How to Develop Training Materials? | ecadema

Producing the best training materials and the training course development for online professional classes in a well-constructed way is a daunting task. Training materials should be effective and useful, as training material is an integral part of your training program. 

Effective Training manuals include training content, enable proper workflow, provide valuable information, follow statutory compliance and codify workplace rules and guidelines. Learning objectives along with the training program duration decides that training materials should consist of workbooks, training manuals, instruction-based lessons, and audio-visual aids.

Learners should find the corporate training materials practical and engaging,  preparing them to make an immediate and lasting impact with their newly-gained skills.

Designing and delivering powerful and incredible corporate training material includes a regular supply of new materials and ongoing professional support during professional classes. 

Perhaps the hardest mistake is to start a project without in-depth analysis. One valuable piece of advice: keep your prototype ready for training material development and test to be absolutely sure that developers can execute on these before moving into full production mode. 

Subject Matter Experts set clear milestones and objectives for decision points upfront and always communicate regularly. 

Design your training material with relevant key information, as these are necessary parts of a training program involving knowledge acquisition and retention. 

In this blog, we will outline a few strategies required to develop effectively training course material.

The preparation phase of developing training Materials:

The design and development phase of systematic training material by professional trainers should be instructor-led, computer-based, web-based, self-directed, interactive, or multi-media-based.

Preparation of training material includes selecting the most appropriate media and materials for eg;audio-visuals, graphics, manuals.

The design of the training is often tested during the development phase to ensure the content is understandable and in the end, applicable to the learners.

The basic training needs assessment:

1. Define the clear vision and goal that the training supports
2. Determine the tasks to perform to achieve that goal.
3. Determine the learning characteristics to make the training more effective

Why is it important?

1. Content can help you build the authority of your training.
2. The content encourages learners’ engagement
3. Content provides relevant and valuable information to learners.

Topic Analysis

Subject Matter Experts utilize their knowledge and often take assistance from existing training materials, such as PowerPoint presentations, presenter notes, reference documents, web resources, test questions, etc. The second step follows these training materials to create short, clear, concise, and engaging content for learners. It can include key information, case studies, real-life scenarios, and a reference to additional learning resources covering the topic.

Set an Objective:

The first step while creating an eLearning course is assessing learners' needs for this training. Analysis of eLearning training material makes sure you aren’t doing training just for training’s sake.

Analysis results help you and learners to achieve because it provides a clear understanding of what they actually need, rather than making guesses or assuming. 

Content Analysis: 

Create the Right Content for the Right Audience

It is important to analyze why training is needed and who your audience is?. It doesn’t matter how effective the course is if sharing doesn’t have value for your audience. Analyze the content and break it down into categories: 

1. Declarative, Procedural, and Situated.
2. Types: Fact, concept, process, procedure, principles
3. Structure: Whether information is interconnected and how important each piece of information is, information gaps, and how information should be arranged.

Define Your Instructional Design Plan

Which instructional strategy is followed while designing the course content? This process should focus on developing engaging content for learners. There are a variety of approaches eLearning designers can take including infographics, storytelling, discovery learning, and situation-based learning.

Training the material should be meaningful and relevant to ensure each trainee will master the objective.

Choose Your Technology

Always do analysis to determine what authoring tools and learning management systems you should employ with available features, cost and to get the best training material for your organization. No tool works everywhere. Before going ahead, you should go through these questions at least:

1. How many learners will access the course at one time?
2. Is your hardware, including servers, databases, and computers, up to implementing the technology?
3. Will the course be accessed on the company’s devices or will each learner be using their own?

Prototyping 

A working prototype of a module helps you to have a pilot version from your course to make sure it actually works. A prototype helps you ideally to determine the technical functionality of the entire course.

This allows instructional designers to create and discard multiple versions to get the best course without wasting on designing the whole course.

Create the Course 

After the prototype is approved by the subject matter expertise, time to initiate designing the actual course, keeping in mind the objectives. You also need to determine a design method that meets the needs of learners and solve all course-related doubts. 

ecadema is an interactive professional online training platform.