The 4 myths of content creation in digital training

The creation of effective content in digital training requires the creation of tailor-made and quality educational content.

The quality of educational content is a major challenge for organizations that want to train with digital technology. This is particularly true for so-called “vocational” training courses. By nature, these courses are specific to each organization because they translate their strategic orientations into an operational manner. An insurer who wishes to train its salespeople online in new sales techniques will have to offer them specific training.

However, the design of effective job training, that is to say that leads to a sustainable and measurable increase in skills, requires the creation of tailor-made and quality educational content. It is the heaviness of this investment in the creation of specific content that makes training managers hesitate between internalizing the design and buying content off the shelf.

At Didask, we believe that the strategic importance of these professional training courses requires companies to: get involved in the creation of specific content. To help businesses embark on this path, it is essential to deconstruct the myths that surround content creation within organizations.

Myth 1: Organizations can fully delegate the creation of specific content

As we said, these professional training courses are strategic and specific to the organization. So the same goes for training content. However, delegating the design of this content entirely, or worse, buying generic content, does not allow you to control your educational heritage and therefore the quality of the transmission of an organization's strategic directions. Content that is too generic or of poor quality will damage the organization's image with its employees, will not allow for optimal engagement of learners and will prevent a real increase in skills.

Training managers and business experts must pilot the design of specific content. and even get involved in content creation. Indeed, they are the only ones capable of adapting content to the needs of employees in order to effectively guide them towards increasing their skills. They must be the guarantors of the creation and maintenance of the training heritage. We must support them by providing them with a method to design their training content, and digital tools that facilitate creation and adaptation over time.

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Of course, A game of the design of these training contents can be outsourced, in particular in the following cases:

• La technical implementation multimedia resources.
• La generic part of a training course : A digital acculturation course contains generic elements that are available off-the-shelf. However, it will be a question of ensuring that it is technically possible to link external and internal content using modular technologies.

Myth #2: Businesses don't create training content

Organizations, on the contrary, are the champions in creating training content : according to the latest European Digital Learning Benchmark barometer [1] 68% of businesses interviewed (114 among the largest in Europe) produce digital content internally. However, this figure masks two realities:

• Powerpoint is still mostly used as a support for internal training (the European Digital Learning Benchmark survey methodology does not indicate whether Powerpoint is included in the definition of “tailor-made digital content”).
• SMEs and ETIs, on the other hand, still use Powerpoint extensively in their internal training courses.

So companies actually create a lot of training content.. These materials, designed in-house, are full of relevant practical cases that can be reused in the context of online training distributed on digital platforms.

Myth #3: We cannot fight against the obsolescence of digital content

Taking control of your educational heritage therefore implies investing in the creation of internal content. But you have to invest rationally... To do this, training managers must take into account two important issues:

• Develop simple educational resources : Multimedia resources are rapidly becoming obsolete. Sober content can lead to excellent results: quizzes, diagrams...
• Rely on a flexible and scalable digital platform which allows the rapid adaptation of educational resources (image, audio, video, quizzes) and the marginal modifications of the training modules over time. Finally, the digital platform must allow the reuse of training content from one training course to another.

Myth #4 : Thanks to the progress of digital training platforms (LMS, MOOC etc...), creating effective content will become as simple and fast as creating a site with Wordpress

Sometimes there is confusion about what it means to create training content. First of all, we must clearly distinguish between transfer of resources on a digital platform of the creation of resources. New web platforms make it easy to transfer content and resources (for example, upload animated files) and organize them into courses with chapters, but rarely to create them directly on the tool.

Moreover, even if a digital platform incorporated functionalities that simplify the creation of resources, there would always be an irreducible part of human work: the same work that produces pedagogical effectiveness of the content. This effort requires the combination of mastering a skill (expertise) and structuring work in order to facilitate its transmission (pedagogy). The pure and simple automation of resource design is therefore not for tomorrow!

If you want to train effectively, creating quality educational content will therefore always be time-consuming.. Today, there are solutions to rationalize this investment and allow trainers to focus on what matters most: ensuring sustainable skills development.

With nearly 30 years of innovation, the digital training sector must now better guide companies that want to internalize the development of their educational heritage.

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The creation of effective e-learning content is now part of a global transformation process, where human expertise and technological advances converge in the service of learning. By moving beyond traditional myths to adopt a science-based approach, organizations can now design learning experiences that combine instructional relevance and operational effectiveness. The key lies in the subtle balance between business expertise, artificial intelligence tools and the principles of cognitive science, thus allowing for a sustainable and measurable increase in skills.
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[1] Second edition of the European Digital Learning Benchmark led by CrossKnowledge and Féfaur (February 2016)