What should you pay attention to when creating your own learning content?

Many organizations today have a desire to make proprietary content available to their employees. For example, this could be a particular business process that employees need to adhere to, a manual for handling different programs or internal knowledge that needs to be shared organization-wide. Whatever the topic, in this article you will read 5 tips to make your own learning content available to your employees as effectively as possible.

Tip 1: Ensure low-threshold availability

When making learning content available, it is important that employees can easily access it. This way you do not create an extra barrier for employees to actually view the content. Think carefully about where you want to make the content available. Is it through an existing platform or intranet? Or are you going to implement something new for this?

In SkillsTown's online learning environment, there are several options for this. You can easily create your own content and make it centrally available to a large group of employees. If there is an existing intranet, you can use a link so that employees do not have to log in again unnecessarily.

Tip 2: Make navigation easy

Sometimes information cannot be presented in a short and concise manner and involves more than sharing a video with two lines of information. When it comes to large informative texts, it is important to help the reader move through this information. Think in advance about a chronological order and convenient moments when the text can be split using a new chapter or subtitle. By working this out well from the beginning, you will save yourself a lot of work afterwards.

In addition, you can use this chapter layout as a table of contents. Make sure that this table of contents serves as navigation and thus the employee can also choose how to go through the different sections.

Tip 3: Make it visual

Research shows that visual content is remembered up to 60% better (source: University of Amsterdam). So think about the information you want to share and how to display it visually appealing. Use supporting photos, videos and graphics. Perhaps there is a great video on the topic you want to share available on youtube or vimeo or you can find photos that fit your story.

In our online learning platform, there are different forms to share content with employees. These learning forms take into account didactic guidelines to add visual elements.

Tip 4: Work with a head, torso and tail

Good preparation, is half the battle. Therefore, before you start creating content, think carefully about what exactly you want to achieve. Write down a goal for yourself and determine with what content you can achieve that goal. Decide which topics you want to cover and divide them into chapters. Provide an introduction (head), core (body) and conclusion (tail). By keeping to this structure, you help employees absorb the content in a logical manner. In this way, you give them a foothold and it is easier for them to move through the course.

Tip 5: Gather feedback

One of the most important parts is gathering feedback. Once you have created and made available your own content, it is important to take stock of the extent to which this content is relevant and connects with the target audience. So research what employees think of it. Are they missing certain topics? Are all the explanations clear? Could they apply the knowledge well in practice? Try to gather as much information as possible in order to improve the learning content permanently. You can do this in a personal conversation with colleagues, but also by means of an evaluation form with the learning content.

Share your own content with employees?

As an online training provider, we have already helped many organizations make their own content available in our online learning environment. Using our didactic learning solutions you can make your own content available in an easy and professional way. We would be happy to tell you more about the possibilities during a no-obligation (online) demonstration.