How to turn traditional training into digital? | Steps for successful conversion

We are currently witnessing how technology is becoming more popular in the modern world and most importantly to the business industry. Most of the jobs rely on it and it seems that there is no industry that has not embraced technology in other forms. 

This technology advancement gives rise to the conversion of traditional employee training to an e-learning format. Employee training using a traditional methodology has gotten obsolete due to the rise of e-learning format.

Traditional training methodology has become ineffective in providing the learning experience employees desire today.  Many think that it’s boring and exhausting to sit in a classroom or office and listen to a set of speakers lecture them. 

At the time when employees are distracted hence aren’t engaged, they are not learning as they should. Employees presently need a more current digital learning experience that includes articles, podcasts videos, and various forms of digital content. 

Also, as most are pressed for time, they lean toward e-learning courses that they can take when they need to. In fact, according to a study, e-learning requires 40% to 60% less time than learning in a similar material in a traditional classroom setting. 

Traditional training setups can be challenging to manage. This is why most companies are maximizing technology to improve their training programs. 

Transitioning to Digital Learning

With e-learning, their employees can take advantage of training modules that are intended to suit their individual needs. Online training likewise permits companies to keep an eye with their employees’ comprehension of what they should do with regard to their jobs and obligations.

If your company has been associated with delivering training to staff for some time now, or if you have been offering Instructor Lead training to employees throughout the long term, you might want to consider converting it to digital format. The thing is, Year after year, eLearning has ended up being more equipped and practical when contrasted with traditional training. 

If you’re interested in taking a leap, here are the steps you should do to convert your existing format into a digital one.

Preparation

Detailed inventory of what you have 

Before anything else, do a vast survey of the entirety of the current content resources that may be accessible. Instructor Lead Training (ILT) usually contains projected slides, (PPts) handouts, training manuals, video, and audio files and worksheets. 

It also comprises auxiliary materials like answer sheets, study guides, etc. You have to make sure that the entire material is gathered and stored in a central repository and it must be categorized with proper information after all the materials have been gathered.

Understand the purpose of the course

Realizing the reasons why an e-learning course was established in the first place perhaps gives you the best guidelines to transition into the digital age. For instance, if the existing traditional training methodologies are providing flow charts that help learners to apply it in a proper procedure, then perhaps a digital re-creation as well can provide flow charts with complete hyperlinks and interactivity to learners. 

Knowing that using technology might leverage the accessibility and availability of training sessions.

Review and Revise

The key to successful online course training is ensuring that all raw materials have been thoroughly reviewed. Before making yourself ready to convert all materials into a digital media format, you have to realize that there are no consequences in ensuring that all materials are all set and ready for conversion. 

Below are the steps you can do in reviewing materials.

• When you’ve found the right digital content in your inventory, which you feel may be useful to your course, give cautious consideration to the Copyright aspects of your inventory database. On the off chance that the content in your inventory has copyrights, you have to connect with the owner and examine the use of that content first.
• Ensure that all material that will be converted is just right and accurate for the course.
• Consider a thorough revision; edit all the misleading and outdated content information on your inventory.

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Try to observe an existing session if there’s any

There’s nothing wrong with learning from other’s work. Chances are that you will be on a greater edge, providing the most appealing learning experience to your employees. In the event that there is a training session progress that utilizes the existing materials, it might be truly significant for key members from your conversion team to observe and learn from it. 

In this manner, you will

• Give the conversion team an exceptional knowledge of the best way to transform a portion of the paper-based materials into advanced content.
• Distinguish potential data “gaps” in the current content. For instance, it is not impossible for participants to ask and request an explanation for difficult content; with this foreseen event your team can include FAQs during the conversion process. 

Conversion

Organize everything you prepared

When the preparation phase is appropriately executed, you can now proceed to the conversion phase which is the most crucial part of transforming ILT into a digital format.

Get organized

Before everything else, you need to settle and organize things up. This will ensure you a successful ILT to e-learning conversion.

Establish different departments such as Instructional designers, subject matter experts, and support staff.

Gather and align all the goals and objectives of different departments. Aligning these goals and objectives is generally an exceptional strategy, as every department would probably have its own particular goals. 

For instance, the Finance department might be hoping to reach an objective in terms of investments and savings. IT department might focus on objectives concerning the department resources.

Establish different roles and responsibilities for every member. This includes jobs such as securing all the resources that will be needed in e-learning implementation, timelines, and instructional materials.

Reinvent necessary items

Simply transforming your course to an e-learning format won’t likely guarantee you better outcomes at the end. You have to be more creative with the necessary aspects of your online course. 

• Converting a traditional classroom training format into a digital format means that you have more opportunities to make your course more user-friendly and adaptable for your participants.
• You can use images, graphics instead of excessive text that can be exhausting to read.
• Manuals with excessive text are not appealing to the eyes, add some voice over and recorded videos.
• All the reading and talking are both monotonous and exhausting, try to spice up your course with some gamification. 

With JetWebinar, you can use their JetCall function. This is their ultra-fast virtual meeting technology wherein you can host an interactive meeting with your team and conduct your training. 

In JetCall you can:

• Let you host a meeting in any type of device without the need for an app download. 
•  Create on the go breakout rooms for your audience to collaborate.
• Collaborate and present easily with your team.
•  Create on the go breakout rooms for your audience to collaborate as an additional way for people in the JetCall to interact with one another. 

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Restructure is important too

Remember that you choose to convert ILT format to an E-learning format to provide a great learning experience. It is not enough to provide them with the same course flow you use in an ILT format; your participant needs more control to take advantage of your course.

• Redesign your ILT program course flow to fit in the context of an e-learning course.
• Use your ILT content from your inventory and transform them into interactive activities. It will allow your participants to exercise their gray areas instead of reading excessive texts from the screen.
• Provide course flow that can’t be found in traditional training sessions to make e-learning more relevant.
• Allow your students to have freedom in choosing segments of your course. As E-learning is self-driven, you have to put more control into the hands of your participants.

Reduce, be concise and avoid repetition

Converting into an e-learning format means that you are bound to change most of the aspects of your ILT course. Keep in mind that what you have exhibited in ILT might not be suitable for an e-learning format. 

Therefore, you have to think of a creative course framework that will likely provide a better learning experience for your participants.

Long texts and crowded screens are not appealing to the eyes of your participants; make the texts simplified and adapt a good graphic design for your course.

Large lessons with too much information to absorb will likely overwhelm your participants, but thanks to this digital format as you can break large lessons into multiple parts making it more tolerable for your participants to focus on.

Provide a summarized content of your course that can be accessed on-demand.

Conclusion

Creating e-learning courses for your workers is certainly not a tedious issue as you have readymade assets in the classroom training you as of now have. With the help of e-learning developers and authoring tools, it is conceivable to change over them to online courses.

Remember that even when we are talking about “conversion” here, your objective must focus on reusing and recycling what you already have in a traditional classroom setting.

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