5 Key Factors to Consider During eLearning Development Process
8 min readGlobalization is one of the essential factors in creating online training solutions. Employees are located in different geographical locations, and traditionally training them is time-consuming and costly. In addition, business needs are constantly changing. The market is expanding, and there is an increase in products. For these reasons, workers are required to update their knowledge and skills regularly. This means that training must be continuous and ongoing. That's how eLearning comes. Without a doubt, one of the most important steps when adopting an online training solution in your organization is the eLearning development process.
Proper planning regarding tasks, project heads, costs and other performance factors forms the basis for adequate execution and control. The process is to do a project to implement the blueprints for a construction project. Therefore, changing anything after this step could have costly consequences.
In this post, we will look at five key factors that determine the success of an eLearning development process. But first, let's go over the basics to make sure we're at the same place.
Proper planning regarding tasks, project heads, costs and other performance factors forms the basis for adequate execution and control. The process is to do a project to implement the blueprints for a construction project. Therefore, changing anything after this step could have costly consequences.
In this post, we will look at five key factors that determine the success of an eLearning development process. But first, let's go over the basics to make sure we're at the same place.
What is eLearning?


Learning that is accomplished with electronic means is eLearning.
eLearning uses technology to enable people to learn anywhere and at any time. Simply put, learning that is accomplished with electronic means is eLearning. Information provided by subject experts is made student-friendly by applying instructional and visual design principles—an electronic portal or intranet for users to access. An eLearning course aims to teach or help individuals who are essentially trying to learn on their own.
Why is a great collaborative process so important to the growth of eLearning?
Collaborating on an eLearning project starts with understanding the learner's challenges and goals as well as the business's objective(s). Every member of the eLearning development team should share their knowledge and insights about the project. Everyone's input is essential to set clear expectations when assigning tasks.
Creating a successful online course requires all relevant departments to evaluate each other's work at fixed intervals. This creates an environment for eLearning teams to be part of the ongoing feedback and evaluation process.
Benefits of having a clear classification methodology
It is difficult to distinguish right or wrong in approaching an eLearning project. It depends on many variables, such as the size and skills of your team, the tools you're using, whether you're outsourcing, the output types you are generating and how intensive they are.
With the rise of cloud-based collaboration tools, some eLearning teams are tempted to adopt their eLearning design, making it evolve. Since remote teams can now communicate easily throughout a project's life cycle through remote social work tools, going “with the flow” can easily feel intuitive. Perhaps there is also the assumption that creative design requires an empty means of blocking and has no fixed rules.
However, we have found that organizations and manufacturing companies that adopt even basic electronics development processes achieve better results:
- Set and work towards clear goals;
- Work more efficiently and get learning products to market faster;
- Reuse tools and templates to their creative advantage;
- Easier to engage and bring stakeholders with them on their journey;
- Actively incorporate lessons learned from other projects into new projects;
- Engage end users and put them at the center of every stage.
5 Key Factors for Successful eLearning Implementation
While there are many stages of eLearning development. Here are some tips that will help you build a great eLearning team that is productive and highly effective to create amazing and engaging online eLearning courses.
Target


You must collect and align all goals from the relevant departments with the project objectives.
One of the easiest methods of determining a module's goals is to evaluate the overall goal of your entire process. From there, understanding the current step will help learners take one step closer to the final goal. Specifically, you must collect and align all goals from the relevant departments with the project objectives. Adjusting these goals and expectations is often a highly strategic process, as each department may have its own specific goals. For example, finance may hope to achieve concrete goals in terms of investment, return on investment, savings in training programs, etc.
Regions or functions may have expectations about time investment and training schedule; reports from users trained in precise data or formats; access from specific devices or areas with limited access and bandwidth; shared equipment; users with particular schedules; etc. Similarly, the human resources department may have goals related to program design, career or promotion plans, certifications, and more. An IT department may have goals related to departmental resource utilization, device utilization, security requirements, budget, licensing, hardware architecture, bandwidth consumption, …
When creating essential modules for your online learning management system, it is important to remember your end goal. If you don't know what you're going to achieve in the end, you won't find the right path that will lead learners to success.
Practicality
It is essential to understand our audience and figure out where they may be lacking. Once you know the knowledge gap, it will be easier to find content to fill that gap. Thankfully, there are digital collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams, with built-in accessibility support, like Immersive Reader and language translation features or Google Classroom. There are also alternative ways of providing instruction, such as emailing assignments, posting lower-grade activities on the school website, or sending paper packets home.
If you can't easily identify these gaps, you can also use surveys and polls to understand their opinions. For businesses, asking a manager can also help identify where employees may be having problems.
Budget
When building an online learning management system, it's crucial to have a budget in place before you begin the development process. This allows you to estimate what you can include in the development and design of your content based on the project's scope.
It is impossible to compare LMSs based on their licensing and pricing policies because there are so many parameters. Some LMS apply feature-based pricing, while others require course payment at the time of registration through payment gateways. However, others put limits on the content.
Below we list typical pricing layouts for your reference:
- Monthly / Annual Subscription
- Lifetime Licensing
- User or content upper limit
- Pricing per user
- Mass discounts
Extensive research is needed to identify hidden or additional fees when exceeding limits and cancellation policies and before you embark on any LMS. It's important to keep your expectations realistic in line with your budget. Try not to create a large buffer during this process, or you may run out of money before your project is finished.
Security and Reliability
Every organization and institute use their sensitive information. Security breaches are the biggest threat to an organization's reputation and trust. Ensuring the security of your content along with protecting your users' personal data is your responsibility on behalf of your organization. You have the right to know what encryption and security protocols are implemented in the LMS. The use of firewalls and SSL plays an important role in tightening security.
LMS reliability can be assessed by understanding downtime, disaster management, and contingency plans. Your LMS should not abandon your users in the middle of a critical learning moment. Users lose focus and patience if the system crashes frequently. Moreover, they cannot afford to lose their jobs due to technical problems with the system.
Communication platform


Make sure your learning app is accessible by mobile devices and adaptable to various platforms.
Once you understand how you will create your content, you will require a platform for your content to reside on. Since you'll be including videos to explain your content clearly, you'll also need to have a hosting background. And now, with the current COVID-19 outbreak, online learning through mobile devices has become more popular than ever. Instead of going to the library or office, you can access your classroom with a desktop computer or laptop. Make sure your learning app is accessible by mobile devices and adaptable to various platforms. While choosing a video creation platform, you also need to keep in mind budget and timing. You should not exceed one of them to compensate for the content.
At the same time, always pay attention to quality. If you find it difficult to handle everything yourself, you can always work with eLearning development companies. They will take all the work on your behalf.
Conclusion
There are more than 5 factors listed above, but we have condensed as much as possible the main factors that should be considered when building an eLearning Development process setup. A quality service provider always ensures the following basic working contents:
- Collaborative and iterative manufacturing processes involving stakeholders in the process – especially end-users – produce better results and are more likely to achieve their goals.
- Learn the manufacturing processes that take the time to pre-analyze, clearly define their goals, and keep everyone focused on these processes that will generate higher ROI.
- Learning development uses learning data and analytics to fine-tune and refine the process for more impact.
- If you are looking for a partner to develop your eLearning process, we – Groove Technology can help you!
- Get a smarter, faster way to increase conversions with Groove's authoring platform.
We'll even tailor your demo to show you how we can help you tackle your biggest enhancement challenges. Contact us now!