Needless to say that online learning has its own set of challenges and limitations. That is why a growing number of businesses are opting for custom eLearning development.
6 reasons to Choose Custom eLearning Development in 2021
1. Custom Elearning development aims to meet your company’s requirements
Most businesses have some goals and needs that traditional courses cannot address. That is why it may be worth investing in custom eLearning development. Well-known eLearning courses from platforms like Udemy and Coursera are extremely effective – but they only address a general set of issues that may or may not align with your business objectives.
Why ask your employees to invest their time and money learning a new course that has little to do with your business? By investing in custom eLearning development you can provide learners with transparent and clear ideas within online employee training. Your employees will have the right information for their specific roles to greatly expedite the onboarding process. You can build effective modules aligned with your industry and company which consequently will increase your ROL (Return on Learning). Moreover, investing in custom eLearning development also let you keep your message and branding consistent with other aspects of your employee’s learning experience.
2. Rapid Development of Content
Custom courses can be quickly and conveniently rolled out so that your learners and employees can acquire new information and skills right away. Rather than having to spend money on books and redundant online courses, you can simply upload your learning material to a custom eLearning platform and offer your employees access to a treasure trove of information right away.
As an instructor, you are responsible for creating high-quality content that can help your students in the real world. Making the best online course through custom eLearning development means that you should structure your online course, using new pedagogical approaches, tech tools, and learning activities.
For instance, if you notice that your sales staff require additional training based on their most recent performance, you can use your LMS’s web conferencing feature to rapidly deploy a webinar that focuses on the core skills that they need to cultivate.
Investing in custom eLearning development also gives a learner the ability to access important information and reference material whenever and when they need it. For instance, if your employees need a refresher course on customer refunds, they can easily log back into the eLearning platform and click on the customer service module to relearn all the essential steps of the customer refund process.
3. Avoid technical mistakes
The most obvious workaround to technical problems is to invest in custom eLearning development. By testing for UI and UX issues in the earliest phase of course development you may avoid the inevitable problems in the future, that is why it is important to have a flexible eLearning platform such as Open edX that allows you to make last-minute changes and edits.
Another clever trick to minimize technical challenges is to keep it simple! Try custom eLearning development techniques that don’t take up a lot of computational resources in terms of RAM or download speeds. This means you need a robust script that can seamlessly load across multiple devices such as mobile phones and PCs. We also recommend providing a comprehensive help page with detailed FAQ sections that can point learners in the right direction. Bonus points if you can provide customer support through live chat, email addresses, or an online forum to sort out any technical glitches.
4. Learners Can Learn At Their Own Pace
Online courses are flexible and can be accessed on-the-go, or whenever the learner or employee is free and comfortable. We have to work with tight schedules – which means you should never try to impose your schedule on someone else. Let your students learn at their own pace.
Divide the content into different modules that consist of smaller lessons, so students can complete a lesson in a short amount of time. In other words, structure your online course properly. You should also implement reasonable time limits that allow busy people to complete your course. Just because your training is conducted online doesn’t mean your students shouldn’t meet deadlines. Set up alerts to your students, whether through email or phone alerts, informing your students that they’re running out of time and asking them to complete their tasks for the day.
You have to identify all the obstacles and convert them into more interesting learning modules. This starts with creating your course’s learner profiles, finding out the main pain points of your target audience, and providing actionable strategies that address their difficulties.
To keep things interesting, you can integrate your online course with all types of interactive learning material, including challenges, adventures, storytelling elements, gamification, and even simulators to maximize engagement.
Bonus points if you can incentivize learning while developing eLearning courses. A growing body of evidence suggests that when students receive incentives, in the form of certificates or qualifications, not only do they get more motivated to proceed with the course but their engagement levels increase. You can modernize your online course by implementing digital badges in education to improve engagement levels and your course’s completion rate.
5. Scalability
One of the most obvious advantages of custom eLearning development is that it can be scaled to suit your specific needs and desires. Custom eLearning development will let you deliver the right kind of knowledge consistently, making learning flowing as your business grows. Custom eLearning solution gives you direct control over the information and provides on-demand microlearning. Moreover, eLearning is accessible on desktop and mobile devices, thus learners can choose when and where to use eLearning.
You can also integrate your online course with social media to make the learning process more engaging. Use a versatile LMS like Open edX platform to integrate social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This allows your students to share their learning experiences, achievements, and problems on social media.
Open edX platform was designed to be highly scalable and offers two main advantages:
The ability to scale your content: It gives you the ability to make last-minute changes to your content at any time. A traditional course cannot do this and hence, without this type of custom eLearning platform, you might miss some advantages of custom eLearning development.
The ability to scale based on the number of learners: Open edX eLearning platform lets you scale your course easily so you don’t have to worry about going from 500 learners to over 200,000 simultaneous learners.
Want to know more about Open edX and why we believe it’s a great LMS technology? Check out our blog posts on the topic:
- Open edX: What Is It And Why 19 Million People Use It?
- Is Open edX the Next Big Thing in Custom LMS World?
6. Custom eLearning Development Can be Done Within Your Allocated Budget
When most people think of custom eLearning development, they often conflate it with enormous costs and excessive effort. What they don’t realize is that the long term benefits of custom eLearning development are enormous.
While it is true that the initial investment in custom eLearning development seems to be big, it will eventually be profitable in the long run. Often, off the shelf courses have enormous fees and subscriptions (the more employees you have, the more expensive it may be), on the other hand, custom eLearning development can fit into any budget. All you have to do is inform the eLearning providers of your specific needs and they will provide you with a customized eLearning solution based on your specific needs.
