The Ultimate Strategy for Scaling Content Authoring Using AI

What lies at the heart of an effective training and development program? For most of those who are in charge of learning management, it’s the content that learners engage with.

That learning content needs to be relevant, engaging, readily available, scalable, and up-to-date. But it can be difficult to make that happen. 

Most organizations that do achieve this have a large team dedicated to producing, maintaining, updating, and optimizing learning content. Others leverage modern AI content authoring tools to create realistic, engaging content at scale.

In this article, we’ll help you join the latter group. We’ll explain what content authoring tools are and examine the challenges involved in the standard content creation process, the benefits of using AI-generated content to fuel learner engagement, and best practices for sustaining quality while scaling production with AI.

Understanding content authoring and relevant tools 

Content authoring is the process of creating educational materials, specifically in the context of eLearning or online courses. However, this process doesn’t necessarily cover educational content delivery or learner engagement.

The content production process typically happens within a content authoring tool. These are specialized software platforms preloaded with features and functionality that support and streamline the content creation process.

These tools often feature:

• Intuitive drag-and-drop user interfaces that don’t require any previous design or coding experience
• Premade templates to speed up content creation
• Support for multimedia formats and mobile devices
• Gamification and interactive content features like quizzes, simulations, and assessments
• Native integrations with learning management systems (LMSs)

Colossyan, for example, is an AI video authoring tool that offers all of these features.

Why high-quality content authoring is imperative for successful eLearning initiatives 

Without content, you’d have nothing for people to engage with and learn from.

But what distinguishes high-quality learning content from average content? Let’s look at a few ways in which the best content excels:

Engages learners

Great content captivates users’ attention with interactive features, relevant and concise content, logical learning progressions, and gamification features.

The end result is that learners are more engaged and spend more time actively focusing on the content rather than mindlessly clicking through and completing modules to check a box.

Promotes higher retention rates

High-quality content that is engaging, relevant, and well-structured improves learning outcomes and enhances knowledge retention. Since the whole point of the exercise is to learn something, improved retention is always a good outcome to shoot for.

Related: What Is Structured Content Authoring? A Guide for Success

Enhances brand credibility

We’ve all seen corporate training modules that cause us secondhand embarrassment due to their poor quality. 

On the other hand, high-quality, engaging, relevant, and interesting training enhances your brand reputation and credibility. It makes customers trust you more, and it makes employees proud to work for an organization that takes workplace training seriously.

These are some pretty big upsides, right? So why isn’t everyone making this kind of content?

The challenges of scaling content authoring 

Producing an internal training module every now and then isn’t particularly difficult. But executing a full-scale content authoring program that covers everything from new employee onboarding and ongoing leadership training to customer educational materials is another beast entirely. 

This process also comes with a few common challenges:

• Resource allocation: Most organizations don’t have people with the expertise, experience, or desire to run a full content authoring team, nor do they have the budget to hire these people.
• Consistency: Without a dedicated content authoring team, companies end up tasking department heads with creating internal learning content. This translates to a lack of consistency across company content.
• Content management: In this scenario, content isn’t located in a central content management system. Instead, it's usually scattered across several laptops and Google Drive accounts, which makes it difficult to reliably access.
• Turnaround times: Authoring new content can take time, especially when multiple stakeholders need to approve it or when the person creating the content already has a full schedule with their primary responsibilities.
• Relevance and updates: When companies barely have the time and resources to put together new content, they rarely have an opportunity to go back and update existing modules either. As a result, most corporate training content is horribly out of date.

Don’t lose hope yet. Despite these difficulties, AI content authoring is uniquely positioned to solve all of these problems.

The benefits of AI-driven content authoring 

Our customers have seen firsthand how AI is revolutionizing learning and development. These six key benefits of AI improve upon the standard content authoring process:

1. Efficiency

AI content creation is much more efficient than traditional methods. 

This is because text-to-speech tools allow you to skip the process of manually recording training footage and replace that content with footage of AI avatars – or even a simple voiceover – reciting your material instead. 

For example, with Colossyan, our AI video generation platform, you can create a new training video in a matter of minutes. This same video would take weeks to produce with standard film equipment, actors, and editing.

