Maximize the Expertise of Your Custom E-Learning Vendor – 4 Elements You Mustn’t Miss
Learn how to work with your e-learning development vendor and make the most of their expertise.
Digital learning courses must impart skills and knowledge to your employees without the need of an instructor/teacher. This is a challenging task. In the absence of an instructor, the responsibility of engagement, interaction, interest curation, knowledge transfer, and every other aspect of learning depends on the e-learning course. Needless to say, your e-learning course must be well designed to make any real impact on your learners. A good e-learning course makes the best use of instructional design methods, interactions, immersive multimedia, and high-quality content, all tailor-made to suit your target audience.
The quality of your e-learning course directly depends on way it is developed. That’s why it is always recommended that you hire an experienced e-learning vendor to develop your courses. But hiring a good vendor is just the first step. In order to make the most of their expertise and infrastructure, you need to work closely with them to get the best possible output. Remember that a vendor is an external entity who must understand your business and the skill requirement to develop an effective course. This means they can develop a strong course only when you work alongside the vendor. Let’s look at a few ways in which you can maximize the output from your custom e-learning vendor:
1. Establish a Good Working Relation
The first step to ensure a great course is getting to know the people you are working with. When it comes to giving your e-learning development business to someone else, you should see beyond the presentation pitch given by the vendor. Always make a point to connect with the team that is going to work on your project. Know their qualifications, review past work, and explore their style of working. This is will help you understand the capabilities of the team better and see the kind of course that they can deliver.
2. Closely Monitor the Development Process
Each e-learning development vendor has a unique development process – analyze, design, develop, evaluate, and finally implement. Most vendors follow these development stages or their equivalent. But the way everyone interprets these stages and the amount of work they do corresponding to every stage differs from vendor to vendor. That’s why you need to clearly understand the scope of progress your vendor is going to make at each stage. You need to have an accord on timelines and quality control. This will make sure you stay in sync with the entire process, which allows you to plan.
3. Ensure Proactive Communication
Communication is the key to ensure smoothness in any process. E-learning development is a project that involves many different people, like subject matter experts, learning managers, instructional designers, and multimedia experts. You need to ensure timely communication from all the different people involved. This way, you can avoid mistakes and facilitate unhindered progress. Effective communication also avoids delays that may happen due to the unaccountability of certain people.
4. Take Care of All Legalities
When you outsource your e-learning process, you are letting an external contractor be privy to a lot of your confidential information. While an experienced e-learning vendor will protect your information at all costs, you can’t say the same about vendors who have just started out. That’s why it is always better to be safe than sorry and take care of all the legalities upfront. Get everything on paper, signed and sealed, considering all the necessary laws.
By following these simple ethics, you can get the most out of your money. Stay involved in the development from start to end and give your employees a high-quality training course.
