Watch the customer interview

Introduction

As a global leader in cloud banking, nCino has hundreds of employees across the world with a variety of learning and development needs. Digital learning is a great way to meet these needs. And the more great elearning that’s produced, the more the business wants it.

But with only a small team, instructional designer Olivia Cunningham was excited to spearhead using Elucidat’s Guided Authoring. A new workflow that helps novice authors create elearning, to the organization’s standards.

If these new authors hadn’t had Guided Authoring, I don’t know that they would have been able to produce such a high-quality product.

- Olivia Cunningham, Instructional Designer, nCino

The challenge: bringing in novice authors

Three different novice authors stepped up to use Guided Authoring, and test it out.

 

1

The elearning intern

New to the L&D team, they had a little experience editing existing Elucidat courses. They were excited to try a new tool, but nervous about making errors.

2

Face-to-face trainer

Responsible for developing training; up until recently their focus was face-to-face. They were eager to embrace digital learning, but easily overwhelmed.

3

The technical writer

Working on large learning and induction programmes, their aim was to improve technical writing across nCino. Having only experienced elearning as a learner, they were starting from scratch.

 

Olivia decided to take a hands-on approach and get them started with a quick practice project. They watched a couple of Elucidat onboarding videos, then created a project based on a US classic. You guessed it, making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

 

We had them all sign in to Elucidat and start building it out. Editing text. Adding images. Doing some of the things that I knew they were going to be doing for the projects that we had in mind.

- Olivia Cunningham, Instructional Designer, nCino

 

With that done, they were ready to tackle a real project. Olivia set them up with an on-brand template to use in Elucidat – one of the key features of Guided Authoring. Their mission? To rebuild elearning created in an old, out-of-date platform.

But this time she wanted them to roam free. And, even though they came to the pilot with different levels of experience, each participant had great results.

 

The outcome

Feedback from novice authors: comfortable, confident, creating lots!

The intern was up to speed and feeling confident. They even managed to produce 10 modules in two days alongside their other work.

“Guided Authoring is so much easier than what I’ve used before. I’m not worried that I’m going to mess something up…It took me no time once I got the hang of it.”

– the elearning intern

The training developer felt so comfortable after building 10 modules, they started to explore what else was possible in the tool.

“Those overwhelming components were removed, and he was able to just focus on getting familiar with how you build something out. He ended up feeling a lot more confident. And ready to be able to dive in to Elucidat a little bit deeper.”

– Olivia on the training developer’s experience

The technical writer went above and beyond. Her projects were complex. With a bit of variety on each page, she had to get creative.

“She was figuring things out that I had never figured out before. She wasn’t afraid to go in, click around and figure out how everything works. And she was able to do so comfortably and without fear of messing something up.”

– Olivia on the technical writer’s experience

Feedback from the L&D team: freed up to do strategic work

Because Olivia put time in up front to set up a template that met her team’s standards, with guidance text in them for the novices to follow, she could rest assured about the quality of their work.

 

As an instructional designer, that’s one of the really big benefits of Guided Authoring. I don’t have to handhold and be there for every step of the process. It allowed me to focus on some of the bigger projects and some of that design and consultation work that takes a lot of time.

- Olivia Cunningham, Instructional Designer, nCino

Summary

Like many global businesses, demand for elearning at nCino is rising as the L&D team grapples to meet it.

For Olivia and nCino, Guided Authoring proved a great way to meet this demand, by empowering employees to share their expertise and create impactful elearning content, safely.

Want to find out how you can achieve similar results? Talk to us to learn more about how Guided Authoring can help you achieve Collaborative Content Creation.

How Guided Authoring empowered nCino:

  • SMEs and novice authors can produce effective learning experiences with minimal support from the L&D team.
  • Pre-defined templates ensured everything was consistent, on brand and following instructional design best practices.
  • Stripped-back user permissions meant the authors could feel confident that they weren’t going to introduce errors.

Learn more about nCino and how they produced scalable elearning to support a global audience.

 

 

Interested to learn more about Guided Authoring?

Explore how you can open up authoring to your internal experts and expand your capacity to meet the demand for impactful digital learning.