Creating Drop-Dead Effective Online Training Courses

"Superb!"

"More training/testing like this."

It's a rare experience to put out an online training lesson and get anything but apathy or grudging compliance.

From my experience, online training courses often fall into one of these categories:

1. Mind-numbing voice-over presentations
2. Video of a talking head trying really hard to be engaging
3. A giant dump of information that makes you want to skip over the content and hope you pass the inevitable quiz at the end

Why online lessons?

I was faced with this challenge when I was given the task of creating a series of lessons to be taken by sales reps and sales engineers before our annual sales kickoff. The idea was to have people come prepared, rather than spend the precious 12 or 14 hours of stage time going over detailed product updates.

In order to accomplish this, I had to eliminate several typical options:

1. Training webcasts: We had to cover 4 products and many services. It would have required many sessions to cover all the material.
2. Onsite, traveling to key sales offices: Too many reps were on holiday at the beginning of the fiscal year, and we had too many offices to cover before the sales kickoff.
3. Recording a presentation video: Videos are very difficult to scrub to the right content for review. Also, videos require audio playback, which may not be possible on a noisy commute or in an office environment.

In addition, the information density of product updates is quite high so reps are often looking to review a specific detail, which would be difficult in any medium that is not searchable. I therefore settled on a LMS-based text/graphics approach to make learning more bite-sized, accessible, and referenceable.

Why another LMS?

Most companies already have at least one LMS, or Learning Management System. These are typically used by HR for compliance training or by Customer Support for customer training.

I considered the one we already have plus other choices on the market, but they lacked a few capabilities important to my goals:

1. Easily mix text/audio/video on one page. The other options require you to choose only one type of media per page, else create pages with a SCORM editor first then import.
2. Assess learning and proficiency beyond anything but a multiple choice test. Studies show that a multiple test does not measure true competency.
3. Ability for the learner to ask questions or provide real time feedback about the content. Learners are unlikely to ask questions long after they've taken a lesson. Feedback needs to be given immediately.

These were important because they affect the learner experience and closes the learning loop, that is, the ability to learn, practice, assess, and review.

Guiding Principles on Making Great Lessons

These tips may be available elsewhere online, but I've found them useful as my guiding principles in creating great content:

• Bite-sized pieces of content: Micro-learning is all the rage, so any text, video, slide must be consumable within 2-3 minutes max. This does not mean you take a 1 hour video and cut it into 6 ten-minute segments. Mix the modality of learning.
• Structured content: Have a clear progression from simple to complex. Explain all acronyms and industry jargon, don't expect people to know what they mean.
• Context: Start with what they will be learning and why it's important. Explain the background and domain knowledge behind the product.
• Focus: Most product managers are tempted to tell sales reps everything they know. Sales reps don't need to know everything. Put yourself in their shoes and mercilessly weed out things they don't need to know.
• Language: Nothing turns off a sales rep like marketing-speak or HR-speak. Drop words like "utilize" and "leverage" from your writing. Sound like a real person. You want them to sound like real people when they talk to customers, right?

The Result

The goal of the online lessons was to prepare sales reps to get the most out of the sales kickoff by making sure they are up to date on all our products and services. By that measure, it was a resounding success and we were able to focus the kickoff on telling our company story, sharing success stories from different corners of the world, and brainstorming on how to take our go-to-market strategy to the next level.

We ended up not only with one of the most engaging sales kickoffs in the company history, but with a collection of lessons that we can repurpose for new employees, refreshers, etc.

Below is a typical unsolicited email I received from colleagues. That's enough motivation to build on the foundation of great lessons we have created.