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E-learning is everywhere today, and not without reason. It’s a powerful way to train and educate large numbers of people, at great distance and at low cost. And with easily obtainable software that lets anyone with a computer create effective, beautiful e-learning courses on any topic, there’s no reason for a business not to take advantage of it… in any language!
E-learning is a fine example of the good that can happen when long-standing institutions adapt to modern needs – in this case, one such institution is the academy. Massive online open courses, or MOOCs, have shown themselves to be a fine means to offer university-level education to eager learners everywhere, at low cost (or no cost) to them. Other institutions are also making good use of e-learning methods to spread knowledge to those who need it; for example, see the article we shared on Monday about medical education in Africa. So, e-learning is a natural choice when businesses need to ensure consistency in employee training.
If you’re over a certain age (as your TrueLanguage blogger is), you may have the experience of getting a job as a kid (mine was at a video store), and being sat down in the office on the first day to watch a short movie about the company’s standards and expectations. And, as a kid, you probably didn’t retain much of what you learned (to your manager’s chagrin). But what if you hadn’t just watched the movie? What if you’d been able to interact with it, answering questions, writing short responses, playing knowledge games? That’s what e-learning courses offer, and they work. An employer can guarantee that all employees are presented with a uniform training experience, while recording their progress and verifying that they have retained what they’ve learned. If it helps a business in one language, it’ll help it in all languages. In short, if you have e-learning courses for your staff, get them translated before you expand!
Even better – create your source e-learning materials with translation in mind, to smooth out as many wrinkles as possible well in advance. Our six tips for global content creation apply to e-learning as well. Keep your text concise, broadly appealing, free of colloquialisms, and easy to understand. However, do bear in mind that an e-learning course is a project with a lot more moving parts than a simple word processing document. Your course may have elements of presentations, spreadsheets, an interactive quiz or survey, graphics animated and otherwise, audio and video components, all in the same package. Be advised that working with all of these parts will require extra time, attention and testing.
One last word: make sure your translation team is aware of your e-learning software specifications, including platform and version. It would be a terrible shame to have your courses translated in toto, into a final product that’s a crucial version ahead of or behind the version you can use!
