The Guide to AI-Powered Course Authoring & Collaborative Learning

Expectations for L&D leaders have never been higher than they are today. Your teams expect you to create training content that is relevant, impactful, and speaks to the current moment.

But how can you deliver courses that match today’s challenges and opportunities when creating content takes weeks, if not months? How can you keep your existing content from becoming dated when the world moves so quickly?

We want to support you to create exciting learning experiences that stay relevant for longer. That’s why we developed a tool to make it fast and convenient to publish and iterate courses using input from subject-matter experts. 

Most L&D teams face major challenges when creating course content 

We work with a lot of L&D teams, and we talk regularly with L&D leaders about the difficulties they face. These discussions tell us that the biggest challenges L&D teams face when creating content are bottlenecks in creating content, and low course engagement rates.

1. Bottlenecks in creating content

On average, it takes 130 hours and $22,178 to create a single hour of eLearning. And most L&D teams work on their own, meaning they’re solely responsible for creating this content. If you’re lucky, you might have a small team of instructional designers to help you out.

It doesn’t have to be so hard. Every organization has the subject matter expertise and institutional knowledge to create engaging, impactful courses that move with the times. 

You just need a way to bring it all to life for your learners without having to spend months developing each course.

2. Low course engagement rates

Science tells us humans learn best from peer-based interactions. Instead of being a one-way street, modern training needs to be collaborative, decentralized, and above all else, current. 

Unfortunately, a lot of the content offered through L&D platforms is outdated, and isn’t built with collaboration in mind. That’s a big reason why the average course completion rate in 2020 was only 20-30%. 

The best way to overcome these low engagement rates and keep your learners motivated? Empower your subject-matter experts to create fun, interactive content in minutes, rather than days or weeks.

Enter our Authoring Tool. 

6 steps to creating impactful courses with our Authoring Tool

Creating content should be a smooth, streamlined, and collaborative process. And when existing content becomes outdated, it shouldn’t be a chore to update it. 

That’s why we’ve developed our Authoring Tool to allow L&D teams to empower subject-matter experts to author courses. Then, once these courses are developed, L&D leaders can either validate them as meeting L&D standards or point out areas for further improvement.

Here’s our six-step process to creating learning content with our Authoring Tool that makes an immediate impact for every one of your learners.

1. Invite subject-matter experts

Your greatest asset as an L&D leader is the expertise within your teams. Your subject-matter experts have a lot to offer when it comes to creating current and engaging content. You just need to know how to leverage this expertise and put it to work. 

The first step in creating great content with our Authoring Tool is to invite subject-matter experts to co-author your content. Have them weigh in on the issues, and don’t be afraid to pick their brains for the insights your teams need. 

With these experts as co-authors, your content will have more credibility, and the insights they offer will make learning more engaging and stimulating for learners.

2. Create course content 

Our Authoring Tool makes it quick and easy to create great content. Copy and paste information from any format, and bring the material to life by using a range of formats from our 100+ trusted partners, including YouTube, Vimeo, Google Drive, SlideShare, and plenty of others.

This creation process is decentralized, meaning subject-matter experts can contribute content and help build courses directly without having to ask L&D leaders for permission. Even better, our Authoring Tool works with the tools your team actually uses, instead of being simply SCORM-based - though of course our platform works with SCORM too.

And with our AI-powered authoring features, users can deploy their first course in just a few minutes on our platform. It’s incredibly fast and intuitive, and it frees you up to spend more time with learners. But more on that later in this article...

3. Exchange internal comments

Every great course is the result of internal deliberation. To turn a first draft into a completed version that is ready to ship to learners, you need to exchange ideas, point out areas for improvement, and watch things take shape with input from subject-matter experts.

Our Authoring Tool makes it easy to share these insights. You can exchange private notes as you co-create courses, suggesting topics for discussion and areas for improvement. This way, every step of the corporate training process is collaborative - even creating the content itself.

4. Include interactive assessments

With our Authoring Tool, you can shape your assessments to suit learner needs, using different question formats to make sure they understand and retain information.  

Choose from a variety of over ten question formats, including open-ended questions, multiple choice, and opinion questions to keep learners engaged. You can also bring the material to life by asking learners to rank items in order or identify the right ‘hot spot’ in an image.

5. Publish and iterate

Once your course is ready, you can ship to learners and use their reactions to improve your content and delivery. Our Reactions feature makes it quick and easy for learners to let you know what they think, giving you the resources you need to iterate and improve over time.

This feedback loop is a big reason why our users achieve course satisfaction rates of up to 99%. It makes it easy to build content to match the needs of your learners, as well as notifying you whenever existing content needs updating to reflect changes or market developments. 

6. Reward your co-authors

When learners engage with your course, our platform sends notifications to your subject-matter expert co-authors to reward them for their contribution. This tells them they’re valued, and helps to reinforce the habit of contributing to shared learning. 

