What is the role of “content” in training?
Training in an organization is the stepping stone to creating productive employees. Therefore, in order to get the desired results, the foundation must be laid correctly. The main point here is the content of the training program. There are certain things that need to be addressed and defined before starting to develop educational content.
First of all, it should be clearly understood why so much attention is paid to content development.
Nowadays, employees hardly prefer standard and ready-to-use content. It is expected that they will be talked to, their learning needs and learning styles will be understood, and content customized to their specific needs and business roles will be created.
Effective training content should basically have the following characteristics:
Engaging content that keeps employees engaged.
Instructional content that will increase the persistence of knowledge.
Content that provides benefits that increase employee productivity.
Engaging content that increases employee motivation.
Some important points that can guide in developing educational content:
Identifying Needs
In order to start developing content, first need to understand what the ultimate goal is. The needs are the learning of functions in education so that tasks can be performed efficiently and, ultimately, time can be saved by increasing productivity. By identifying the necessary needs for work and learning, it is useful to determine which role in education needs training in which modules.
Student Profile
It is very important to understand that not all employee roles require training for everything. Each job role has its own specific learning needs, we need to focus precisely on the areas of training. For example, if it is determined who needs which training and only the necessary training is given, rather than each person receiving training on each subject, it can be both more personalized, easier, and provides more efficient improvement.
Terminal Learning Objectives
After determining the student profiles, we need to define the general learning goals for each role or profile. The final goals define what a student will learn in training and what he will be able to achieve upon completion of training.
Enabling Learning Outcomes
Activation dec are intermediate goals or milestones that a student will achieve to achieve greater final goals. They are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that make up the bigger picture.
Formative Assessments
Formative assessments are intermediate checkpoints to ensure that the student decently assimilates the information provided. Each activation goal must comply with at least one question. However, there may be more than one question with an activating purpose. They are not normally scored and provide explanatory feedback for reinforcement.
Summary Evaluations
The summarizing evaluations are in line with the final objectives. To ensure that the final goal of the training is achieved, summarizing assessments are used. It can be measured by scoring method.
Content Outline
After setting the activation goals and deciding on what parameters we want to test students on, we now need to list the topics and subtopics for training. The content outline should focus on what the learner needs to learn in order to achieve the enabling and final goals and successfully complete the formative and summarizing assessments.
Identify Possible Sources
The information we are looking for to create educational content can be in manuals, government notices, circulars, or just in someone’s head. It can simply be anywhere. What needs to be done is to explore and document it.
In summary, it is extremely critical to know how education should be provided. Whether your education is in a classroom or in open education, micro-learning, videos, etc. it always helps to know if it was given through. Thanks to this, we can have enough information to meet the requirements and start developing the content.
It is clear that developing content for an educational program is not as difficult as it seems. A certain level of expertise is needed to analyze and set goals and objectives, as well as to create a training plan, but this is something that a partner with the right skills and qualifications can easily handle. The level of participation provided by the content determines whether an employee will really focus on it during the training program. All this can easily explain how active a role content has in education.