How do you meet stakeholder needs with e-learning?

Try putting yourself in the shoes of your stakeholder. Quite often, you’ll find that they hold a picture of what they want, but they struggle to articulate it to you. If you’re a good listener and you can relate their need to a recent work example, then find that example and show them how you’d adapt it to work for them. Prove that you’ve listened and understood. Confidence grows in common ground.

Further to this you want to hone in on the stakeholders pain points and identify how your e-learning project solves them. For example, a business is spending time training new graduate employees. What are their pain points? Wasted time - costs money New graduates make mistakes - costs money New graduates become disillusioned if training is inadequate - potential loss of staff With your e-learning project you will fixate on solving these problems.

Indeed, while tools and methods provide valuable insights, the heart of stakeholder understanding lies in empathy. Empathy transcends mere data collection; it's about genuinely feeling and comprehending the emotions, needs, and aspirations of those we serve. It's the difference between knowing what stakeholders want and truly understanding why they want it. By immersing ourselves in their world, we can anticipate their needs, address their concerns, and forge stronger, more meaningful connections. Cultivating this skill not only enhances our stakeholder relationships but also elevates the impact and success of our projects. In the realm of e-learning, where human connection is paramount, empathy is our most potent tool.

The first step is to ensure that any kind of formal learning is appropriate to drive the behavioural change the stakeholders are looking for. It's very easy for everyone to point to training/learning as the best method to "fix" something that isn't working but often we need to push back and ensure the stakeholders can answer some challenging questions before we agree that an e-learning course is the right way to go. Questions to ask: Is creating a course the most effective way to address this compared to other learning solutions? What other initiatives could address this need? How are you measuring that there is a skills gap currently? There are many other questions to ask before agreeing that a course is the right way forward

In addition, the communication should not simply involve you relaying what you are doing. Asking lots of questions early on is important to make sure that the project is honing in on addressing the pain points. Don't get too far down the prototype phase without firmly establishing that you are on the right track.

One method of testing is to run webinars with sections of the proposed content to ensure the audience is engaged and actually learning. At the end of the webinar ask the audience to complete two questionnaires. One will involve a knowledge test (I would keep this anonymous so they don't feel under pressure!). Secondly, a feedback form asking if the learning aims and objectives were met, if they would recommend the course to their colleagues and what were the best parts of the content (and also what needs improving). Early testing prevents you from creating a lot of content that is potentially not helping the students and stakeholders meet their goals and address their pain points.

The best way to involve your stakeholders is to associate them with the project milestones. Some stakeholders are more interested to contribute to each milestone than others. So, identifying the milestones that suit their needs. But the most important milestones are included in the following: Design Mockups, Prototype, Alpha version. Asking about their perspectives and any comments they may have.

Its not just about involving them but holding them jointly responsible for creating a successful learning intervention. Stakeholders should be designers, reviewers, subject matter experts - not just someone who says "Build me a course". Its a collaborative effort and they should understand their role in the project from the outset. Additionally, one of the biggest challenges we face in learning teams is the lack of engaged Subject Matter Experts. The requestor needs to bear some responsibility for helping to find the right experts who can bring insights and knowledge to the fore.

e-learning development is an iterative process, so we have to align with stakeholders regularly to keep them on the same page as us. If you use the ADDIE model to develop e-learning, make sure that it has been modified to be iterative because the ADDIE model is designed as a waterfall model. When you develop the e-learning, the development process should be documented and approved by both the e-learning developer and the stakeholder. You can use the Project Charter template to create this document.

Whatever methodology you use, ensure the stakeholders have a high level understanding of the process, and their role in it. Don't assume ADDIE or SAM are know outside of learning teams. Don't assume people in your business know that we need to create objectives, what Blooms is, how we evaluate learning outcomes. Make sure they understand why these things are important, and how they will make the learning outcome more effective if done properly.

ADDIE is a great tool for keeping your project on-track. My tip here is to educate your stakeholder/SME on the process and always inform them of the stage you’re in. Be flexible! but inform, example: “Yes, we can make those Design changes, but we’re in Development and Implementation begins on…”. Any framework will give you this control advantage, ADDIE is the most well known.

Setting expectations, defining the future state, documenting the goals, identifying the behavioural changes - this all needs to happen before the project gets approved to move into production. Without the right inputs, your output is potentially going to fail to meet requirements. Once in production use the SAM methodology (or similar) to create an MVP course that can be iterated on based on input from the stakeholders. They will feel listened to and take a more active approach to the project. With that buy in, managing their expectations becomes much easier as they feel they have contributed throughout the process.

Completion of an elearning course is not a good measure of success. The industry standard for completion is around 5-10%. Success can be a learner gaining a single new skill or understanding a new concept from the many skills and concepts contained in a course. Don’t assume everyone needs to learn all of them to be satisfied they have gained something valuable.

IF you have done all previous steps in the right way, this is the easy part. Once again you need to help stakeholders understand how you will measure the impact of the course. Make sure they understand that completion rates are pretty much irrelevant, as are standard feedback forms. Make sure you have put a good amount of thought and focus into the feedback questions you are using, the timeframes you are using them and the method of providing the feedback. Ensure that ROI calculations are actually something you can measure during the initial scoping of the course. Often ROI is tricky to measure with any accuracy or meaning.

I love the practice of creating rapid e-learning assets and sharing them with the stakeholders frequently. Often communication with words is inadequate - presenting a rough visual is much more effective in clarifying expectations and defining future work.

In my experience practical hands on activities are critical. It’s not enough to provide well illustrated, well written text and great video content. You need to provide activities where learners can put their new skills into action. The addition of quizzes or other assessment activities helps test the effectiveness of the learning.