This is guest post from iSpring Solutions
If your company needs to develop eLearning content, you generally have two options: build courses in-house or outsource the process to third-party experts. Here are the benefits of creating courses within your company instead of outsourcing eLearning development.
1. Faster course creation
If you build courses in-house, it will save you plenty of time because you won’t have to manage an external development team, introduce their experts to your topic, and drown in multiple email chains trying to agree on the final version.
2. Cost-effectiveness
Typically, in-house authoring is cheaper, especially if you have a dedicated professional for the task and a subject matter expert who can share relevant knowledge and practices on the topic. This is also true for the cases when it’s possible to build content quickly by reusing existing training materials.
3. Faster content updates
If you need to regularly update course content, buying an authoring tool seems like a reasonable investment. For example, if your product line expands regularly and you need to equip your salespeople with up-to-date knowledge, you can make changes to a course in a couple of hours.
You won’t have to wait for third-party developers to dig into the update, review content, and send source files to you for approval. Plus, an outsourcing company probably won't be able to deal with your task immediately, which is a huge issue if you’re under a tight deadline.
4. Less paperwork and approvals
When a course is built within your company, it’s easier to discuss its content with subject matter experts and get final approval from the project manager. Plus, given that modern authoring tools are very simple to use, SMEs can build a course themselves and decide which content and procedures are worth including in the final version.
5. Sensitive data is under your roof
If your training content contains confidential info such as policies and regulations, customer data, or product-related figures your competitors shouldn’t see, outsourcing it can be quite risky.
6. Specific content
If your training topics are too industry-specific, and you don’t want to spend days finding relevant outsourcing specialists or sharing your company’s expertise, it will be much easier to assign this task to your own talent.
7. Selling courses
If you create training content on general topics such as healthy lifestyle, stress management, and software training, and have all the rights to the intellectual property, you can sell the courses to third-party companies and recoup the investment.
"A lot of modern authoring tools have little to no learning curve"
If authoring tool complexity is what stops you from building content in-house, there’s good news. A lot of modern authoring tools have little to no learning curve, and your instructional designer doesn’t have to master complex variables, layers, or programming interfaces.
Even a new user can quickly learn the ropes of a toolkit, and you won’t spend money on expensive software training. For example, iSpring Suite, a PowerPoint-based authoring toolkit, requires no training to get started. Instead of a dozen separate products, designers get everything they need for authoring in one place.
What Kind of Content can you Create With an Authoring Tool?
Let’s dive a little bit deeper into content creation. Here are the key types of content you can quickly craft in-house with an authoring tool:
Interactive books with a flipping effect. You can build this type of content from your existing documents such as regulations, instructions, company presentations, and manuals. You can upload the books to an LMS and track as ordinary courses, however they lack interactivity, which brings us to the next type.
Slide-based courses. The name speaks for itself — a PowerPoint presentation can be a solid basis for an employee training course. If a task is super time-sensitive, you can polish your existing corporate slides and convert them to online courses in several minutes. Or, make the slides more engaging with interactions, photographic characters, and professional templates.
Assessments and quizzes. With interactive question templates, you can build an engaging assessment or drag-and-drop activity for your course. It’s possible to customize quiz design, fine-tune scoring rules, and provide learners with extensive feedback.
Video-based courses. With an authoring tool, course creators can record and create video-based courses with annotations, graphics, and slow motion effects, and more. For example, you can shoot a video with an expert and support it with text, graphics, and transitions. Plus, you can pepper your video with helpful insets to highlight the key points and boost retention.
Dialog simulations. To train employees’ communication skills, you can quickly build conversation simulations using your own sales scripts and scenarios.The tool features a lot of photographic characters and location photos to model a realistic situation.
Screencasts. Create professional-looking video tutorials and how-tos by simply recording your screen and adding interactive elements and visual tips. This type of content doesn’t require a lot of effort or a heavy production budget, but is a helpful way to train employees to finally master corporate software or services.
Looking for an easy-to-use yet powerful authoring tool? Test drive iSpring Suite and get your training off the ground within a couple of days!
About iSpring Solutions
iSpring is a global leader in creating award-winning software for eLearning. Since 2001, iSpring Solutions, Inc. has helped thousands of businesses worldwide to advance their corporate training and spread best business practices. iSpring is recognized for its beautifully engineered products and exceptional service.
More than 53,000 customers from 155 countries choose iSpring for its reliability and high performance. The customer list includes 148 of the Fortune 500 companies.