Before you know it, your learners will be creating course content on their own and inviting you to contribute as a co-author. That’s what collaborative learning looks like in practice. 

Supercharge your collaborative learning strategy with AI-powered authoring

At 360Learning, we’re committed to creating features that will actually help Learning and Development teams make an impact on the metrics that matter to them. We know that just because AI features work in one industry, don’t necessarily mean they'll work in learning and development. That's why we've engineered learner-centric and time-saving AI features that will truly add value for your L&D team.

We’ve built our AI feature set to:

1) Automate away the boring, the dull, the monotonous, and the mundane. Can you imagine your life without chasing compliance or the repetitive tasks that fill up your day? 

2) Keep L&D in control. You’re the expert in learning strategies, pedagogy, and knowing what your learners need. AI and subject-matter experts can help you create content, but what if AI could also help ensure that courses meet your learning standards throughout the process? 

3) Create courses faster. You spend time working on course creation. Assessments, learning objectives, lots of planning, building, and reviewing. This process is about to get much faster. 

4) Improve the learner experience. Learners will have personalized learning, advanced search, high-quality courses in any language, and a library of content highly contextualized and personally recommended based on their needs, thanks to you and your AI support. 

When you can work faster and automate more, you have more time to dedicate to developing learning strategies and supporting your learners. Here’s a closer look at three of our most powerful features, and how they work together to do just that: 

Feature #1: Prompt management

Manage AI prompts in 360Learning by establishing company culture, pedagogy, and compliance requirements that all AI-generated courses must adhere to before they’re even created. Save yourself time and reduce friction for your experts through prompt management. By learning to manage prompts effectively, you’re building yourself a strong skillset to stay at the forefront of L&D and in control of your learning programs, even as you leverage AI in your LMS. 

By doing so, you don’t just create courses faster– you create courses that are relevant and meet your strategic learning requirements faster. You ensure your internal experts can focus on sharing their knowledge while also adhering to pedagogical best practices (keeping you in control of quality, consistency, and compliance). 

Feature #2: AI-powered course builder 

Now that your brand tone and voice, learning strategy, and compliance requirements are in place, you and your experts are ready to create courses. Manual course creation can be an arduous process, like translating company processes and documents into engaging courses. AI is a powerful tool that can make course creation five times faster. 

360Learning’s AI features can turn a document into a course in 2 minutes. Imagine how fast you can update process documentation or create an onboarding process if you can take existing documents and turn them into courses complete with activities and key takeaways in so little time. You can free up your and your internal experts’ bandwidth, and make sure your learners have access to the most up-to-date courses by letting AI handle course creation. 

When your courses need a quick content update, adding new and or updated assessments can be the most time-consuming part of updating your courses. With 360Learning, you can access our Suggested Questions tool, to choose from a list of questions across a variety of formats. The questions come with correct and incorrect answers that you can easily edit, saving you the time of coming up with assessments. 

Your learning platform then becomes part of your company’s identity. Your culture, processes, and other contexts all reside at your learner’s fingertips. This is why using AI to create courses without context from your platform won’t generate the best content for your teams. You’ll end up with generic content that can be useful on a high level but misses the mark for meaningful content creation to engage your learners. 

In our AI-powered course builder, you can enter a title, course objective, and/or learner audience and AI will first review your learning platform for context. AI then refines your prompt to include your inputs, as well as existing content on your platform to generate a relevant course for your learners. That means countless L&D hours saved from manually curating personalized training. That's right: with 360Learning you can instantly generate custom courses, paths, and catalogs based on individual job titles and skills to deliver targeted learning experiences.

Now you’re in (cruise) control with course creation, but that’s scratching the AI surface. 

Feature #3: AI-powered automation

AI-powered automation benefits your learners, too. With advanced search, your learners can easily find anything they need, including in classrooms or in a course activity. AI can recommend courses based on their learning activities, skills, or course completion. Using our Globalization solution, you can use AI to help translate courses so your global learners can access the same high-quality content regardless of their platform language. 

AI-powered authoring lets you ship engaging courses in minutes, not months

It shouldn’t be hard to create and share great content. That’s why we’ve built our AI-powered authoring features to help users deliver short, to-the-point courses that match today’s learning needs and help teams to stay current.

What’s more, we know it’s working. On average, our users report an average consumption of 11 activities per learner per day. Even better, courses created with internal collaboration are rated as being twice as helpful as courses created by L&D teams alone. 

That’s the power of collaborative learning: you can quickly address learning opportunities, put the needs of your people first, and distribute ownership of your learning.

With our AI-powered authoring tools, you and your teams no longer have to deal with flat, outdated content. Instead, you can ship more, ship faster, and ship higher-quality by putting your L&D team at the center of learning culture and growth.

If you’d like to learn more about how AI-powered L&D can transform your organization, book a demo with one of our learning experts! Or, if you’re still curious about what AI can do for your team but not ready to commit to a platform just yet, check out our free AI Certification for L&D.