Thinking outside the box to create bespoke eLearning

Dec. 9, 2013 - PRLog -- This great example of ‘thinking outside of the box’ really impressed the judges of the Charity Learning Awards, who declared Hanover a worthy winner of the award for ‘Amazing Use of Resources’.

housing association wanted to develop their own in-house eLearning, to reflect its policies, processes and branding. But outsourcing to external developers was cost prohibitive, at £6,000 per 30 minute course. So the L&D team decided to train three of their members to become in-house eLearning designers instead.

This involved training in eLearning design, and theyalso attended a Charity Learning Consortium course to become competent in using Adobe Captivate. This cost, whilst being significant, was still less than the cost of procuring just one externally designed 30 minute e-course. An amazing return on investment!

The two key barriers to overcome were:

Ø  Gaining confidence to successfully move from classroom training design to providing engaging e-courseware. This was overcome by establishing team scoping and design sessions, to add support and fun in their leap to create Hanover eLearning. This approach has been so successful they now do this for webinars too.

Ø  Initially finding good imagery. But they established a good relationship with the Hanover marketing team to access existing image libraries, used in Hanover publications and on its website. These were free of charge, creating huge savings compared to buying stock artwork.

They quickly progressed to confidently produce good quality, effective in-house eLearning. In the last two years, members of the L&D team have created the following e-courses:

IT systems:

·         OPENHousing Management System x 4

·         Office 2010 Introduction

·         DCal Procurement Card x 2

·         Ebuy Purchasing

Policy and Procedure:

·         Antisocial Behaviour

·         Fire Awareness

·         Understanding Bribery

·         Effective Appraisals x 3

·         Equality and Diversity  x 3

As a result, staff feel eLearning is more relevant to their roles, and are more engaged with the eLearning suite supplied by the Charity Learning Consortium www.charitylearning.org . Following the release of the Equality & Diversity courses, there were 80 voluntary completions in the first two months alone.

ELearning design is now embedded as a training team competence and areas of the business proactively ask for bespoke eLearning solutions. The cost savings have been massive: having developed 17 courses Hanover has now saved more than £79,000. This cost-benefit increases with every course they create - and plenty more courses are planned.

Andy Lancaster, Learning & DevelopmentManager, Hanover commented: “The Charity Learning Award means so much to the Hanover L&D team who have approached the challenge of creating in-house eLearning with real enthusiasm. We have learned so much on the journey – and are continuing to do so - and the award is a brilliant milestone.”

Top tips for creating bespoke eLearning by Andy Lancaster, Learning & DevelopmentManager, Hanover:

1.      Invest in team training - it has a cost but is vital to gain understanding and creativity.

2.      Storyboarding is essential: time spent planning learning progression ‘wins time back’ when creating.

3.      Designing interactivity is vital for engaging eLearning. Pick up brilliant ideas by looking at e-courses created by others such as Tom Kuhlmann.

4.      Graphic design skills are a key to e-design. Gain an understanding of design and layout. Establish effective graphic design principles from day one.

5.      Allocate sufficient time for staff and subject matter experts to test modules.

6.      Create an in-house branded template. Add slides of interactive activities on an on-going basis which can be re-worked for other courses.

7.      Establish subject matter experts to create the content and to monitor changes and ‘future proof’ courseware.

8.      Manage organisational expectation and proactively manage when development time is offered to the business. Be aware that the demand resulting from your success may exceed capacity!

The Charity Learning Consortium is unique. We enable cost effective eLearning within more than 120 third sector organisations, making online learning available to more than 300,000 volunteers and staff. We're the largest group of charities, housing associations and not for profits working in the third sector in the UK, collaborating to make eLearning both affordable and effective. But we'd like to do even more! That's why we launched Giveback UK, and are asking everyone in the learning technologies community to take part, by donating resources and expertise to charitable organisations. We want all sorts of people to get involved, so if you think you could do anything that could contribute to an online learning course, we really want to hear from you. Please come and chat at Learning Technologies, 29-30 January 2014, Olympia, London. Together we really can make a difference to the world. One resource at a time...