The Dos, Don’ts & Myths of Learning Content for Effective Development Programs
Good learning content is essential for any effective learning and development (L&D) strategy, whether eLearning courses or formal in-person training. Creating impactful learning content for employee development is easy to get wrong, with so many differing ideas about how to do it.
In this guide, we’ll dive into the dos, don’ts, and myths about creating effective learning content for development programs, so you don’t have to get lost in the sauce again.
What is learning content?
Learning content refers to the materials, resources, and tools used to deliver knowledge, information, and capabilities to learners. It broadly covers everything from traditional textbooks and formal courses to digital resources and online learning.
In L&D, learning content facilitates employee training and development and is crucial to transforming how your employees work and think meet organizational goals.
The myths of eLearning content
With everyone jumping on the eLearning bandwagon in some shape or form, it’s no wonder that eLearning content development comes with its fair share of myths and misinformation. We can definitively dispel the three biggest ones:
- It’s better to have more content
- You can just get AI to make content for you
- A bigger price tag equals bigger gains.
Myth #1: More content is always better
You simply can’t engage learners with more, more, more. It doesn’t matter if you give employees 30 chapters of a textbook or a few standalone training videos. Quantity does not equal quality (and when we talk “quality”, we really mean “meaningful”). It’s far more impactful to have a smaller selection of relevant, well-curated resources than a vast library of materials that are rarely used or hard to sort through.
Myth #2: AI can replace human content creators
To be blunt: no, AI can’t. AI can help create content, but it can’t replace human content creators entirely because it doesn’t have the nuanced judgment necessary for eLearning content development. Human oversight and understanding from professionals such as instructional designers is still essential to ensure the quality and relevance of eLearning courses and materials.
Myth #3: Expensive content is always best
While “you get what you paid for” is generally a good guideline, it’s not law. What your organization considers quality will depend entirely on your business priorities and needs. It’s more important to focus on how the content aligns with your desired learning objectives than how expensive it is.
In other words: worry about closing specific high-risk capability gaps so learners gain the critical information they need for their jobs.
The dos of good eLearning content
Not all learning content is created equal, and that can cost your business in time, resources, and employee engagement and retention.
It needn’t be a minefield, though. As rules of thumb:
- Invest in quality content
- Use AI (wisely)
- Choose the right learning management system (LMS).
Do invest in quality content
We ran a study on the state of L&D and performance management and found not many L&D initiatives actually achieve learning outcomes. While 94.9% of employees agree that mastering their role-based capabilities is important (capabilities being the mix of knowledge, skills, behaviors, processes, and tools that drive organizational outcomes), only 9.3% go on to complete training and change their behaviors accordingly. As long as this intention-behavior gap exists, employee and business performance won’t ever improve.
The likely culprit is learning that isn’t relevant to employees. In other words, training that doesn’t track towards organizational objectives, align with day-to-day work, or target individual training needs. Employees care about learning that has a “point” or purpose (i.e. it reflects real-life scenarios). Without a purpose, they won’t waste their time doing it.
So, when we talk about “quality” content, we mean content that is relevant, engaging, and effective at achieving learning outcomes. Provide relevant content and:
- Employees are more likely to stay with their company because it’s providing them with professional development (and that reduces recruitment and onboarding costs)
- Course content is more likely to make learning stick, reducing time-to-proficiency and increasing productivity
- Long-term costs are reduced because training content is aligned with organizational priorities, so your existing content inventory doesn’t need to be updated as often.
Do use AI wisely
Everyone and their dog is talking about utilizing AI to enhance their L&D content. We don’t disagree, but we’d caution you about where to use AI.
A lot of people will espouse the importance of using generative AI to easily create training videos, video content, and written content at scale. But remember that intention-behavior gap? Giving learners too many concepts at once actively disengages them and just… doesn’t add to the learning experience.
You also can’t trust that AI will create content that is a) accurate and b) relevant to your learners’ needs. You’re better off using AI to personalize the learning experience by:
- Defining capabilities and mapping them to job roles
- Assessing baseline competency and using that to create learning criteria
- Assigning learning content to individual learners based on their capability gaps.
