit hole! Subscribe to receive new articles sent directly to your inbox.

Read the guide

Explore our eLearning projects

Explore our past projects from various industries with our entertaining demo videos to see select samples of our eLearning development work.

Read the guide

Get hands-on with interactivity examples

We have various interactivity samples you can try – from 360° virtual tours to matching exercises – to help inspire ideas for your next eLearning project.

Read the guide

We invite you to contact one of our expert learning consultants, who can provide a comprehensive quote, discuss your timeline, and answer any questions.

We use current technology, eLearning theory, and a highly collaborative process to build courses learners love to take. We have years of experience transforming our clients’ instructor-led training into eLearning—it’s what we do—working with you and your team to produce your vision.

If you choose us to help you convert your instructor-led training to eLearning, we will:

1. Coordinate a full training needs assessment to identify gaps, redundancies, or outdated materials in your current training program. Ask the right questions to ensure we understand your learners and training goals, focusing on your desired outcomes and how you measure success.
2. Create a plan to close the gaps, streamline your content, and ensure your material is current through interviews with your SMEs to ensure consistency and alignment with your learning objectives.
3. Develop storyboards and course design elements that form a connection to your brand and ensure your material is delivered in a manner that engages your learners.
4. Use best practices to build your course content with added benefits from interactive features like animations, simulations, and other rich media. We have an extensive toolkit!
5. Ensure that your course mechanics work well in your LMS or other delivery platform with our QA process to reduce errors and omissions. 
6. Provide you with the source files of your courses, so you have them for future development or revisions if needed.

Are you ready to start your rewarding endeavor of transforming your live training into interactive, engaging eLearning? Work with our highly skilled, experienced team to bring your vision to life – book your meeting today!