A major hurdle among training departments involves the time and cost associated with developing quality instructional material. There are many factors to consider - course length, level of interactivity and the professional talents involved with creating the images, video, etc.
Available Resources
Perhaps the most overlooked ingredients are time required and availability for SME's, instructional designers and editing. In some ways, creating eLearning content can be like re-modeling a house…expect the unexpected, delays are inevitable and always invest in good tools.
$60,000 per Hour
A Chief Learning Officer who oversees training and development for 100,000 people recently told me “the time and resources required to develop customized content is simply a luxury that we do not have.” She has a training staff of 600 people and characterized their activities as “treading water.” As a result, she is forced to push out eLearning content that in her own admission is “not-engaging” and has “tremendous room for improvement.” She later explained that off-the-shelf content is like “pushing a square peg in a round hole” and therefore she's left using “rapid-development” tools to create each course by scratch.
Recent reports from both ASTD and the eLearning Guild suggest that 1 hour of low-interactive eLearning content (from tools such as Articulate and Captivate) can cost as much as $60,000 and take 86-117 hours to produce. While these costs are considerable, they are still significantly lower than instructor led-training when you consider the collective travel, seat time, administration and scalability costs.
Selecting the Right Tools
eLearning can be cost effective if you decrease the time and required resources. Having the right learning management system for the job can make all the difference. This is where the integrated content management system (CMS) of the Accord LMS has proven to be invaluable. The integrated CMS allows organizations to easily a) reorganize and repurpose any of their existing course content when creating new courses and b) utilize existing referenceware and collateral that your company has already created. The intuitive drag-and-drop features are easy to use and support both move and copy.
Whether it is SCORM, PowerPoint, PDF, Word docs, images, videos, certificates of completion, text or even test questions, the content can be local or hosted anywhere on the web. With the Accord LMS and its Content Management System you can easily:
- Blend SCORM and non-SCORM content or referenceware
- Quickly add content and organize learning catalogs
- Assign learning content to individuals, groups or any combination
- Recommend and sell your learning content with eCommerce features
Integrated Content Management
The Accord LMS integrated content management system can easily save you time and money. The beauty is in its simplicity.
To learn more, please contact one of our eLearning experts at info@accordLMS.com to discuss how your organization can utilize its powerful LMS and integrated content management system.