Imagine your typical working day. You have one trillion things that need your immediate attention. In addition to that, there are around 7 trillion things that can wait a bit. But just a bit.
And then imagine somebody from your team comes to tell you about this amazing new initiative your company has just started. Your head is starting to hurt a little bit, as a precaution.
“Hey, John! Guess what! We’re starting to build eLearning courses, and you’re the Subject Matter Expert on one of the topics! You’ll help out building that course with the agency!”
So, you being John… be honest. How many seconds would it take you until you’d reach a point of high-pitch screaming and spontaneous self-combustion? Because, in addition to those 8 trillion things you need to do, now you’re also appointed as a Subject Matter Expert. And you need to work with some agency on some courses.
But you know what. It’s not that much time. Nothing is ever as it seems. Iceberg that sunk the Titanic seemed small but was actually huge. And this task of you being a Subject Matter Expert in the process of eLearning course creation might seem huge, but it’s actually not.
Let us start melting this proverbial iceberg by stating what would be your main tasks as SME (Subject Matter Expert) in the eLearning course creation:
1. Mapping out the existing knowledge – once you know you are the SME for a particular topic, the first thing you’ll need to do is to figure out what materials you (your company) already have on this particular topic. It could be PPTs, webinars, YouTube videos, eBooks, … Once you figure out what you have, you’ll move on to the next step:
2. Deciding which of those existing materials will be used as raw materials for the future eLearning course – you being the expert means you’ll know best which of these materials are the most relevant. Do they need to be included in the eLearning course, or are they some extra reading materials? So, after you decide what knowledge will be the basis for eLearning course creation, you need to:
3. Send those materials to the agency – or whoever is in charge of the communication with the agency inside your team. After that, you’ll:
4. Have a kick-off meeting with the agency – where you will tell them all you want them to know. What should be the main focus of the course, main takeaways, learning goals you have, target audience, and so on. After that meeting takes place, the only other thing you’ll need to do is:
5. Provide feedback – is the agency on the right track; did they cover everything correctly; is this the course you wanted to produce
In eWyse, we take great care of everybody’s time – yours and ours. Being an agency means that efficiency keeps us going and growing. And what we like for ourselves (not wasting time) we want to provide to our clients too.
We calculated the amount of time you, our Subject Matter Expert, will need to invest to produce with us a single 20-30 minute long course. We need 6 hours of your time, over a period of one month. That’s not a lot, you gotta admit. And if you, our Subject Matter Expert, used to train people internally on that particular topic, then we are actually saving your time. Because you’ll invest 6 hours once instead of investing a lot of hours every single month on training others in face to face environment.
And what’s in those 6 hours of time that we need?
It’s 1 hour of kick-off meeting that you’ll have with us. Then 15 minutes to provide us with feedback on the Outline and 15 minutes for the feedback on the Concept. After that, 2 hours to provide us with feedback on the Storyboard, and then again 15 minutes for feedback on the Moodboard and Demo slides. We’re wrapping it all up with 2 more hours to give us feedback on the entire course (If you are not familiar with these stages of production, please click here)
We have made a short infographic that shows it all:
So, John. May I call you John? I hope this eLearning course creation doesn’t seem so scary or time-consuming anymore.
Author: Martina Osmak
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