Well, let’s clear something out. Based on the raw material Instructional Designers receive from Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), it’s Instructional Designers’ task to develop the learning content. Whenever SMEs send you learning material that is articulated correctly, then your job becomes much more straightforward. So, you must be wondering, how can you help SMEs develop learning content that can make your life easier?

What does a Subject Matter Expert do?

A subject matter expert, or SME, is a person who possesses a deep understanding of a particular subject and provides the knowledge and expertise for a project or program. 

One of the most critical steps of developing learning material takes place way before the development itself. It occurs when the people responsible for providing you with the content needed to create an eLearning course, the SMEs, gather all the required material. Once they gather all this raw material, they send it to the Instructional Designer for review and editing in a format suitable for producing the eLearning course.

Unfortunately, in many cases, the raw material Instructional Designers receive is not of high quality.

How can you help SMEs develop the learning content?

In my early years as an eLearning designer/developer, I realised that Subject Matter Experts needed assistance to author the content accurately. A major problem I faced was that I received either too much or too few learning content. Occasionally their writing was entirely academic, and most of the time, the content they sent me failed to cover the Learning Objectives.
To counter this, I realised that I had to teach them how to articulate the content to help my job. I was right. Providing the SMEs with aid early on saved me Instructional Design time and speeded up the development process.

Consider this:

Some SMEs know all about a topic but have no clue about learning theories or pedagogical strategies, and some others haven’t even participated in the creation of an eLearning course. Therefore, all SMEs need some guidance—even the experienced ones.

Guidelines to the SMEs

To develop the content correctly, I give the SMEs I work with, the following guidelines:

Be relevant

Explain to the SMEs that learners need skills and not just academic knowledge.

Therefore, the learners need to see examples of real-world activities that they can relate to. To find relevant examples, tell the SMEs to ask themselves:

What confuses learners when they first learn or apply this knowledge on the job?

Ask the SMEs to think about the most challenging real-life situations the learners face in applying the knowledge/skills you are trying to teach them. They should build the content around these challenges.

Besides content creation, the SMEs can also provide you with the foundation of the scenarios or stories of your eLearning course. During the needs analysis, you have probably found out the most challenging situations the learners face. Advise the SMEs to build their stories or scenarios upon those challenging situations. Outline the importance of emphasising the learners’ most common real-life mistakes to create a helpful story or scenario. 

Learning objectives

Another common characteristic SMEs share is that they give way too much content (raw material) to the Instructional Designer. Instruct them that they should avoid sending good-to-know material. Instead, ask them to send you only the critical information the learners need to meet the learning objectives. Emphasise that the content should always cover the learning objectives adequately.

Therefore they should always ask themselves the following question:

why is this piece of content supporting what people need to do for this course?

Be brave to tell them that not all content should be in the final eLearning product. Explain to them that the content should tie to the Learning Objectives. Ask them to avoid adding information that does not support achieving the Learning Objectives. 

To help the SMEs stick to meaningful content, advise them to use curriculum mapping.

Each paragraph or part of the content should map back to at least a learning objective.

Inform them that paragraphs that don’t map back to a learning objective or are not crucial for understanding the content should be removed. To help them with this process, I suggest giving each paragraph an “invisible” title in the form of a comment. This way, they can also realise if the content has already been covered.

Engagement

Explain to the SMEs how important it is for the learners to be engaged with the content.

To gain the learners’ attention, I ask them to include a hook at the beginning of each section or unit at the raw material they send me. A hook can be a quote from a famous person, a story, thought-provoking phrases, statistics or facts.

When SMEs ask me how to develop content, I propose that they include as many step-by-step guides as possible when you present something sequential. Those step-by-step guides can become excellent job aids, process interactions or even scenarios.

Learners need a summary of the delivered knowledge more than anything else. Thus, I ask the SMEs to provide an overview of each unit. I use this overview at the end of each unit so the learners can ensure that they have adequately covered the essential parts of the content. Besides, this is an excellent way for SMEs to realise and double-check if the content covers the learning objectives.

Language

Another common issue I face from time to time is that SMEs, especially those in the education field, tend to use academic language or extremely long text. So, what I do is I ask the SMEs to create short sentences which are readable without hassle. To help them with that, I suggest using MS Word’s readability statistics or a tool such as Grammarly.

Additionally, I advise them to avoid long paragraphs. Thus, I ask them to break the content into easily understandable segments. We don’t want the learners to be intimidated due to the size of the text, do we?

Besides, I ask the SMEs to build the content in 2nd person singular when referring to the learner to save me some time. e.g. “In this module, you should learn”.

Quizzes & Feedback

Although it is an IDs job, some SMEs like to send me the assessment questions they want to include in the course’s quizzes. I can’t recall how many times these questions lack the most critical part of an assessment. This is none other than to provide the learners with a chance to review the learning objectives. So, stress to them the importance of aligning the quiz’s questions to the learning objectives.

Besides, another piece of advice I give to the SMEs is to make sure that the answer to each question is not obvious. I instead explain to them that questions should be difficult enough to provoke learners’ thinking process. I also suggest they should avoid creating extensive question stems and distractors (answers). Those should be as short as possible so the learners won’t have to read the question twice. 

Finally, I request them to provide feedback on each question. As mentioned in previous articles, the correct/incorrect feedback is not constructive at all. Therefore, I ask them to give short feedback, based on the learners’ choice, both correct and incorrect ones.

Conclusion

To sum up, let me share the following quote from Heidi K that popped up at my Linkedin feed today:

“In most cases, SMEs should not be designing learning experiences, and instructional designers should not become subject matter experts. Instructional designers have the skillset to gather knowledge from the SMEs and pull that back to the beginner level, taking only what they need.”

As discussed at the beginning of this article it should always be clear that we help SMEs for a specific purpose. To help us do our job. Therefore, we shouldn’t seek to swap our role with theirs but to assist us in creating better learning experiences for the learners.