You've spent hours upon hours building content from scratch in the hopes of engaging the trainees in your organization. You need them to care about what they are learning, so they can retain the information and bring about a change in your organization. But so far, what you've created isn't performing as you expected. Your learners are not as engaged as you thought they would be and as a result, your hard work is not generating the output and positive change you need.
Creating compelling content that engages trainees is more easily said than done. It's definitely a team effort, but even when you put your best team on the job, the possibility of failure is left hanging over your heads.
The Challenges of Team Authoring for eLearning Content Creation
If your organization existed in a vacuum, you could settle with creating eLearning content once and reusing the content for years to come. Unfortunately, organizations need to adapt to the fast pace of market changes. What you know today may not be true in a month and eLearning content needs to evolve just as quickly.
But to create content at this speed you need to solve the common challenges that come naturally with team authoring.
Inconsistencies in Design and Style
When several designers and content creators are working separately using desktop applications, it becomes difficult to design the course in a way that's consistent. The same goes for course writers. If one writer uses a certain writing style to present information while another writer uses a different style, the content clashes and doesn't create a smooth learning flow.
Desktop applications make it difficult to share the content and styling guidelines that would resolve this issue.
Lack of Control
When several people are working on the same eLearning project, content will naturally be spread all over the place. Until the project is complete and ready to be stitched together, it's difficult to get an idea of what the final course will look like. This makes it difficult to creating content that flows well from beginning to end.
Difficult Technical Learning Curve Using Most Solutions
In many cases, you have to deal with pesky desktop software. Even more unfortunate, the people in your organization who have your subject matter skills will rarely be the same people who have the technical knowledge to manage the software.
Even once you place this challenge aside, other issues remain. You often have to choose between:
- Expensive software with powerful management tools, but underwhelming interactive content creation options
- Powerful desktop authoring solution with little to no management tools for your team
Neither of these situations is ideal.
How to Solve Common Team Authoring Challenges in eLearning
Recognize yourself in any of the above challenges? Great news: you can remedy these issues. Below are some methods of solving eLearning content creation challenges in the context of team authoring.
Eliminate Silos
Team members should have the ability to work independently but without isolating their content from each other; eLearning content creation is a collaborative process.
Desktop tools give authors the freedom to work on their own, but as a result, they fail to foster an environment of collaboration. This collaboration is key to creating engaging content that will aid in the success of your organization.
At all costs, these silos that keep authors away from each other must be eliminated.
Create a Standard Framework for Content Creation
Creating content using a standard framework will not only help create a uniform look and feel for your eLearning content but will also increase team productivity. Why? When the framework is already created, your authors can spend less time thinking of the 'how' and more time creating the 'what' of the eLearning content. As a result, your team will gain more time to create new eLearning material that is easy to update and reuse.
Bring Your Best Minds Together
You'll spend less time editing and reworking content if your authors collaborate together to solve the problems of today and the future. A collaborative environment will generate more engaging content more efficiently and at lower costs.
Pick a User-Friendly Solution
Most team authoring solutions become costly—not just because of the price tag but because of the time it takes to train your team to use it. Lower the cost of creating eLearning content by choosing a solution that's easy to pick up and requires little to no training.
The Best Tool to Level Up Your Team Authoring
Absorb Create combines user-friendly interactive authoring tools with management tools under one cloud-based solution.
Although this eLearning authoring solution is great for single authors, it truly comes to life when you include other eLearning content creators:
- Invite your team members:assign role-level permissions, which helps you validate content before publishing
- Set up workspaces in public or private teams:a single Absorb Create account can house multiple Workspaces—each Workspace is its own separate entityand contains its own set of users, courses, libraries, and tasks
- Add and manage your content:use a central library to categorize, manage and find your content easily, while always knowing how each multimedia asset is being used
- Insert branding guidelines:avoid inconsistencies to create a solid structure for content creation,including themes and brand colors
- Save time with templates:create yourown content templatesto quickly copy and reuse existing content
- Collaborate:work from the cloud on a single project, assign tasks and insert comments
- Build interactive courses:with its ease of use and drag-and-drop features, you can quickly create powerful interactive text, videos and even branching content
With a cloud-based course creation solution, your team authoring process can evolve to the next level and your organization can finally create the eLearning content it needs.
We encourage you to keep these challenges and solutions in mind the next time you're creating a course amongst your team. If you haven't tried Absorb Create and it's Team Authoring yet, give it a try completely free.