Do choose the right software
The most common way to map out capabilities is spreadsheets, and yet it remains the most problematic. One of the biggest issues with using spreadsheets for L&D and performance management is they’re not navigable or centralized.
On the other hand, most learning management systems aren’t built to manage performance and therefore prove tangible learning impact. Learning content is most effective when autonomously managed by learning solutions rather than manually by individuals. After all, there’s no point in having good learning content if you can’t actually find it.
So, you need to keep an eye out for certain features.
- Advanced search features and tagging so learners can find and access relevant content when they need it, rather than scrolling through a bloated catalog.
- Truly personalized development plans based on the capabilities of learners’ job roles and capability assessments.
- Content mapping and third-party completion reporting. We mentioned the former in the previous section but it’s worth calling out again as many vendors will partner with third-party content providers. Some of those providers will tell you completions don’t matter because learners aren’t accessing that content, or those providers don’t provide completion data. That’s not to say their content is bad but low engagement means poor ROI for your spend. To get real bang for your buck, you need to make that content a) relevant to learners and b) reportable.
Hot tip: regularly review if content actively feeds capability building and “prune” outdated or redundant content to keep the library manageable and relevant.
The don’ts of eLearning content
It’s always easier to add a habit than take one away. The don’ts of eLearning content development may be more baked into your current processes, but unpacking them will up your content game.
Avoid:
- Rely solely on AI
- Overlook development costs
- Overload the library.
Don’t rely solely on AI
Again, just because the masses are saying it doesn’t mean you need to follow it. (Can you hear your mum saying, “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you?”) AI can produce large volumes of content, but it’s not always the most accurate or relevant. In a 2024 McKinsey survey, 63% of organizations named inaccuracy as their biggest concern with generative AI. A quarter of those faced negative consequences because of generative AI’s inaccuracy.
We’ve all seen AI struggle to do simple things like unscrambling letters into real words. But if you’re using AI to create materials for, let’s say, medical and health fields and the content is wrong, that content could put people at risk.
AI still isn’t ready to make content or decisions without human oversight—you still need to review AI-generated content to make sure it’s accurate and matches your organization’s brand and standards. Side note: this is why we prefer AI as an HR assistant to match content to capabilities to job roles, rather than content creation.
Don’t overlook development costs
Nothing comes for free these days, learning content included. Purchasing high-quality content can add up, especially if you’re trying to populate a content library.
Content costs could also include a SCORM authoring tool of some kind. Not all LMSs have authoring tools or ready-built content libraries, meaning you’ll have to rely on integrations from third parties or make your own from scratch. For example, Acorn doesn’t have an in-built authoring tool as there are plenty of reliable tools already on the market, and we want to focus on our bread and butter: linking learning and performance.
In saying that, licensing an authoring tool will likely add to your L&D costs. Many tools also require some level of instructional design expertise to make the most of. If you haven’t got that talent internally but need to create your own branded content, you may be looking at contracting or hiring for another role. It’s always worth enquiring with an LMS vendor to see if they offer content authoring as a service.
Don’t overload your content library
Many bloated content libraries go hand-in-hand with self-paced learning. The major disadvantage there is you rely on intrinsic motivation, which is notoriously fleeting. Basing the efficacy of your L&D strategy on the whims of learners isn’t likely to win you executive brownie points. Nor will it get you any meaningful data on learner progress, engagement, or competency with which you can improve training efforts and tailor experiences for individuals.
Less is more, and the same applies to learning. There’s a limit to how much content is useful and meaningful to have before it starts to become derivative. Too much content means there’s a higher chance that content is:
- Outdated, potentially teaching learners obsolete information and hindering productivity
- Irrelevant to capabilities, meaning they net no return on the effort to build them
- More likely to disengage learners and quickly reduce L&D’s effectiveness.
Key takeaways
It’s easy to believe the myths surrounding eLearning content. The best advice we can give is to focus on your own needs.
Good learning content is only effective if it helps bridge capability gaps and ultimately impacts business objectives. When in doubt about learning content:
- Use AI to automate the tedious content-based tasks, rather than using it just because every vendor is selling it
- Invest in content that specifically addresses organizational learning needs, rather than mass libraries that tries to catch all problems
- Choose the right tools, from a performance learning management system to a user-friendly SCORM authoring tool.
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