Top 10 Cost-Saving Tips from the Latest eLearning Guild Report

The eLearning Guild recently released a great eBook full of helpful cost-saving tips for e-Learning development called The eLearning Guild’s 75 Tips to Reduce eLearning Costs. The Snap! by Lectora® rapid e-Learning software team collected our favorite money-saving tips with a few pointers of our own:

  1. Divide courses by skill level. Find the skills of your learners, divide your course by levels or modules and only require completion of each section based upon experience or skill.
  2. Create a simple design and development process. This process outlines the necessary steps to follow throughout development and avoids wasting time on unnecessary projects, while keeping everyone organized and on task.
  3. Shorten courses. Courses should include only the essentials to keep both develop­ment time and course completion time short.
  4. Create reusable training. Design your training in a way that can be easily updated and used for multiple training scenarios whenever possible.
  5. Let learners create learning content. One respondent of the report explained how his sales team creates simple videos for other sales people, which they enjoy and find very effective.
  6. Use templates. Templates make rapid e-Learning development quick and easy to create a custom, highly interactive course in a very short amount of time. Click here to view a company’s rapid development story with Snap! Empower™.
  7. Invest in PowerPoint training. PowerPoint to Flash development saves a lot of time because development takes place in the already familiar PowerPoint environment. Snap! by Lectora is extremely intuitive, easy to use and is only $99.
  8. Use the incredible amount of free resources available. Use free stock images, animation, audio editing, image editing, stock media, color design and more. The eLearning Guild report lists these resources as frequently used by respondents: Stock XChng, GoAni­mate, FootageFirm, ColorSchemer, Audacity, Windows Movie Maker and Microsoft Office clip art. Don’t forget to check out the Snap! by Lectora Friday Finds, full of free tools and resources!
  9. Design your own graphics. If you can’t afford new images, modify existing images or create your own. Use free graphic tools like Gimp, IrfanView or you can even use Power­Point.
  10. Use social media & free professional development resources. Social media is a great place to find cost-effective tools, resources and to network. e-Learning developers and industry professionals are eager to share their tips, tools and ideas on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Sign up for helpful blog subscrip­tions, newsletters and online conferences to open up a world of information and ideas.

All of these great tips came from The eLearning Guild’s 75 Tips to Reduce eLearning Costs, written by Patty Shank, PhD, CPT, Director of Research at the eLearning Guild. For the full set of 75 cost-saving tips, download the eBook here.

For even more great e-Learning tips and resources, check out the blogs in the Rapid e-Learning Round-up to find helpful how-tos, new ideas and tons of freebies!