Seven Reasons to Upgrade Your Corporate Training with Editable Off-the-Shelf Courses

Let's face it: your corporate training desperately needs an upgrade and you know it.  Maybe you've known it for years.  

We get why you've been procrastinating – there are a lot of obstacles and tough decisions in the way, starting with this one: Do you buy off-the-shelf courses or go fully custom?

Off-the-shelf courses are quick and cost-effective, but they're generic. Inevitably, you'll have to supplement with PDFs full of company policy (and good luck getting anyone to squint at those on their phone).

Custom-built content is…an investment. In the we-will-own-it way and the on-my-budget way. Plus, it takes time. A lot of time. The rollout will be slow.  

It's a tough call. But what if the perfect solution is neither…and also both?

Say hello to fully editable off-the-shelf courses with dominKnow. We've partnered with well-known providers of off-the-shelf courses to offer you the best of both worlds.

Here are seven reasons why editable off-the-shelf courses are exactly what you've been waiting for.

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Reason #1: Have Your Content and Edit It, Too

Editable off-the-shelf courses bring you all the benefits of ready-made and custom content – with the downsides of neither.

Let's face it – for certain topics, most organizations don't actually need to create their corporate training from scratch. Using ready-made content with minor tweaks would fit your needs.

By giving you the option to take the content that works, cut out what doesn't and add what's missing you can save a lot of time and a lot of money.  You'll get exactly what you need with an efficiency that's never been available before.

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Reason #2: Modernize Your Corporate Training with the Masters

dominKnow's partners in this revolution are also specialists in the technology and design that the modern workforce expects.  These courses are optimized for mobile and for modern work styles.  

Our editable libraries contain microlearning units from masters of the craft. Many focus on not only skill development, but guided application and reflection on your current work tasks so everyday tasks and application of learning fit into your normal work flow. Plus, these courses are HTML5-only, true-responsive design to suit all devices.  

There's a reason mobile learning and microlearning remain buzzwords: bite-sized learning on the go makes sense for the modern workforce.  

But if you're new to either learning strategy, the transition can be daunting as you realize it’s not simply making your courses shorter.  

Editable off-the-shelf courses can be a good place to start when hauling your L&D into the new decade. Editable content libraries let you leapfrog past the learning curve to get your organization up to date.

Consider them your "training” wheels (ha ha!) on a new learning strategy and a jump start in design on content that is completely unique to your organization.

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Reason #3: Pick Content from Industry Experts

By partnering with multiple providers, we can offer dozens of libraries and hundreds of courses.  They're award-winning, designed by experts in the subject matter, so you know you're giving your employees a strong foundation in the topics you choose.

And your options are broad.  Here are just a few of the content areas available

• Safety  
• General Business Skills
• Business Communication
• Compliance / Respectful Workplace Training
• Customer Service
• Design Thinking
• Interpersonal Skills
• Leadership Skills
• Performance Development
• Managerial Skills

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Reason #4: Customize Your Corporate Training to Feel Like Your Own

This is where the fun starts.  

First, you'll brand the courses so no one can even tell they're off-the-shelf. Give them your company's style by inserting your logo and customizing the colors and fonts to match your organization’s branding.  

With dominKnow's custom theme feature, you can choose these settings once then apply them to all of these off-the-shelf courses with a few clicks for an instantly consistent look and feel. You can even create a brand new look feel using a completely different design.  

And if elements of your branding change, the edits can also be one-and-done.  Our authoring tool provides reusability and uses dynamic content production.  That means we store content (like logos) in a centralized media library in your dominKnow | ONE site. Then you call any of these reusable elements (themes, images, audios, videos, PDFs, glossary terms, learning objects, or references) into your projects dynamically. Every time someone opens up a project, they see the current centralized version of that item.  

That makes universal updates a snap – update a reused element in  dominKnow | ONE, and the changes are immediately pushed to everywhere it was used. A quick re-publish puts it in the hands of your learning audience.

You can further personalize the courses by swapping generic images for ones that suit your audience better. Change out the original stock photos to ones that better reflect your workforce.  Pick high-quality royalty-free images from dominKnow's built-in library or import custom images of your staff and facilities to really make these off-the-shelf courses your own.

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Reason #5: Make the Content Relevant

Relevance is the key the making your L&D programs effective.  The more easily a learner can draw a line between the content and their experience, the more engaged they'll be in learning. The retention and application of what they've learned will also improve.

The ability to edit off-the-shelf courses allows you to increase their relevance for better results.  

You can remove or alter content that doesn't work for you. No more caveats to communicate outside the courseware about pieces your learners should ignore or remember differently.

You can add new content that's missing.  Some courses come with state-specific add-ons to ensure you're training on relevant jurisdictional laws. But you can also add company- or location-specific content of your own that off-the-shelf courses can't account for.  

Even when nothing is wrong, off-the-shelf courses can still be made more relevant your learners' experiences. You can tweak examples or scenarios to better fit problems they're likely to encounter.  

Changes can be as small as editing a piece of text or fundamental as remixing content from different courses together. Then add unique test questions to evaluate knowledge of custom content where necessary.  

Consider the following ideas when customizing your corporate training:

• Service- or product-specific information
• Job aids
• Corporate videos
• Proprietary graphics
• Specific Software Steps/Simulations
• Organizational charts
• Company models or processes
• Leadership messaging
• Company forms

The best part is, you don't have to worry about messing up the course's cross-device compatibility as you customize.  

dominKnow | ONE's Flow is designed to produce true responsive content without any extra programming or modification. If, on the other hand, you have advanced users, our tools provide the flexibility to adjust defaults and customize the way things display based on screen size, browser type, or even device.

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Reason #6: Leverage dominKnow | ONE's Other Features, While You're At It

When you're editing these off-the-shelf courses you have access to the full editing power of dominKnow | ONE. You aren’t limited, as often is the case with other customized off-the-shelf offerings.  

Tweaking content is just the beginning.  You can also:

• Translate corporate training into other languages, using our streamlined translation tools
• Localize courses for multiple jurisdictions without duplicated effort. Parent-child course relationships mean common course content remains linked for easy updating.  

• Organize learning assets in our central media library. Share, reuse, and track assets across multiple learning projects.
• Streamline the review process of your updates with built-in tools. Stakeholders, subject matter experts, and authors alike will find leaving and addressing feedback simple. Create automatic reminders for reviews and follow-ups.
• Use accessibility features to ensure you remain within WAI-AREA, WCAG AA Level 2.0, and Section 508 guidelines. Corporate training libraries have been tested for accessibility – make sure your custom content is still up to snuff.

Those are just a few of the capabilities you can leverage to get the most of your editable off-the-shelf courses. Features vary by product, so let us help you determine what you need.  

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Reason #7: They Could Be Your Gateway Content

We have to warn you now, working in dominKnow | ONE can be addictive.

By the time you've customized and rolled out your editable off-the-shelf courses, you may find yourself itching to create a few courses from scratch.

The good news is, we've got your back.  

Our themes and layout templates provide an organized, good-looking head start. Use them as-is, modify them, or create and save custom options. dominKnow | ONE also has the features you’ll need as your authoring skills grow and you move into more advanced authoring. And our collaboration tools might just change the way your entire creative team works.  

To learn more about our libraries of editable off-the-shelf courses or our cloud-based authoring tool in general, use this form at the bottom of our page of information on Off-The-Shelf Courses.  

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