Being Creative in the eLearning Industry
Securing a sale can be a difficult task no matter the industry. It becomes even more difficult when the company that you are trying to pitch to has employees within their company that could complete the same job that you are trying to do for them. This issue is all too relevant within the tech industry.
Today my boss was trying to secure a sale with a company for an eLearning Module. Of course, one of the issues brought up was that they could have their in-house programmers complete the module for them at a much lower cost.
The storyboard they had provided us with as a guideline was extremely simple and boring. I had originally created the demo based off the storyboard without any outside creative input of my own. This of course resulted in an extremely dry and boring demo module. The demo I had created would be exactly the type of demo that their in-house programmers would have created. Knowing that, my boss asked my co-worker and I to collaborate on the project and to create some that would really impress the company. This required a lot of reworking and a lot of creativity.
After working over a day to get the module finished, we finally completed a working demo. The difference between the new demo and the one I had created the day before was night and day. The new demo had interesting interactions, animations, and audio. Now if we were to show you the storyboard that we based our demo off you would barely be able to tell they were related. We were able to create such an amazing demo because of our creative freedom. At first, I was under the impression that the company was looking for a module which was basically a copy of the storyboard. This was not the case; in fact, it was the opposite. We needed to show the company that we could create a product that they could not create themselves. After being way more creative with the base storyboard that they gave us we accomplished this.
Creativity is the tool that is used to differentiate an engaging and interesting module from ordinary ones. Adding more interactions, animations, and custom graphics help to jazz up a module significantly. When attempting to sell an eLearning module to a potential company, in order to really impress them, do not be afraid to add new content to their proposed module, including more interaction and custom graphics.
