Don’t Let Your eLearning Get Stuck in the Past: Tips for Modernizing Content

If you’ve ever been in the situation where you’ve been forced to watch a training video that was clearly made at least a decade or more before you’re seeing it, you understand the impact of outdated material.

When you’re serving your audience training and development material that’s outdated or even appears to be, you’re going to lose their interest and probably have them laughing for all the wrong reasons.

While we often associate traditional training videos with being outdated and at times downright hysterical, your eLearning can also appear dated without the right design.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or updating existing content, there are some design tips that can help you achieve fresh, modern multimedia training.

It’s Ok to Be Trendy

With the training materials of the past, trendy wasn’t really a possibility. The reason?

It was too costly and time-consuming to change your training materials as the trends changed.

A learning management system helps you sidestep that dilemma because you can change the entire look and feel of your content within hours. This makes it okay to take stock of current trends in the design and media world and regularly incorporate them into your training content.

Seek Inspiration

Have a look around and see what other people are doing with their own eLearning. You can look at huge companies like Disney who offers Disney University or you can look at your smaller scale competition. You can even get inspiration from a variety of sources from outside of your industry.

By taking the time to look at well-designed eLearning you’re going to be able to gauge what’s contemporary in the design world and better hone in on the trends, letting your learners know what they’re looking at is relevant in terms of content, style and design.

Focus on Functionality

When you’re attempting to modernize your multimedia learning, look at the obvious design components like color schemes, videos and fonts, but also what’s considered current in terms of functionality.

For example, most learners have come to expect responsiveness in their eLearning. This means they’re able to use any device from a tablet to a smartphone or even a desktop computer and get the best adaptation of the content.

If you’re presenting learning materials that aren’t responsive you can immediately turn-off your audience. It’s not only more difficult for them to view and access content, but it also gives the perception the training is archaic.

Also, if your course has files that need to be downloaded, it’s a big red flag it’s outdated. Just making the change from these type of files to dynamic content can do a lot to modernize your learning.

Visuals Matter

One of the simplest ways to remedy outdated eLearning? Change your visuals.

This can mean everything from stock photos that don’t look current, to pictures that are grainy or poor quality.

Changing them to something that’s modern and high-quality is immediately going to make your learning look like it belongs in today’s marketplace. This is also going to increase the perception of professionalism.

Remember – keeping fresh and modern learning content isn’t a one-time venture. It requires constant updating, learning and scanning the market to see what’s happening in both design and functionality.

It requires a bit of dedication, but thanks to the development of learning management systems like eLeaP, keeping content fresh is simple and efficient.