Why rapid authoring is increasingly needed in today's workplace

Modern workplaces are constantly changing. But did you know how much and how often? Here, we’ll talk about the importance of rapid authoring in ever-evolving industries and the top three reasons why your workplace training materials need it now more than ever. 

How long does course development take?

Recent research shows that average course development takes between 1-3 months. Then, it can take anywhere from 1 week to a year. Unfortunately, not every workplace has that much time to build courseware and training materials. 

1. Regulations are always changing

Currently, there are seven new or updated regulations in different parts of the world, which are already in place (or will be soon):

• The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)
• The Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (CTPAT)
• The EU Forced Labor Regulation
• The Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive
• The German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (SCDDA)
• The Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) Regulation
• The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR)

Each changed regulation means retraining for some or all of your workforce. It is critical that your workers understand and follow the new regulations, so your enterprise does not suffer from “fines, seizure of goods, lost market access, and loss of customer trust”.

And as you know, regulations are changing all the time. This means that there is an ongoing need to retrain your people quickly and often. You don’t have time for a long development process for your training material.

2. The workplace is shifting

Even though the pandemic is (mostly) over, current workplaces still haven’t settled and have not returned to the pre-Corona conditions. Many workplaces are using this ‘in-flux’ time to negotiate with their workforce about what the workplace situation will look like moving forward. Five areas they are exploring are:

• Where does virtual reality and AI fit in?
• What kind of hybrid situation are employees looking for?
• Where can your workplace support your workers’ well-being and positivity?
• What would need to change to increase their productivity?
• How can your workplace increase employee engagement?

3. The rise of AI

AI is popping up everywhere. There are now a variety of apps that can help people in their daily work. For example, there are now AI writing apps like Jasper that workers have had to quickly become familiar with. There are also AI graphic design apps that significantly cut down design times and may even improve the outcomes.

Employees now need to become familiar with and use AI apps to help with their productivity.  And this is where training and rapid authoring can come in. 

Ways to implement rapid authoring

Let’s break it down.

Option 1: Choose a course from a free course library.

One of the issues with new courses is designing and organizing the material. This is definitely the case when dealing with new or updated compliance regulations or new AI apps. Fortunately, with platforms like SC Training (formerly EdApp), other people have already done the work and are willing to share it with you for free.

The SC Training (formerly EdApp) Course Library, for example, has 11 courses in the compliance category. Simply choose the one which suits your workplace needs, copy it, tweak the content if needed, personalize the branding to your company, and make it available to your trainees.

Duration: You can customize a course in about 15 minutes.

Option 2: Copy/paste into a template of your choice.

If you have the course material or questionnaire already, all you need to do is upload it into the relevant template.

For example, at the start of this article, we spoke about the negotiations that companies are having with their people about building new workplace situations. Chances are you know the questions that you need to ask. You just need an easy way to get the questions to your people and analyze their feedback.

SC Training (formerly EdApp) offers 4 different survey templates. You can ask open-text questions, allowing your workers to say whatever they wish. There is a multiple-choice option that you can choose to survey your employees according to a specific set of answers. Then there is a 0-5 slider option—an excellent way to measure the popularity (or not) of different conditions or suggestions. 

Lastly, the quadrant matrix offers a relational way to see employee feedback on axes. Except for the open questions which have to be looked at by a human, your LMS will analyze the results of the other three automatically.

Duration: You can create a survey in about 20 minutes.

Option 3: Leverage collaborative learning.

In addition to other benefits of collaborative learning, collaboration is an inexpensive way to maximize group knowledge. Putting together what you know with what others know usually adds up to a lot!

The SC Training (formerly EdApp) Discussions feature makes collaboration easy. A Discussions forum enables peer-to-peer learning on a large scale. Since it is virtual, location does not matter. Since it is online, time does not matter either. Colleagues in any part of the world can post questions and answers at any time. 

Duration: You can set up a Discussion forum in about 15 minutes.

With SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s rapid authoring features, think about how much you could create in just a few minutes!

Sources:

https://www.assent.com/blog/are-you-ready-for-2023-compliance-changes/

https://www.linezero.com/blog/five-emerging-workplace-trends-for-2023

https://www.jasper.ai/

https://influencermarketinghub.com/ai-graphic-design-tools/

https://coursemethod.com/2019-course-creator-industry-report.html#:~:text=The%20majority%20reported%20they%20were,months%20to%20create%20their%20course.