Producing your own eLearning courses is no walk in the park. There are a number of skillsets and a lot specialized knowledge required to produce an engaging and effective online course.

Depending on how specialized the subject matter is, and how many media elements your course contains, a single hour of online training could take anywhere from 30 to 300 hours to produce! And that doesn’t even count the time you’ll spend setting up your learning environment so it’s able to track your learners’ progress.

To get a better grasp of what kind of talent goes into producing a course, let’s first examine the process.

Outline Your Training Objectives: Once your agency has chosen a training topic, the first step is to spell out the intended outcomes or learning objectives. The learning objectives will serve as the framework for the course, and the element by which all the supporting content is provided. The course outline should be drafted by a Subject Matter Expert or an industry professional who best understands how the training applies in the field.

Write the Course Content and Assessment Questions: After outlining the course objectives, the next step is to spell out the who, what, when, why, and how. If you’re working directly with a subject matter expert, this person can usually provide the supporting research-based evidence to validate the training program, otherwise you’ll need to employ a team of researchers to provide this information. At this point, writers should also be working on putting together a pool of test questions and interactive questions to assess learner knowledge based on the established learning objectives.

Develop Course Storyboard: Once the content is written, it needs to go through a translation process to ensure that it can be easily digested online and that it will effectively engage the learners. This is where an instructional designer comes in. The instructional designer will enhance the learning experience by adding interactive exercises to the training to reinforce learner knowledge. The instructional designer should also spell out the art specs, infographics, charts, and photo specs he or she thinks will engage the learners and retain their attention.

Create Media Elements/Graphics: Following the specification of the artwork and photos, you’ll need someone to actually create those images. Course media assets should be aesthetically pleasing and designed in a manner that is cohesive to the design of the training – while still aiming to reinforce learner knowledge. Always choose stimulating and engaging colors, typography and designs.

Record and Edit VoiceOver/Music: Without an active instrutor running the course, having success in a self-paced environment depends largely on how well you can hold learners’ attention. This is where having professional voice talent, someone who can speak clearly and with a lot of excitement, emotion and inflection, is key.

“Buller, Bueller, Bueller…”

You might recall that line from a popular 80s movie. Imagine listening to a monotone voice like that for a number of hours – how much information would you retain?

Author the Course and Bring all the Components together: After the arts are rendered, the voiceover and audio has been recorded and edited, and all of the content has been authored, someone has to put it all together into a cohesive program. This is where the eLearning Developer comes in. Just as the Instructional Designer is the brains behind drafting the course blueprint, the eLearning Developer is the heart that brings the course to life by adding animations, building the interactive experiences, and seemlessly flowing together all of the text, artwork, and audio into a complete learning experience.

Quality Control: When you have multiple cooks in the kitchen, somebody has to taste the soup before it goes out for order. Once a course has completed the development cycle, a blind review is conducted to document any errors, bugs, issues or modifications that may be needed before releasing it live to learners.

SME/Market Review: Even after everything has been compiled, gone through, edited, changed and finalized, you want to make sure your course is still valuable to the end user and the course author. Letting your subject matter expert review the course after you’ve completed it will either confirm that the course fits the bill, or let you now what areas need additional adjustments.

What Kind of Talent Do You Need for Effective eLearning Courses?