Globalization means it’s increasingly common for companies to have a presence in multiple countries. With this comes the need for staff training on an international scale. However, designing effective and engaging courses for multicultural, multilingual, and dispersed audiences presents significant challenges.
With this in mind, authoring tools can be of great help. If your company is looking to train its staff around the world, an authoring tool can be a valuable tool for creating effective, interactive and personalized courses that meet the needs of your globalized audience.
Here are some of the considerations to keep in mind if you want to create courses in global organizations.
1. Choose an easy-to-use authoring tool
The ease of use of your authoring tool is the main factor to consider when developing courses in a global company. The reason is simple: it allows you to design and update the courses in an agile and simple way, and adapt them quickly based on the needs of each employee.
Luckily, the best authoring tools are designed so that training managers or users can create e-learning courses easily, without the need for technical knowledge. When you choose your authoring tool, make sure it offers an intuitive interface and features that allow you to add elements easily.
The best authoring tools also offer basic style templates to help you get started with the design of your courses. Note how easy it is to add images or text, change your color palette, and edit. In this sense, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors, are ideal for visualizing the final result.
2. Use a cloud-based tool
One of the biggest challenges global organizations face when delivering training is real-time collaboration. Done well, it allows geographically dispersed teams to work more efficiently and effectively, synchronizing efforts and sharing information instantly. Real-time collaboration, in turn, allows you to solve problems quickly and improves decision-making to increase productivity.
Cloud-based tools have transformed the way businesses access, collaborate, and update their content. “Being in the cloud” means that different users can work on the same course in real time, facilitating collaboration and the co-creation of educational materials.
Cloud tools facilitate access to resources and educational materials, and allow constant updates to incorporate new content, organize folders, transfer projects, and assign permissions. They also offer scalability in relation to the number of users and courses that can be created, something especially useful in global organizations.
3. Personalize content
Global organizations face different challenges related to geographic location. Even so, the training of its employees must be uniform and aligned with the image of the company, regardless of location. The personalization of the training content can be of great help in these cases.
When creating courses in global organizations, make sure your authoring tool gives you functionality to create custom templates that ensure consistency with your corporate image.
Through customization, content creators can create their courses, starting from a template adapted to their needs, which can feature logos, color palettes, typography and even layout options and standardized backgrounds for the company. In this way, each course, no matter where it is taught, will be in line with your corporate branding.
4. Invest in productivity-boosting features
Spending too much time creating a course can be a problem, especially in large organizations where many employees must be trained in different areas of knowledge. That is why functionalities which increase productivity are important.
Some of the most important are the stock gallery and photo editor, which will help you save time searching for images and applications to edit them with.
Other features offered by some authoring tools are restore points and backups, which allow you to recover and access old versions of your courses. This is especially valuable for organizations working collaboratively or for teams of designers.
Finally, autosave is a must to guarantee your changes will be saved automatically every few seconds, preventing you from losing information accidentally.
5. Choose an authoring tool that supports web translators or offers machine translation
Although this is a productivity-related functionality, it deserves special consideration when it comes to creating courses in global organizations, as it is very common for cultural and linguistic differences to exist between employees from different regions.
To solve this problem, you should use a tool compatible with the main web translators. Even some of the most modern ones offer automatic translations, which will help you save time and resources in the translation and editing of texts.
6. Include engaging interactive resources
Keeping employees motivated during their training is essential for both small and large companies. That is why your courses should offer resources that engage your audience and allow them to learn while having fun.
The use of interactive content is the best way to achieve this. Your authoring tool should allow you to integrate resources such as audios, videos or images that attract attention and help retain knowledge. Some tools even provide you with different types of exercises including multiple choice options, drag and drop exercises, match or fill.
Other valuable interactive resources are games or gamified elements and linked scenes, which allow users to develop their decision-making skills in a safe environment.
In order to engage your audience, your chosen tool must also adapt to different formats, allowing students to access their courses via a mobile, tablet or computer for the best possible learning experience.
7. Create courses that are inclusive and accessible to all learners
Your global courses should be usable and understood by all employees. This is an essential requirement to ensure equal opportunities and to achieve a greater scope and understanding of the materials.
What does this mean? That if your course is simple to understand, easy to navigate and interact with, students can concentrate on the content, without having to worry about learning to use technology, which will facilitate their process. That is why you should opt for an authoring tool that allows you to create accessible courses for all audiences. U¡In this way you will enhance your reach and offer inclusive training experiences.
8. Share your content effectively
When creating courses for global organizations, special attention should be paid to the distribution of the content, that is: how to make sure your course reaches employees in different locations and regions. Many companies distribute their e-learning courses through their LMS, but for this the course must be compatible.
As for compatibility standards, the most common are SCORM1.2, SCORM 2004 and Tincan/xApi, so if you want to distribute them through your LMS you should make sure you choose an authoring tool compatible with these standards.
However, this is not the only way to distribute them. You can also choose an authoring tool that allows you to share your courses via a direct link, export them, or embed them on your organization’s intranet. And some even offer you their own integrated distribution environment, which allows you to register students, as well as follow up on training.
9. Measure training success
Once you follow all these tips, you’ll be ready to create effective courses for global organizations. But keep in mind that the effort involved in doing so should be worth it.
How can you measure that? By choosing an authoring tool that allows you to analyze your training by results, list of courses, number of students enrolled, percentage of progress, student profile and grades, and more.
Now, with so many authoring tools available on the market, it can be difficult to determine which one best suits your needs. If you’re looking for a tool that meets all these requirements for creating courses on a global scale, check out isEazy Author.
isEazy Author is the easiest tool on the market, designed to create attractive, dynamic and truly engaging e-learning courses in an agile and autonomous way. With our capabilities for creation, distribution and interactivity, you can turn your ideas into reality in no time, designing authentic learning experiences for your employees. Try it for free!
