What To Know When It’s Time to Move from Instructor-Led training to eLearning

Congratulations – you’ve convinced key stakeholders and organizational leaders that it’s time to move from traditional classroom and instructor-led training to innovative, creative and scalable eLearning. Now the question becomes how to make the leap from one format to another.

Many companies have a hard time moving from instructor-led training (ILT) to eLearning and they find a number of pitfalls along the way.

Here are some common mistakes and tips that can help you make a seamless and valuable transition from classroom training to a learning management system (LMS):

Don’t just copy and paste content to eLearning

This is perhaps the number one mistake companies and organizations make when they’re moving from ILT to eLearning – they just replicate everything from their classroom learning into their learning management system.

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The same things aren’t going to work in an LMS that work well in classroom training.

One of the biggest examples are Power Point slides.

All too often a company will think they’ve created great eLearning by moving their existing slides into an LMS. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work. Power Point slides create a great ILT tool because they create conversation amongst the instructor and students while providing an outline of key points. When these same slides jump to an LMS, they often become dull, monotonous and un-engaging. They also tend to lack the context and relevance that can be created by an instructor in a classroom setting.

Keep content concise

This is another huge problem organizations face when they move to a new learning format. With eLearning, the style of learning is completely different and you have to realize this and create content that’s designed for a multimedia learning.

It needs to be short, concise and completely to the point in order to be engaging.

With eLearning, it’s all about presenting information on a need-to-know basis and there’s not a lot of room for anything extraneous. One of the first things you may want to do when you’re moving from one type of training to another is to go through and conduct a very deep edit of your content, keeping this in mind.

Use ILT as a framework for creating eLearning

While ILT may not be the best way to train your employees in terms of efficiency or even effectiveness, before you ditch it altogether, you can learn from it and translate what you learn to your multimedia content.

Sit in on your classroom training and take notes on what’s happening, what questions the learners are asking, where learners seem to be most engaged and how the instructor converses with students.

These are all elements that you can then use in your multimedia learning content. You can use conversations to guide script writing, you can preemptively address questions of the learners and you can create content that’s going to naturally progress as the training did in a classroom setting. When you utilize the classroom training of your organization as a guide for developing your LMS content, you’re going to have the best of both worlds, ultimately.

These are just three of the primary places where organizations face issues in terms of moving to an LMS. Once you’ve addressed these points and you’ve made the shift from ILT to eLearning, you should then gather feedback from your employees.

Let your employees guide your new form of learning – this is a great advantage of multimedia learning – the ability to easily change it and tailor it to suit your shifting needs.

Have you recently made the move from classroom and instructor-led training to a multimedia format? If so, what were the biggest challenges you faced, and what are your tips for successfully making the move?