Not only does this allow for a faster content creation process, but it’s significantly more cost effective as well. 

2. Consistency 

Anyone creating a large volume of content will want their materials to look and feel consistent. With a high-quality AI authoring tool, you can save and store content preferences for future use.

For instance, using a set template for all of your content can improve the uniformity of your materials. This is also true of brand kits, which help you ensure that every learning video uses the same fonts, logos, colors, and AI avatars to enforce your brand image, no matter who at your company creates the video.

3. Scalability

Since AI allows for a much faster content creation process, it eliminates the lengthy production turnaround times that make content production unscalable. 

AI allows you to create great eLearning content from just an idea thanks to Colossyan’s prompt to video workflow. And with an AI script assistant, the process of perfecting your script is a lot more efficient, allowing you to develop video content at scale. 

Scalability is especially difficult for teams whose content is centered around a particular actor or brand representative. Fortunately, many AI video tools offer custom avatars, allowing you to create videos using AI actors that look identical to your human actor. They can even sound like them too. 

4. Editability

AI content authoring’s flexibility and scalability also make it easier than ever to ensure that learning content is up-to-date.

Let’s say you have a set of new employee onboarding videos. A few things may have changed since you produced these videos, from reporting lines to internal processes, so you need to update the content.

If you produced them the traditional way with real-life actors in a film studio, you’d have to start from scratch, write a new script, and refilm your footage. But with an AI avatar video, you can jump back into your content authoring tool, edit the script as necessary, and export the new clip in no time.

5. Language translation

One of the best things about the state of work today is that many people work remotely, which gives businesses access to a global workforce and a much greater ability to enter new markets. But the problem with this is that people in different countries often speak different languages.

AI content authoring can ease this challenge by automatically translating your content into a variety of languages. Colossyan’s video creator translates into 70+ languages, and even offers several accent options for enhanced localization.

6. Cost savings  

All of the above benefits, from faster content creation to easier editing, add up to one thing: more cost-effective content production. 

Video content traditionally has high barriers to entry, requiring immense amounts of funding for equipment and staff costs. 

But with AI, small- and medium-sized businesses can produce full-scale internal learning programs complete with professional-quality video footage that would’ve been 80% more expensive to traditionally produce. 

Best practices for maintaining high content quality with AI 

Now that we’ve covered the benefits of integrating AI into your content process, let’s cover some best practices to ensure high-quality content:

Provide human oversight and implement quality assurance measures 

You wouldn’t publish a piece of eLearning content that a human content creator produced without a final check-over and sign-off, right? The same should apply to AI-driven content authoring.

Especially when you’ve used AI to help write your video scripts, you’ll want to do a final check to ensure that the content is aligned with your intended learning objective. This might involve having a subject matter expert review the content before it goes live, for instance. 

Establish effective feedback loops

As happy as you might be with a piece of content, what’s important at the end of the day is how learners feel about engaging with it. Do they find it entertaining? Do they learn something valuable from it? Or is it boring or confusing?

Establishing feedback loops, such as post-module surveys or long-form interviews, is a great way to understand how learners feel about the content you’re producing. You can then use this feedback to inform future content creation plans.

Start slow and scale consistently  

Here’s one last tip: don’t jump into the deep end right away. Instead, start small, create a few learning videos with AI, and examine any assumptions or uncertainties you might have about the tool. You will learn valuable lessons from this process. 

You’ll also discover how quickly you can produce content, what kinds of materials you need to get the most out of your AI model, and who else you might need to involve in the process.

Afterward, as you get a handle on how your AI content authoring tool works, you can scale up production and start implementing more advanced functions like interactivity features and gamification. 

Colossyan: Our user-friendly AI video content authoring platform 

While there are plenty of great eLearning authoring tools out there today, only a handful use AI as the content generation engine. Colossyan, our easy-to-use, cloud-based AI video generation platform, is one of these.

With Colossyan, you can choose from upwards of 150 diverse AI avatars to use in your video content. With dozens of premade video templates and a built-in brand kit, you can create visually consistent videos that can be automatically translated into over 70 languages to serve a global audience. 

‍Try Colossyan for free today to see its powerful features in action. Or speak with our team of experts to learn more.