Back to There is no denying it: we have all become deeply impatient. At work and at home we want everything, right now, with no waiting — and companies, spurred on by the technologies at their disposal, keep confirming us in this new normal. Amazon, Netflix, Uber and the rest ride this wave of ever faster and always available (or nearly), while holding themselves to a sharp standard of quality. Faster, yes, but without sacrificing quality.
The training sector follows the same trend: the courses people ask for are short, effective and available at any moment on the learner’s preferred device. Hence the rise of microlearning, which has won over learners (short, targeted courses) and buyers alike (shorter courses, so potentially cheaper ones).
For content producers, then, the challenge is to produce more quality content in less time in order to stay competitive.
This article shares a few rules we have put in place at Aptilink for producing quality content at scale, matched precisely to our clients’ objectives and deadlines.
Rule 1: a road map, thou shalt set
What happens when you go shopping without a list? 99% of the time you either forget things and have to go back, or you give in to the unnecessary, buy more than you meant to and blow your budget. It is exactly the same with your training! Take the time to define your project precisely, and you will secure both efficiency and your budget:
- Who exactly is the target audience?
- What are the objectives of the course?
- What budget has been allocated?
- What deliverables are expected?
- What is the project schedule (build a detailed backwards plan)?
- Which experts, internal and external, will take part?
- What are each member’s roles and responsibilities?
On the design side, likewise, don’t skip the synopsis — it is never time wasted. The synopsis gives an overall view of the project, lets you check that the teaching methods are varied and confirms that every objective is covered. Nothing is set in stone, of course, and you keep some flexibility during production: minor adjustments are always possible as the project runs. But the direction is set and the backbone is in place.
Rule 2: the right tools, thou shalt choose
As the saying goes, a good workman needs good tools. Whether for communication or for production, choose them carefully according to your team’s skills, their appetite for new technology and what your projects need. The tools must fit your budget and be simple enough to pick up quickly, while offering the features your project needs to succeed, in instructional quality as much as production quality.
Here are a few examples:
Rule 3: templates, thou shalt create
This rule saves so much production time that we could have put it first (but we had to keep some suspense, and we have followed a roughly chronological order: from the idea to the finished project).
What is a template?
It is a pre-designed frame for presenting content. It sets the exact position of images, text, video and any other media, along with the size of each element, the fonts and the colour schemes.
Templates save a great deal of time — all you have to do is fill them with the right content — while keeping the project visually consistent.
Our advice?Build enough templates, varied enough to cover all your learning activities and hold learners’ interest (if you rotate between two templates, the result risks feeling monotonous).
Make sure, too, that your templates are responsive and adapt automatically to every display configuration your participants may have.
Rule 4: resource libraries, thou shalt build
Your module production experience may well not end with this project. Look further ahead: keep and reuse what worked well.
Reusable resources come in many forms:
- Photos and illustrations
- Videos
- Content and exercises
- Templates
Build yourself resource libraries so you can reach for these elements again quickly when you need them.
Tip 1: think your filing strategy through, and adopt a logic that is… logical to everyone who will have to use it!
Tip 2: there are plenty of free image and video libraries online (Unsplash, Videvoand others). Do read the terms of use carefully, though: free may only mean free in certain contexts.
Paid libraries (Shutterstock, Adobe Stockand so on) are often faster to work with, not least because the professional choice is wider and searching is easier.
Rule 5: a naming convention, thou shalt keep
An effective naming convention should, in our view, carry at least the following:
- Project name
- File name
- Status of the file
If the file “sources_2023.docx” has been pulled out of its folder, good luck to anyone trying to file it back in the right place without opening it (and even opening it, they will not know whether more recent versions exist).
The file “Aptilink_Ecodesign_sources_vFINAL.docx”, by contrast, speaks for itself immediately.
Rule 6: quality checklists, thou shalt draw up
Project almost finished? Well done. Before you deliver it, run the quality checks it deserves.
- Is all the content defined in the storyboard actually there?
- Do the images match the storyboard specifications?
- Are the spelling and grammar rules respected?
- Are all the links live?
- …
One piece of advice:
Several passes, each focused on one criterion from your checklist, beat a single global read-through covering everything at once.
Bonus tip: ChatGPT, thou shalt consult
ChatGPT deserves an article of its own (we are working on it), but it belongs in a piece about production at scale. Why? Because it can save you a great deal of time, particularly in gathering content or drafting course structures.
If you learn to communicate with this artificial intelligence (yes, that is a skill) and you check its answers (yes, it can get things wrong), ChatGPT can save you real time.
One last piece of advice: a professional, thou shalt call on
We can all bake a cake, but it has to be said that the ones from the pâtisserie look rather better than the home-made version.
The same holds in every professional field, training included.
So here is our last piece of advice: don’t hesitate to call on an experienced professional such asAptilink.
You will benefit from their experience, their expertise, their tools and their methods, and save precious time on your quality production at scale.
