Experts Engagement Tool: Leverage Subject-Matter Expertise With Collaborative Learning

As an L&D leader, you already know the strengths, skills, and know-how your internal subject-matter experts possess. But how can you encourage these experts to share their knowledge and help others grow?

You need an easy way to leverage this expertise to help ship your next great course. Without a system in place to seek help, get feedback, and reward experts, putting this expertise to work can be a pain. Not only do you have to follow-up with people one-by-one; you also have to motivate experts into partnering with L&D, and edit their contributions for consistency.

Fortunately, we’ve developed a tool to take all the hassle out of engaging your experts to build excellent courses. Read on - or skip ahead to the video ;) - to find out more!

Your experts want to help - they just need a better way to do it

Studies have shown that leveraging internal expertise is one of the best ways to build resilient, competitive organizations. If you’re not encouraging your experts to share their specialized knowledge, you’re missing out on a way to strengthen your business to face future challenges.

That’s why it’s such a shame when organizations don’t create easy ways for subject-matter experts to share this knowledge. After all, experts want to help others learn by creating relevant course content for them - they just need an easy way to do it. 

For L&D teams, developing course content reflecting this subject-matter expertise can be an arduous, time-consuming task. Not only do you need to ask around to see who should pitch in, but you also need to define what you’re looking for, chase people down for their contributions, and wrap it all together into a consistent course. 

No wonder it takes 130 hours and $22,178 on average to create a single hour of eLearning!

At 360Learning, we’re on a mission to make it quick and easy for L&D teams to harness subject-matter expertise and create exciting learning content.

That’s why we’re introducing our Experts Engagement Tool. 

Engage your experts in 5 easy steps

Our Experts Engagement Tool supports L&D teams to identify and engage experts, build courses, and ship this learning content across their organization. 

This happens in five easy steps.

1. Ping your experts to get the ball rolling

Let’s say you have a learning need that has been requested by a number of people. As a first step, you can ping a number of experts to make them aware of the opportunity to contribute to wider learning. 

Once you’ve let them know, you can start to gather volunteers with the right skills, knowledge, and background.

2. Gather volunteers with the right expertise and insights

After you’ve pinged people to get started, your experts can apply to contribute to the course with just a single click. Then, as the person overseeing the project, you’ll be notified about the experts wishing to contribute.

On top of pinging people directly, our platform organically pushes the top learning needs to be seen more widely within your organization. This way, you can get the attention of a wider range of experts, including people you may not have initially thought to ask for help.

3. Create your project - and pick a project owner

With our Experts Engagement Tool, it’s up to you to decide when to launch the project. You can pick a project owner from the list of experts who have volunteered - they’ll be in charge of authoring course content from here on out.

4. Coach your experts through the authoring process

Some of your experts may not have contributed to a course before. But fear not! They can complete a quick in-platform onboarding session to get up to speed. This way, they’ll know exactly what to expect. 

Once they’re ready, they can start adding activities and learning content, including text, images, videos, questions, and a range of other media. If they have any queries while they’re crafting their course contributions, they can post these in the forum, which is only visible to project team members and L&D.

5. Reward people for their contributions

Once the course has been finalized and shipped with the great input from your expert authors, it’s time to give them the credit they deserve. 

You can thank and congratulate them on the Learning Needs page, where they will receive encouragement and feedback from learners. The more recognition they get, the higher they’ll rank in the leaderboard of community champions. 

Once an internal expert has created their first course, they’re more likely to create more courses more frequently. That’s how leading companies like Toyota, Mitsubishi, Appen, and AlphaSights end up leveraging internal expertise on a huge 95% of their training projects.

Your experts won’t have to wait long to see how their new content is being received, either; with Reactions, they’ll have access to real-time learner feedback.

Our Experts Engagement Tool makes leveraging expertise easy

Leveraging subject-matter expertise to create exciting courses shouldn’t be a pain. As an L&D leader, you just need a quick and easy way to gather the right volunteers, create your project, and oversee their inputs. Our Experts Engagement Tool gives you all the help you need. 

With our Experts Engagement Tool, your internal expertise won’t just lie dormant within individual teams. Instead, your experts will be able to share their knowledge to help others learn, and win the recognition they deserve. It’s all part of Collaborative Learning at scale.

Our Experts Engagement Tool is the second of our three pillars of our Enterprise Plan, so stay tuned for our next exciting update! 

Interested in all our Collaborative Learning features? Check out our Relevance Score, Video Pitch Assessment, Reactions, Authoring Tool, Discussion Forum, and Projects Tool.

If you’d like to see how our Collaborative Learning platform can help you, book a free demo with one of our learning experts.