4 steps to “startup” your elearning projects

• 4 min read

A startup approach to Elearning

In this post I will take you through some basic startup principles that can apply to elearning projects – in the end, every project in the making can be considered a startup, it all depends on the approach!

‘Get out of the building’

The first step in any startup is to find an idea. Creativity is a mysterious beast, but the best way to find ideas is to ‘get out of the building’, i.e. stop making assumptions, and go out and start looking at people’s real-life problems. Henry Ford used to say, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.” This is probably true, but getting feedback from people with different viewpoints can only improve your project.

When it comes to elearning projects we could use the same kind of approach by reaching out directly to learners in order to understand what they need and if there’s anything in particular that they would like to experience during the course. You might be surprised by the good ideas that come from from this activity!

1+1=3 – or – ‘team is king’

One of the first things you learn when building a startup is that you just can’t do it alone. I am not simply talking about workload or the practical issues of getting things done in a limited amount of time, I am talking about the value of different viewpoints and expertise in a team, and the incredible things that two different brains can create. Moreover, you have to deal with the fact that no one person is proficient at everything, therefore you will need people with different skill sets.

When building your training materials you are going to need a solid team in order to execute your ideas. Remember: poor execution can kill even the best ideas, and execution is a direct consequence of your team’s quality. Of course you can try to do everything on your own or ask a friend to help you with the graphic design, but nothing will produce better results than a good, experienced, well-integrated team.

Minimum Viable Product & the power of validation

So let’s say we have an idea and a team to execute it: now we need to start building the product! In the last few years a few new approaches to this challenge were born, thanks to a new kind of business environment. In fact, thanks to modern technologies, becoming an entrepreneur has never been easier; this has resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of businesses and  innovative technology-based projects (which we call startups).

As every businessperson knows, greater competition means a potential struggle, and getting funds to run a startup project has become a lot more complicated than what it used to be. While in the past entrepreneurs were able to pitch ideas, get money and build a product, nowadays you need to show “something” in order to convince someone to give you an investment. As a result, entrepreneurs started presenting Minimum Viable Products or MVPs. An MVP is basically a prototype of your project, it’s a product big enough to convince someone that what you have in mind can work, but not too big to wreck your finances or sap too much time.You can use the same approach for your elearning project. Instead of building your full 500 lessons course, you could start with a pilot, a few lessons that you can show to a group of learners. This process is also called validation and allows you to gain a lot of time and resources by letting your end users understand what you want to create and collecting feedback when you still have the chance to steer your project to ‘learn-vana’ 🙂

Measure, analyze, pivot, iterate

Once your MVP has been rolled out and validated by your end users, it’s time to make the magic happen, it’s time to build your amazing elearning project, or startup.

One of the most relevant approaches developed in the last few years is the Agile project management approach. This approach consists of developing your project (or software) one (minor) release at a time, in order to allow proper measurement and analysis of the results. By studying the outcome of each improvement of your project you can easily “pivot”, which is the startup term for changing direction, and then iterate this process in order to continuously improve your learning experience.

These project management strategies developed by the latest generation of entrepreneurs can be extremely useful to elearning designers and will help you to improve the learner experience.

If you want to discuss how to implement these strategies you can contact us directly, comment on this post, or simply get started by activating your 14-day free trial of the Docebo LMS.