Everyone thinks e-learning is great, everyone wants it, and you as a beleaguered learning and development professional are supposed to make it happen. However, you have very little time to create your training and onboarding courses, which is why we want to give you some tips on how to optimize your time management with blink.it.
Tick - Tock - time is running out!
When it comes to designing digital training courses for employees in your organization, the biggest pain point for many learning and development professionals is probably the factor of time. And specifically, not enough of it. Far too little. Or none at all: no time for needs and topic analyses, no time for conceptualizing the course structure, no time to select evaluation methods, and certainly no time to create high-quality course content.
The pressure to keep pace with increasing demands while also meeting the needs of employees can be overwhelming. We are familiar with this dilemma in learning and development, and that's why we designed the blink.it LMS for ease of use, without skimping on high-quality functionality. If you want to find out how we solved this problem for our clients, feel free to schedule a free initial consultation via the following button:
Schedule a free initial consultation now!
We want you to comfortably do your job, and here are some suggestions that will save you time in course creation.
More requirements - less fluff
The top rule for time-saving course creation is a clear definition of the respective course objectives:
Who should complete the course?
Which skill should be learned through the course?
What is your goal in your role as a learning and development professional?
Always ask yourself when compiling the individual learning content whether they contribute to the objective and are relevant for the participants.
Additionally, consider what prior knowledge you might expect from your participants so that you do not present them with learning content that they already know inside out. Otherwise, it could lead to boredom right at the beginning of the course, and you must avoid that if you want to keep your learners engaged until the end of the course.
Even if you incorporate gamification elements such as a quiz into the learning content, they should be directly aligned with the learning objective. Pure entertainment is nice to have, but always remember that creating these course elements will cost you some time.
Curious? Here you can test blink.it directly for free!
The new course view of blink.it – optimized for simplicity and clarity
The new course view of blink.it – optimized for simplicity and clarity
The thing with didactics
The science of learning and teaching is an expertise that you cannot really expect from every learning and development professional. Professional trainers and coaches spend years acquiring didactic knowledge, refining it, and applying it to their educational content.
We know from some of our clients that they have no clear idea or experience of how to structure a training course, and they are almost afraid to tackle the topic at all. And then course creation keeps getting postponed because there is just never enough time to deal with it calmly. Or “off-the-shelf” courses are purchased, which are not perfectly tailored to your target group, perform significantly worse compared to self-designed courses in terms of learning success, and above all, consume a lot of your budget.
Here are two good options for how to get started with course creation quickly and overcome the panic of the “blank page”:
1. Don't complicate things too much: You don't have to win awards with your courses. Sure, it would be nice if you could present didactically sophisticated courses. But if you are not well-versed in didactics and simply don't have the time to acquire this knowledge, just stick to a kind of instruction manual for your course structure:
Introduction: Explain to the participants what the course is about, what they will learn, what to expect in the course, and why they need this knowledge.
Learning Steps: Create a list of the individual steps that lead to achieving the objective. Imagine you are following a recipe: You would peel the onions before cutting them, right? First, gather all the individual steps in a brainstorming session, group them into chapters, and then bring them into a logical order.
Objective Achieved: Bring all learning strands together towards the end of the course and summarize what has been learned and what advantages or applications the acquired knowledge offers.
2. Use the blink.it Blueprint: The Blueprint is a blank course template that already includes a course structure. You will find a brief guide on how to use the Blueprint, as well as a short explanation of the content in each learning unit (the so-called “Blinks”). The template is applicable to all types of course topics: You just need to fill the Blinks with content, and after that, you can reorder or add to them as you like.
A shared job is half the time
In the blink.it app, you can upload or create various multimedia content for each learning unit and enhance it with gamification elements. With drag-and-drop functions and user-friendly editors, you can quickly add, edit, and organize content without wasting valuable time.
“That's all well and good,” we hear you saying now, “but where am I going to get all this fabulous learning content in a short time? Should I just pull it out of thin air or what?”
The answer is: Just get the material from your colleagues! In blink.it, it is possible to set up multiple people as admins of a course. Once you know what learning content you need for a course, ask the experts in your company to provide you with the material or upload it directly into the course.
Maybe they already have completed presentations, illustrations, or even videos that they can easily make available for you to upload. If not, they would likely need significantly less time to create such learning content than you would, as you would first have to familiarize yourself with the respective topic. And why try to be an all-in-one solution when you've got an entire farm represented in the company?
So: No panic about the learning content! There are probably already plenty of useful files available in your company that you can compile suitable content for your course from.
Fortunately, one never stops learning
And this also applies to course creation: Your course participants can leave comments and questions for the respective course instructor in each learning unit in the blink.it app. From their comments, you’ll see what you can improve in this course or what you need to pay attention to in future courses.
The blink.it app also offers smart settings for each learning unit, such as the scheduled Blink release, allowing you to determine the automated course flow in advance. You can easily track the learning progress of course participants in your dashboard and see how your preset course flow works for them. Your courses will quickly become better, and you will learn in a short time how to proceed with creation to meet the needs of your employees so they can achieve their learning objectives.
So you see: Even if you have very little time for creating digital training or onboarding courses, you just need a few tricks to quickly set things in motion. It would be a pity if no training could be offered in your company due to time constraints because employee development is certainly one of the reasons why you chose this great job in the first place.
We hope that this article has helped you and wish you lots of fun and success in creating your courses - preferably without time pressure!
