A Guide to understand Whom and How to Outsource eLearning Content Development

Before we, VKCL, start explaining the step by step outsourcing guidelines to an eLearning Content Development Organization, we would like to share that VKCL has been involved in dealing with the outsourcing business; K-12 education; corporate and academic eLearning, and many more content related business from more than a decade to various organizations, worldwide. On such a vast experience basis, we have gained enormous knowledge on whom and how to outsource eLearning Content Development, which we have provided in this article in the form of step by step guideline.  

Question you need to ask yourself before outsourcing eLearning Content Development task

1. Checking valid reasons for outsourcing the content development work

   
   The first step before outsourcing an eLearning Content Development activity is to understand your own core strengths and what can be done internally. To elaborate, you may be a start-up with only four to five employees. Hence, there is no way you can do everything on our own. In such cases, team members blame each other’s weaknesses rather than focusing on individual strength. So in such scenarios, talk to the team and decide which team member can do a particular task related to content development in the best possible manner. Remaining tasks can be outsourced to an eLearning content development organization. For example, you may have an instructional designer, writer, and editor in your team but no graphic designers, programmers, HTML and LMS specialists, multimedia experts, etc. So, you can ask an instructional designer, writer, and editor to develop a text storyboard, and outsource the work related to image creation and editing; 2D and 3D animation creation to an eLearning content development organization.

   
   

2. Whom to outsource – onshore or offshore organizations?

Onshore outsourcing means getting the work completed in one’s own land, whereas offshore outsourcing means getting the work done in a different country. Onshore offers several benefits such as reducing the communication gap; face to face meetings become possible; no cultural difference, and both parties can function on same time frames which implies time difference problems do not arrive. On the other hand, offshore development saves revenue considerably; minimizes workload; a wide variety of outsourcing options opens up, right from multimedia to HR to marketing to cloud based technology owing to the huge availability of talents worldwide. 

3. Should you opt for a single or multiple outsourcing vendor?

   
   Depends upon the flexibility and risk you are ready to undertake. Having a single outsourcing organization means all work can be allocated to a single vendor which reduces the hassle of communicating to different people in different companies. Also, you can bargain when a huge volume of work is assigned to a single vendor.

   
   On the other hand, opting for multiple outsourcing partners means you are not placing all eggs in one basket – smart choice. Yes, the task of communicating with every vendor may be laborious but it minimizes the risks in terms of work completion on time and cost-wise. More importantly, multiple eLearning content development organizations offer you the option of working with people who quickly understand your needs. For example, a start-up organization may be a good choice for small tasks such as creating or editing a YouTube video, and an old-fashioned big organization may be the best choice for creating multimedia content or product interfaces.