How do you update your e-learning content and materials to avoid outdated or inaccurate information?

Regularly schedule content reviews to assess accuracy, relevance, and currency. Assign responsibility to SMEs/IDs to conduct thorough reviews and identify necessary updates. Monitor industry trends, best practices, and regulatory changes to ensure content remains current. Encourage feedback from learners and instructors to flag outdated information or areas needing clarification. Utilize version control systems to track changes and maintain an audit trail of revisions. Prioritize timely revisions and communicate changes to stakeholders. By implementing a proactive review and update process, organizations can ensure that e-learning content remains accurate, up-to-date, and aligned with current knowledge and standards.

Planning ahead can also mean to plan no updates. An e-learning course is sometimes a one-time effort and thus the lifespan of the course is just a year. Other courses may cost a lot of time and resources and when they need to be there for 3 to 5 years, a plan is needed to keep it up to date.

To ensure e-learning content remains accurate and relevant, conduct a systematic audit of existing resources. Use tools like content inventories, analytics, user surveys, quizzes, and peer reviews to identify what needs to be changed, added, deleted, or improved. Assess each piece of content based on accuracy, relevance, currency, consistency, quality, accessibility, and alignment with learning objectives. Prioritize updates based on the content’s impact, urgency, and frequency of use. This approach helps maintain the integrity of e-learning materials, meeting the evolving needs of learners and enhancing the overall educational experience.

A great tip to audit content is to assign this as a mandatory recurring training course to a responsible (subject matter expert) for the training content. When they get invited to re-take the course, this is a trigger to review the content and check if the content is still relevant.

Updating content can be quite intensive, especially in cases where the content exists in multiple languages and is distributed across multiple learning platforms. Having an authoring tool that facilitates this is a big help when updates need to be created. Otherwise, much of the work will be publishing training courses and uploading them to your LMS systems for maybe small updates.

Most importantly, involve subject matter experts and stakeholders in this process. Verifying the content is important. If possible get the opinion of learners as well, whether they would like something else to be incorporated as well to help the course be more effective.

Repeating the cycle of updating content will provide two benefits: 1. By creating a recurrent call to actions for your stakeholders ( SMEs in general) via structered e-mails will help you receive the most updated information for your eLearning content 2. You will be certainly sure that your audience will have the latest and the most updated content ensuring quality and growth for your teams/audience. A proper timeline for content updates may be at 6 months with regularity or once per year. But to make sure the content is always up to date it is recommended not staying updated more than that ( excepting when the course content doesn't have updates and there is no need for those).

Additional tips as below: Stay informed: Subscribe to industry publications, attend conferences, and encourage your team to stay current on relevant topics. This proactive approach helps identify when content updates might be necessary. Utilize external resources: Consider collaborating with industry experts or professional organizations to ensure your content reflects best practices and the latest developments in your field.

By using an authoring tool that not only facilitates content creation but also provides re-recording capabilities with version control. tts performance suite enables seamless tracking of changes and updates to content, maintaining a clear record of revisions. This functionality allows content creators to efficiently manage updates, revert to previous versions if necessary, and ensure that learners always access the most up-to-date information. By systematically storing each change, version control helps prevent the dissemination of outdated or incorrect materials, enhancing the reliability and effectiveness of e-learning programs.