Too often, the Learning & Development department doesn't have the necessary time or resources to keep pace with business needs. Further, with the LMS and Authoring Tools being the only 'go-to' systems, it makes it harder to have centralized oversight on L&D projects.
Wouldn't it be great if L&D could bring together the entire process and the tools they already use into a single platform?
When you streamline your training development process, automate best practices, and connect your favorite eLearning tools and enterprise apps, you have a Learning Design System (LDS): a single source that gives you – and your team – more accountability, consistency, and speed.
But how to do this?
First off, automate. Any instructional design process that is done manually with Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, in-person meetings, and the like may seem to do the job but are in reality inefficient and cause bottlenecks that compete with speed.
Additionally, as further described in the article SMEs are from Mars, communication challenges between SMEs (subject matter experts) and L&D can be cumbersome, so corporations find it necessary to 'train the trainer'. They teach SMEs adult learning theory and frameworks like Bloom's taxonomy. However because SMEs are busy, they often do not have the time to learn this and they do not like being forced into a course. L&D needs to make it WIFM -- What's In It for Me? -- and a train the trainer workshop most often does not accomplish this.
By automating the instructional design process with workflows, an LDS can guide SMEs through best practices and they'll learn what to do and when to do it. The benefits are that training content will become higher-quality and more consistent, and the entire process will become more scalable for L&D.
If you want to learn more about innovative technologies to automate and streamline your training development process, download our FREE eBook.
Integration is the next step, and is key for centralization. Most workplace productivity tools like Office 365, chat applications like Slack, and project management software like Asana are disconnected from L&D and learning technologies in general. You can have the LDS connected to your favorite tools and apps, and streamline the entire manual instructional design process. All of your applications can connect into the systems the organization already values, saving time and costs.
You can also have multi-channel publishing: the old way was to publish SCORM into your LMS. With other integrations, however, and the xAPI / Tin Can, you can use share links and other file types to make learning delivery more flexible and content updating more manageable, and still report back to the LMS.
Flexibility and choice is the key, as each organization is different and has different preferences. With one click you should be able to share blueprints and prototypes with stakeholders and beta learners for early feedback, and when ready, publish to the LMS, to Salesforce to learning experience platforms -- or to all platforms simultaneously. You should have the flexibility and choice of how you wish your learners to access learning content.
Having everything work as one seamless solution via your LDS will provide innumerable benefits. Anyone can collaborate to design L&D projects and training content – rapidly and at scale – that delivers quality without bottlenecks and delays.
