Create Online Training Courses

So you are ready to take the e-learning plunge and engage in online training. Are you are ready to begin developing online training courses or e-learning?
What do you do to get started?

The first thing I recommend is plan, plan, plan.

1. What is your training budget?
2. Do you intend to develop an in-house online learning or training management system or are you going to outsource to a training software vendor to provide these online learning or training solutions.
3. Is your e-learning content already created?
4. What is the format of your training courses or e-learning?
5. Did you know you can turn a stale and boring PowerPoint presentation or training course into an exciting Flash movie that does no require any software to play seamlessly within the browser of your users computer .. think YouTube!
6. Are you the “take-charge-lets-manage-our-own-system” kind of person with minimum oversight or control of IT? Then you might need a secure, easy to use, web-based training and e-learning system.
7. How often do you update your courses? How easy do you want the course maintenance process to be?

Assuming you answered these questions correctly and think you are ready for e-learning or web-based training, what steps do you need to take to actually get started with your online training course program?

1. I recommend you identify a training software vendor .. it is less costly and saves you a ton of headache. Trust me .. I know … I am a vendor and folks come to me after getting frustrated trying to develop their own systems in-house.
2. Secondly, have your content ready. Many vendors will give you some sort of free trial account. If they don’t ditch them and come to eLeaP. I highly recommend you use your free trial to thoroughly investigate the e-learning software system and make sure it works for your needs. Go ahead and use your free trial to load up your content. Then when you are ready to pay for the service, you will be ready to launch your training to your staff. See what I mean? Be smart .. its your limited training budget, use it wisely.
3. Once you go live, you will need tech support every once in a while. I recommend going with a company that gives you a couple of options – web based support system and good ole fashioned phone support.
4. After using the training system for a while, take an evaluation. How are things going? How are your users liking the new training system? How is course creation and user management going for you? It is as easy as you hoped? Talk to the vendor… they always have new features coming along so see what is coming down the pipe. You might contribute ideas that end up in the next upgrade of the e-learning management and training management system.

Conclusion

E-learning and web-based training is an exciting cost effective method for developing or creating online training courses and training programs. Like any new industry you have to watch out for the hype. Get a vendor who will work with you. Get a vendor who is affordable and gives you flexible pricing and lastly have fun doing web-based e-learning.

Create as many online courses and trainings as you can… you can always use them!