What’s the easiest way to create e-learning?

You’ve got a looming deadline from regulators who are requiring you to train your entire team on workplace safety practices. From everything you’ve read, e-learning is the smartest way to go because it will allow you to train everyone at once while lowering training costs. It also makes it easy to deliver a consistent message to everyone. And, it gives you a way to report people’s scores to regulators. All of these benefits make e-learning a no-brainer.

But what if you’ve never created e-learning before? Can anyone make it? What’s the absolute easiest way to go from an e-learning zero to an e-learning hero? Let’s take a closer look at the answers to those questions and more. We’ll start with the lowdown on a basic process for creating e-learning that anyone can follow. And along the way, we’ll share some smart timesavers you’ll love.

3-step process for creating e-learning

Although it might sound a bit intimidating, e-learning is pretty easy to create. If you scour the web a bit, you’ll find lots of different approaches that people take. But almost all of them involve three basic steps: understanding the goal of your training, gathering and prioritizing essential content and messages, and then creating your e-learning course in a course development app. 

Let’s walk you through all three of these steps.

Understanding the goal of training

First things first: Why do you need e-learning? If it’s in response to something like a workplace safety matter, then you’re probably looking to minimize the risk of injury or death to your workers, avoid operational downtime, and satisfy the requirements of regulators. All of these things are examples of training goals—or what your e-learning needs to do.

Understanding these goals can help you narrow in on what your learners really need. For instance, is there a gap in their skills that you must address? Maybe workers need more help spotting potential safety hazards on the factory floor. Or, maybe they’re lacking key knowledge and need instruction on how to use the safety features of their equipment.

The point is, taking the time to frame your goals will help you keep your eye on the ball and create the most effective course possible.

Gather and organize source material from subject matter experts

Once your goals are in sight, you’ll want to gather source material from folks in your operation who are subject matter experts. These individuals might include team leaders or fellow managers, or folks from your company’s legal or compliance departments. The type of content you’ll gather could vary quite a bit, from PowerPoint slides, equipment manuals, and quick reference guides to job aids and safety training videos. 

After you’ve gathered your source material, you’ll want to take a little time to think about your goals again. What do your learners really need to know to hit those goals? Any source content that supports the goals should make its way into your e-learning. Anything that seems less helpful or more “nice-to-know” can be set aside or referenced in your course as additional, optional content. 

Create your e-learning

Once you’ve nailed down your goals and content, you’re ready to create e-learning using specialized software designed for course creation. This software, known as an “e-learning authoring app,” can vary widely in features and ease of use.

Most e-learning authoring apps are stand-alone apps that you install. Some of these apps are pretty easy to learn, but most have a steep learning curve. In many cases, you’ll find that before you can create e-learning that’s inviting and interactive—and that works on every device, including laptops, tablets, and smartphones—you’ll need to spend weeks or months getting familiar with the app.

Then, once you’ve created your e-learning course in an authoring app, you’ll need a learning management system (LMS) to host your course. An LMS is an online platform that allows your learners to access their assigned e-learning. It also lets you track their course completion status, activity, and quiz scores.

Knowing this, some folks skip the e-learning creation process altogether and buy finished e-learning courses from a vendor. This approach is commonly used when the content you need to teach is a general business topic, such as workplace harassment. 

Licensing off-the-shelf e-learning may seem from the outside like the easiest option, but it’s also the most expensive one. Off-the-shelf e-learning is fraught with “gotchas” such as per-person costs for accessing each e-learning course and restrictions on the number of times learners can access courses. That means if you need to do refresher training for your team later—gotcha!—it costs even more money. And even with off-the-shelf e-learning courses, you still need an LMS to host them. If you don’t already have an LMS, that could mean an additional expense—either to buy one of your own or to pay the vendor to use their LMS. 

In fact, netting out the real costs of buying off-the-shelf e-learning may just be too time-consuming for you—especially if you’re facing a pressing need for training. That’s where using an all-in-one training system, like Rise, makes a lot more sense. 

With Rise, you create and host as many e-learning courses as you need all in one spot, and all for one price. There are no separate apps to maintain and no “gotcha” pricing from vendors to negotiate. Rise also gives you a straightforward way to track and report on how well your learners performed on their quizzes, or whether or not they completed courses assigned to them.

For creating e-learning, Rise gives you dozens of prebuilt lessons on popular business topics like workplace harassment, project management, leadership, and communication, so you don’t have to start from scratch unless you want to. These professionally crafted lessons are higher quality than what most off-the-shelf e-learning vendors provide, and include gorgeous instructional videos, and compellingly written, interactive exercises that capture your learners’ attention and get them thinking.

And if you need something more customized, no problem. Rise has you covered there, too. You can create e-learning from scratch using modular learning blocks that you can arrange and customize with your content and images.

Or you can start from a course template to save yourself time. Rise has templates for all sorts of human resources, marketing, sales, IT, legal, operations, finance, and customer service topics. These templates give you an easy-to-follow outline for the topic and include placeholder text, interactions, and images that you can quickly update with your own content. Since experts build Rise course templates, you’ll know you’re structuring your e-learning course in a way that’s both engaging and effective. 

Let’s recap

Creating e-learning is a simple, three-step process where you think through your goals, gather and prioritize your content, and then build your e-learning course in a way that makes that content shine. And with an all-in-one training system like Rise, it’s never been easier for anyone to create amazing e-learning. With prebuilt lessons and intuitive course templates, Rise is simply the easiest way to create e-learning. Period.

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