It’s the perfect time of year to take stock of your elearning offering. How could you make the content and system you’ve already got work better for your organisation? You might be surprised by just how much of a difference you could make, without investing too much time and zero money – in fact, these tips could even shave a bit off your budget!
Have a learner clearout
Be honest: when was the last time you checked your LMS to make sure all the learners were still current? It’s all too easy to skip regular maintenance and leave ex-employees or former clients languishing on the system, taking up a seat that you could use for another person (and most likely costing you extra money). It’s definitely worth a few minutes of your time to check through the learner list and archive or delete anyone who should no longer be there. It’s worth mentioning that regular deletion of unnecessary data is also an important part of adhering to UK GDPR regulations, too. If you’re a Nimble customer, you’ll find detailed guidance about deleting learners and archiving results in our Knowledge-base.
Tidy up your courses
It can also be easy to let the outdated courses pile up – and while it’s useful to have an archive, it’s a lot easier to navigate your LMS if you use course folders to file these away. If you’re a Nimble customer, we’ve got a great support guide with detailed steps to creating archive versions and folders: How to keep versions of your courses.
This could be a great time to take a spin through your current courses, too, and check that any references to legislation, links to news articles, or case studies are still up to date. We’d recommend setting a calendar reminder once a year to make sure this actually gets done! It’s also a good opportunity to refresh the imagery in your courses. Take a look at our webinar for some ideas: Using Images and Video to Maximise Learning.
Repurpose existing content
If you’re like most of our customers who use Nimble Author, you’ve no doubt crafted carefully-pitched courses that are just right for your organisation. But what if you could use that content in a different way, to get more out of it? Breaking long courses down into bite-sized micro-learning opportunities can be a great way to squeeze more value out of your hard work. It may be you created a long course about, for example, your full product range. That 40-minute module is really worthwhile for the sales team – but by quickly creating a short ten-minute course about each product, you could have resources that are useful for a wider range of learners.
This can be particularly useful if you’ve created video content to use in a longer course, such as screen captures. There’s nothing stopping you from building a microcourse that just contains a few key videos to illustrate a process; this can become a great resource that team members can go back to whenever they need it, or could even become a customer education tool; find out how Noetica use Nimble to train their clients.
Put the power in your learners’ hands
Once you’ve created short courses from your existing content, don’t just let it sit there; make it easily available to your learners. If you’re a Nimble+ customer, our Nimble LMS Catalogue function is included in your licence (just ask your Customer Success Manager to enable it). It’s a great way to empower learners to enrol themselves on courses that are of interest, and the perfect place to keep any microlearning.
If you’re concerned that your learners might find this approach overwhelming, why not try a marketing tactic: send out a regular learning newsletter that highlights one or two courses every month. This doesn’t take long to put together, but can help keep learning top of mind for your teams and drive motivation to engage with it. If you can emphasise the benefits of each course for their role, even better – and there’s nothing quite like a testimonial from someone who’s completed the module! If you’re a Nimble customer and you’re interested in how to improve the takeup of your elearning offering, speak to your CSM about being enrolled on our free micro course: Marketing Elearning to Your Teams.
Set a maintenance schedule
Now that you’ve dusted away the cobwebs, why not make a plan to keep things in order? Even with the best of intentions, it can be difficult to prioritise regular maintenance of learners, enrolments, courses and learning programmes. It doesn’t have to be an arduous task; consider setting half a day aside every six months. Just make sure you block the hours out in your work calendar ahead of time!
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