Best practice guide to content preparation

Before you create a course that’s tailored to your company, you’ll need two key pieces of information:

1. a clear idea of what you want learners to think or do differently after taking the course, and
2. what information they need to make this happen.

1. Course outcomes (or Learning Objectives)

Think about the top three to five things your learners should get out of the course. Should they be able to understand certain concepts, follow a new process, know how to escalate concerns?

We call these Learning Objectives – a term you may or may not be familiar with. Share your training goals and we can rework these with you to create the Learning Objectives that will sit at the heart of the course. They will let the learner know what to expect, and also help us in the course development process to ensure we’re meeting your goals.

2. Course content

Once the Learning Objectives are agreed, we need the right content so your learners can meet these objectives. Here’s a guide to providing good quality content that we can use to design your course:

• If you’re providing a PowerPoint used for face-to-face training, ensure it has speaker notes to bring the slide content to life – often the crucial details exist only in the trainer’s head!
• If your content sits across different documents, please drop relevant text/ images/ diagrams into a single, editable document (a Word file works well) so we have only the content you’d like to include. If you do need to provide different documents, please make it clear what to include and what can be cut out
• Finalise all content internally before sharing with us – new additions or edits later in the process can cause project delays so best to get it all sorted before we begin
• Think about the word count! For a 30-minute course, provide roughly 30 minutes of content – considerably more or less and we’ll need to spend time getting it to the right size before we begin (but we can always help you with this process)
• Decide if text and terminology are set in stone or if you’re happy for us to rephrase/wordsmith – if the content has been signed off by your legal team, for example, then let us know
• It can help to write heading sections and drop content into each section to ensure you’re covering the key topics. This makes a content document easier to handle and quick to review
• Bring the content to life – add some realistic situations and examples related to your learners’ day-to-day tasks, any red flags, or pitfalls a learner needs to watch out for – we can turn these into engaging scenarios that will ensure your learners understand how to apply the knowledge to their role

You DON’T need to spend time wordsmithing the content, thinking about page layouts or e-learning interactions. So long as we have all the information we need, we will create the learning flow, interactivities and design elements to turn your content into engaging e-learning.