Your eLearning development strategy doesn’t have to push your financial limits or consume excessive time or energy, especially if you have cost-saving tips and multifunctional authoring tools in mind. Recently, The eLearning Guild conducted a survey, which captured eLearners’ techniques for reducing costs and creating content in the most efficient way, while still maintaining quality. Read our top 10 tips from the The eLearning Guild’s 75 Tips to Reduce eLearning Costs by Patti Shank here:

1. Develop once, use many times. See if there is overlap in your needs where you can develop courses together with people in the same business. This could work especially well for regulatory and compliance courses.

2. Provide mobile content for mobile staff. This makes content available to them and reduces the cost of having them have to come into the office for training.

3. Incorporate social interaction into asynchronous learning. Blogs, e-mail, wikis, discussion forums, and other tools are useful for support and engaging with facilitators and other learners. You may be able to improve learning and cut down on course size by adding social interaction. Participants may be able to respond to others’ questions as well and this will lessen reliance on the facilitator, reducing costs. Note: If a message board or e-mail system is in place for participants to get help, you must monitor it and answer questions.

4. Don’t be afraid to design your own graphics! If you can’t afford new ones, modify or create your own. And you don’t need expensive graphics software, PowerPoint, especially 2010, can do amazing things—just add a little creativity.

5. Create clear, replicable, and concise design and development processes. This reduces the time required in building courses. Most designers and developers spend far too much time in things that don’t add value!

6. Use rapid tools. This reduces the learning curve and development time. Tools mentioned included Lectora.

7. Use tools to allow multiple reviewers to review and comment online.

8. Plan ahead. There’s a steep learning and effort curve when implementing a LMS. If you plan for it, you’ll save time and effort.

9. Map authoring tools to the LMS. Check out how well your authoring tools work with any LMS applications you are considering. You can save a lot of time and has- sle by making sure they can play well together.

10. Connect with other instructional designers etc. to exchange ideas. How? Twitter, LinkedIn groups, local professional groups (such as the eLearning Guild, ASTD and ISPI), etc.

For Lectora and CourseMill users, these steps are extremely easy to follow. Lectora makes it easy for you to create mLearning content, which is tip number 2 on our list, by publishing to HTML5, which reduces costs and time for holding in-house training sessions. Tip number 7 suggests using a tool that enables you to collaborate online, and Lectora Online is the ultimate tool for this because you can instantly view real-time changes and streamline your project life cycle directly from your Web browser. Another key component is using an authoring tool and a learning management system that are compatible, and Lectora and CourseMill LMS are a perfect pair for any eLearning developer.

Reducing costs is important for any instructor, developer, designer or SME in the eLearning industry, and there are many simple, easy-to-employ solutions to do this in an effective manner. Sometimes, “saving money isn’t only about finding cheaper ways to get the job done,” according to the report. “It’s also about optimizing the resources you have available, including yourself.”

For the full list of tips for reducing eLearning costs, download the Guild’s research report here.

 

To keep up to date with Lectora and related activities, stay connected with our social networks at: Twitter: @lectora, Facebook - http://bit.ly/cIG0Pe, LinkedIn group (Lectora Rapid eLearning) - http://bit.ly/9qcO3n

 

Heather Thomas is the Social Media Lead at Trivantis Corporation. She is a senior public relations student at Kent State University and is interested in corporate PR and social media. She enjoys traveling, reading and writing.