Revitalizing Workplace Training: Mastering the Art of Updating Old eLearning

Creating training isn’t only about creating training. It’s about making the right training and ensuring it is up-to-date.

As employees suggest changes, new things are learned, or software changes, those updates must be made to training to keep it relevant. Nowhere is that more true than in corporate technical training. Software changes faster than almost anything.

So, if training isn’t updated regularly to keep pace with technology changes, employees could be learning incorrect information. Or what they’re learning doesn’t match what they see on the job, which is unhelpful.

It’s important to update old eLearning that has been sitting for a while. That means it must be evaluated regularly and deemed accurate or not. As more eLearning is created, an organization will need to spend more and more time evaluating old content.

Revitalizing workplace training is not just about creating new content from scratch; it’s about breathing new life into existing content. Creating content and forgetting about it is a recipe for disaster.

This post covers the reasons, strategies, and techniques that can help businesses master the art of updating old eLearning.

One of the first steps in this process is to assess the current state of your eLearning materials. Is it still accurate and aligned with your organization’s goals? Or does it require a thorough review and update?

We’ll explore the importance of content evaluation and discuss practical tips for identifying outdated information. By doing so, you’ll be able to pinpoint areas that need improvement and focus your efforts on enhancing the overall learning experience. However, updating old eLearning doesn’t stop at content evaluation.

It also involves leveraging new technologies and approaches to make training more effective and relevant. Sometimes, training was developed in a rush and, upon evaluation, could be better presented in a different format. Some formats could be microlearning, performance support, or even contextual help that’s easier to access.

If you have old eLearning lying around collecting dust in your learning management system (LMS), it’s time to put an evaluation process into play.

Discover how small tweaks and strategic updates can make a difference in revitalizing old eLearning. This will be a transformative endeavor to increase the value of your organization’s training. Updating old eLearning will unlock the full potential of materials.

The Harm Old eLearning Does

Surprisingly the harm of old eLearning is quite high. If you let content go and continue to age, then you’re going to notice some of these harmful impacts:

• Waste employee’s time taking useless content.
• Make it more difficult to find the right content that isn’t outdated.
• It will likely be ineffective if it is poorly made and text-heavy.
• Employees will lose trust in other training.
• Spread inaccurate or harmful old ways of doing things.
• Non-accessible content, which is harmful to some, can be a legal issue, too. Be sure always to make eLearning content accessible.

These are some of the harms we experience in outdated content. One of the biggest harms is that it makes you look bad. If you’re putting out new content and the old content gives you a bad name, the new content won’t be as effective or trusted.

You must start by evaluating the current state before you can improve it.

Evaluating the Current State of Your eLearning Materials

Before your department starts taking on too many new responsibilities, make sure there’s time allotted in people’s schedules to review and update old training. It’s unreasonable to ask for a normal workload and then add review/revisions to that.

So, make sure your company’s leadership understands the need for updating content and that they’re on board with giving employees time in their schedule for reviews. With the time available, carry on with this process.

When it comes to updating old eLearning, the first step is to assess the current state of your materials. This is crucial in determining whether courses are accurate and aligned with your organization’s goals.

For new content, it’s important to understand if the content is needed and, if so, to analyze the needs thoroughly. For old content, it’s important to conduct a thorough evaluation on whether a course is still needed or not. These are all parts of the normal ADDIE process, and it’s an iterative process if practiced properly, which is why it’s such a great process for creating training.

This will help you first identify if a course is still needed and second identify areas that need improvement and guide your efforts in enhancing the relevance of training.

Start by taking the course. Review each module or course in your eLearning program. Look for any outdated or inaccurate information. If you’re reviewing a technical course (our specialty), pay attention to the process and parts that could be missing or may have changed.

If there are references to specific software or technology that may no longer be relevant, then that’s a red flag. It’s probably time to revamp that entire course.

It’s also important to consider whether the content aligns with current best practices and instructional design principles. Creating training requires a lot of practice to do quality work. That means there will likely be improvements that can be made by someone new at creating training vs. an expert.

Another aspect to evaluate is the effectiveness of your assessments and quizzes. Are they still measuring the desired outcomes? Do they provide valuable feedback to employees and the organization?

Additionally, user feedback and performance data should be taken into account. Are there any common complaints or issues being reported? Analyzing this feedback can provide valuable insights into areas where improvements are needed. Look for patterns or trends that indicate a need for updates or revisions.

Those are all good places to start when assessing if an old eLearning course should be updated.

Practical Tips for Identifying & Updating Outdated eLearning

With a lot of content in your LMS (or maybe you have content that’s not on an LMS), evaluating it at regular intervals is necessary. That ensures employees are getting accurate and relevant information. It also ensures that employees aren’t overwhelmed with old information that’s not important.

