Hi, I'd love to hear what other learning professionals are doing when it comes to tracking content and topics in your elearning materials. When there are company updates or a new feature release, it's becoming more difficult to know exactly which materials are affected. How are others handling this? Any ideas or recommendations will be appreciated.
That sort of tracking can be tricky, especially for large companies with lots of training.
One of my clients kept a spreadsheet of their courses that included what links and documents were referenced in the course. That can be lot of work to set up. Plus, it's got to be updated as needed. But it was handy.
By the way, some of their courses referenced job aids. Here's what we did to ensure those could be updated without having to republish the courses:
We didn'tattach the job aid PDF to the course. Instead, we linked to the job aid on the company SharePoint site.
We used basic names for the job aids, and never changed them. Instead, we put the version number & date info within the job aid. That allowed us to replace an old job aid with a new one without changing the URL.
Hi Yuki! Yeah...it would be a whole lot easier if content stayed evergreen, but that's definitely not the reality. 🙂 To go along with Judy's helpful tips, I wanted to chime in with a few resources that I hope make it easier and save you some time in the future.
5 Tips for Building E-Learning Courses That Are Easy to Maintain - I know this is more about prevention, but the ideas in this article might be something you want to do moving forward, such as—Set a Course Expiration Date when you know some information will be obsolete as of a certain date. That way, you don't have to go through a ton of courses to check if it needs updating because you already made a note.
Course Update Spreadsheet - a Course Maintenance Sheet can be really helpful because you can see a list of all the courses in one place with any notes you need to stay organized. If you do use something like this, I highly recommend importing it into Google Sheets if you have more than one person working on updating courses. This allows everyone to see it and make changes in real-time so you don't have to pass a file back and forth.
In the past, my organization had content organized in a way that using Jira made sense. And since we were already in that tool every day, we were reminded of it often. We also employed checklists in Sheets to ensure updates happened across all of the content. Do you think that having a slack channel where updates are discussed is helpful? I was thinking of building a workflow in a team channel to push the update checklists out.
these are my statements, not those of my company or clients.
4 Replies
That sort of tracking can be tricky, especially for large companies with lots of training.
One of my clients kept a spreadsheet of their courses that included what links and documents were referenced in the course. That can be lot of work to set up. Plus, it's got to be updated as needed. But it was handy.
By the way, some of their courses referenced job aids. Here's what we did to ensure those could be updated without having to republish the courses:
Hi Yuki! Yeah...it would be a whole lot easier if content stayed evergreen, but that's definitely not the reality. 🙂 To go along with Judy's helpful tips, I wanted to chime in with a few resources that I hope make it easier and save you some time in the future.
I hope that helps!
Thank you Sarah and Judy for your responses, I really appreciate it.
In the past, my organization had content organized in a way that using Jira made sense. And since we were already in that tool every day, we were reminded of it often. We also employed checklists in Sheets to ensure updates happened across all of the content. Do you think that having a slack channel where updates are discussed is helpful? I was thinking of building a workflow in a team channel to push the update checklists out.
these are my statements, not those of my company or clients.