Authoring tools are used for lots of different types of learning content, but can we detect a trend within large organizations of what people really create? We spoke to a sample of 1,000 Easygenerator users to understand what they make with the tool.
If you search for courses or look at MOOC sites, such as Lynda or Udemy, the outcome differs a lot to what people make in Easygenerator. People look for skills they need or think they need on MOOCs.
The content created in Easygenerator, however, is much more specific to a company (culture), an industry (regulations) or job title (tutorials).
Content created in Easygenerator can be divided into four categories:
The more formal courses are mostly there to serve as documentation. Think company values, compliance, company guidelines, and policies. If we look at Bloom’s Taxonomy (the standard model in L&D of classifying the complexity and specificity of learning), we are looking at the lowest stage: “Remembering”. Formal training is often created by Instructional Designers, as its outcome is less prone to change and it is top-down.
The content we find in the product training category mostly give the learner a frame of reference to do their job:
Product Training always solves a need for information to be interpreted, exemplified or explained. This is the “Understand” stage in Bloom’s Taxonomy. Content created in this category gives the learner/consumer a frame of reference to be able to do their job.
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The three content types within the work instructions category are:
Work instructions always solve a basic question: “How do I do X”. If we look at Bloom’s Taxonomy we are looking at the “applying” stage. Work instructions allow employees to either execute or implement tasks. Ninety-nine percent of the time, work instructions are user-generated content, i.e. employees create this content themselves. This is especially true for how-tos and tutorials.
The only course type we saw recurring in this category are branding guides and fun quizzes. These would fall into the “Create” stage of Bloom’s Taxonomy. The courses here also serve as documentation, but always to create something. Although fun quizzes might not directly help employees in their day to day objectives.
The content created by Easygenerator users (authors) consists of 40% formal / hr driven training, 23% product training, 20% work instructions and 17% of small learning nuggets.
60% percent of content is created by subject-matter experts (employees) and 40% is created by traditional instructional designers.