These practical tips will help you identify outdated eLearning and stay on top of the process in the future, too. Success lies in having a process that you can repeat regularly to ensure old content isn’t out there too long.

Identifying outdated information in your eLearning materials is crucial for maintaining relevance and effectiveness. Go through each of these items and create an action plan to review old eLearning:

• Document Content: Don’t just create and upload it into your LMS. Document all training content available in one place and tie each item to a review cycle.
• Schedule regular reviews: This is one of the most important things you can do. Ensure every eLearning course (or even piece of content) is attached to a schedule that will regularly alert you when it’s time to review it.
• Make time to conduct regular reviews: Just scheduling reviews isn’t enough. Employees must have enough time to perform the reviews rather than simply creating new content.
• Seek feedback: Every course should allow employees to provide feedback. Don’t tie it to an NPS score (those are useless for eLearning); craft the survey carefully. There are many resources out there for crafting good learning surveys. Always allow employees to write open-ended feedback.
• Use analytics tools: Take advantage of analytics tools that track a course’s overall sentiment and value. Before creating a course, ensure there’s a KPI tied to it that tells your company if employees are getting value from a course. If you can’t tie a KPI to it, then it’s not valuable.
• Use Your Resources: If you’re not sure about something, ask. It always helps to work closely with subject matter experts used to create the course to ensure that the content remains accurate and up to date. They were a valuable resource the first time and will also be for reviews.
• Document The Process: It’s not enough to document the content; you must also document the process and update history. You need to document when the content was created, was last checked, and when it needs to be checked next.

These tips will ensure you create a well-oiled process that ensures old eLearning remains fresh and gets updated promptly. Your organization’s eLearning content is only as valuable if it stays updated.

These tips are especially important for custom technical eLearning. That’s because technology changes the fastest and likely needs a faster view and update cycle.

When it’s time to update old eLearning, that’s also a good opportunity to upgrade it to be even better. That could be repurposing it in a different format or modifying the content to be more interactive and relevant.

Leveraging New Strategies to Update Old eLearning

Updating content to be accurate is one thing, but what about updating it to be better? That does require more time, but the goal should always be to achieve better results.

A good opportunity to make old eLearning content better is when you update it. A course may have been built well the first time, but there’s always room for improvement.

Sometimes new scenarios can be integrated into a course to improve it. Perhaps something major has changed in the organization due to a lesson learned; that’s a good opportunity for an update.

Sometimes courses are great to get employees up to speed but aren’t as necessary in the long term. Once employees are, for the most part, up to speed, then the content might serve better as performance support.

There are great opportunities for training employees with performance support because it’s a powerful form of improving employee performance. If you can replace a course with 2-5 job aids, then that’s a huge win. Employees can then get only what they need when they need it.

Performance support is a popular form of microlearning, but there are other methods of making a course smaller and more performance-driven. Microlearning can work well for corporate technical training for those short tasks that employees need help with.

When a course is necessary, there could also be an opportunity to make it more interactive. That could be introducing a new scenario or an interactive activity that makes the course more relevant and engaging.

Challenges Of Updating Old eLearning

There are always challenges involved with both creating and updating eLearning content. These are some of the challenges you’ll likely experience and must overcome to update old eLearning.

• Buy In: It takes time and financial resources to update eLearning. Leaders must buy into that and see the value of investing that time and money.
• Internal Skills: Sometimes eLearning needs to be updated because the know-how wasn’t available to do it right the first time. That could still be a challenge when updating eLearning. Working with an instructional design consultant to gain the necessary skills is sometimes helpful.
• Extremely Old Content: It might be that content needs to be completely recreated because it’s so old. A complete recreation might be necessary if a course was created before rapid development tools. What if it was built in Flash? That’s going to require even more resources.
• Busy SME: The one person you need to update content is swamped for the next six+ months. That’s very common and a huge challenge. Sometimes you may have to find another expert.

Anybody who creates eLearning is familiar with all the challenges that can accompany it. Many of those challenges remain even when they get old and must be updated.

Wrap Up

Updating old eLearning is essential for organizations that take their employee development seriously. By assessing the current state of your materials, evaluating content for accuracy and relevance, and overcoming challenges, you can revitalize workplace eLearning.

Remember that updating old eLearning is an ongoing process. Regularly evaluating your content, seeking feedback, collaborating with subject matter experts, and having a well-oiled process will ensure you can make updates happen regularly.

By doing so, you can ensure that your training materials remain effective and impactful. It will also ensure your content remains a trusted source of knowledge and skills in your organization.

So don’t let outdated eLearning hinder your organization’s growth and make you look bad. Embrace a process and make sure you stick to it. Making time to update content is just as (if not more) important as creating new content.

Schedule a free consultation to discuss your process for updating old eLearning content. We’d love to see how we can help. The right process can make your time go further in ensuring content is relevant and valuable to your organization.