Updating Old E-learning: When to Refresh, Rebuild or Start Again
A familiar request lands in your inbox: an existing e-learning course needs updating.
The branding has changed, some of the content is out of date and there are a few interactions that no longer work particularly well. On the surface, it sounds straightforward. Open the source files, replace a few graphics, update the text and republish the SCORM package.
Then you open the course.
It was built six or seven years ago. The navigation feels dated. There are interactions that depend entirely on using a mouse. Videos have no captions. Text is embedded inside images. Colour contrast is questionable. Nobody is completely certain which version of the source file is the latest, and the person who originally commissioned it left the organisation three years ago.
Suddenly, a simple e-learning refresh doesn't look quite so simple.
In our experience, this is a common situation. Organisations build up libraries of digital learning over many years, and those courses don't all need replacing simply because they're getting older. But equally, repeatedly patching legacy content isn't always the economical option it first appears to be.
The real question "Is updating it still the right thing to do?"
Start With the Learning, Not the Design
When an older course starts to look tired, the natural instinct is to focus on its appearance. New branding, updated illustrations and a cleaner interface can make a significant difference, but visual design should only be one part of the review.
We normally start by asking whether the course still does the job it was originally created to do. Is the information accurate? Does the structure still make sense? Are learners being asked to understand and apply something useful, or are they simply clicking through information? Has the audience changed? And does the assessment genuinely demonstrate understanding?
This is particularly important with courses that have been amended repeatedly over several years. New slides get added, old sections remain because nobody wants to remove them, and additional knowledge checks are bolted on. Eventually, what started as a focused 20-minute course becomes a 45-minute collection of everything anybody has ever wanted to say about the subject.
Sometimes refreshing an old course is an opportunity to remove content rather than add more.
Accessibility Can Change the Decision Completely
Accessibility is one of the biggest reasons to look beyond the visual condition of an existing course.
Expectations around accessible digital learning have moved considerably, and older e-learning may have been created without accessibility being a significant part of the original brief. That can leave fundamental problems that aren't easily solved by changing colours or adding captions at the end of the project.
Keyboard navigation is a good example. If a course contains interactions that require dragging objects, hovering over hotspots or clicking small areas of the screen, simply adding alternative text doesn't necessarily make those interactions accessible. Likewise, important information shouldn't depend solely on colour, audio needs appropriate captions or transcripts, text needs sufficient contrast, and navigation should remain understandable without relying on a mouse.
Our approach is to consider accessibility as part of the overall learning design rather than as a compliance exercise added immediately before publishing. That matters because some accessibility issues can be fixed relatively easily, while others are inherent in the way the original course was constructed.
If you're already replacing significant parts of the interaction model to make an old course accessible, rebuilding may start to make more sense than continuing to patch the original.
When an E-learning Refresh Makes Sense
Not every old course needs rebuilding. Far from it.
We've worked with plenty of existing learning where the underlying structure remains perfectly sound. The content is still relevant, the interactions work, the source files are available and the course simply needs to reflect a new brand, updated terminology or changes to a process.
In that situation, an e-learning refresh can be extremely cost-effective. Graphics can be updated, layouts improved, voiceover or video replaced, accessibility issues addressed and outdated content amended without throwing away everything that already works.
This is particularly true for straightforward compliance, product or process training where the learning objective hasn't fundamentally changed.
The important thing is to avoid turning a refresh into a rebuild by stealth. If almost every screen needs restructuring, every interaction needs replacing and the assessment needs redesigning, you're no longer making minor improvements. At that point it is worth stopping and comparing the cost of continuing with the cost of starting again.
When Rebuilding Is the Better Investment
There is always a temptation to preserve an existing course because money has already been spent creating it.
But that investment has already happened.
The more useful question is what will give you the best learning asset for the money you're about to spend now.
We tend to recommend considering a rebuild when the problems are structural rather than cosmetic. Perhaps the original source files are missing or unreliable. The course may have been created for desktop screens when learners now expect to access training across different devices. Accessibility might require fundamental changes to the interactions and navigation. Or the content itself may have evolved so much that you're trying to force a new learning experience into an old structure.
Older courses can also accumulate technical baggage. Publishing standards, LMS requirements, browser behaviour and authoring tools change over time. A package that technically still launches isn't necessarily something you want to keep maintaining indefinitely.
Starting again can sometimes look like the more expensive option on paper while actually being the more economical decision over the next few years.
Don't Automatically Recreate the Old Course
If you do decide to rebuild, there is another trap to avoid: faithfully recreating the old course in a newer authoring tool.
A rebuild gives you an opportunity to question the original learning design.
Do learners really need all 60 screens? Does every piece of information need narration? Are those eight click-to-reveals actually helping somebody understand the subject? Could a scenario replace ten screens of explanation? Could a short animation communicate a complicated process more effectively? Could the assessment be integrated throughout the course rather than appearing as ten questions at the end?
In our experience, these questions often uncover the biggest opportunities.
Learning technology and expectations change, but so does our understanding of how people engage with digital content. A rebuild should take advantage of that rather than simply giving an old course a new coat of paint.
What About Gamification and Interaction?
This is also a good point to consider whether the course could become more engaging.
Gamification doesn't have to mean turning corporate training into a game. Used appropriately, relatively simple techniques can give learners a reason to think, make decisions and see the consequences of those decisions.
A process course might ask learners to put steps into the correct order. A safety course could ask them to identify risks within a realistic situation. Customer service training could present a conversation and ask the learner to decide what to say next.
The important distinction is between interaction and clicking.
Adding buttons that reveal paragraphs of text technically makes a course interactive, but the learner hasn't necessarily had to think about anything. We generally prefer interactions that ask learners to make a judgement, solve a problem or apply what they've learned.
And, as with everything else, those interactions need to be designed with accessibility in mind.
Our Perspective: Don't Decide Based on Age Alone
We've been creating digital learning for long enough to have seen technologies, authoring tools and design trends come and go. One thing that experience has taught us is that the age of a course isn't a particularly useful measure of whether it needs replacing.
We've seen older courses with solid learning design that only need relatively modest work to bring them up to date. We've also seen much newer courses where rebuilding is the more sensible option because the underlying structure makes them difficult to maintain, inaccessible or unnecessarily complicated.
That's why our starting point isn't "How old is it?"
It's "What still works?"
Preserve the things that are doing their job. Improve the things that aren't. And if the amount of compromise required to preserve the original starts outweighing the benefit, that's usually a good indication that it's time to rebuild.
For us, that's a much more practical approach than automatically recommending a new course every time.
How Sliced Bread Lite Can Help
At Sliced Bread Lite, we work with organisations that already have learning materials and need a practical way to turn them into something current, accessible and useful.
Sometimes that means updating an existing Storyline or SCORM course. Sometimes it means taking the content and rebuilding it in a cleaner, more accessible format. And sometimes, after reviewing what already exists, the sensible recommendation is to make a handful of targeted changes and leave everything else alone.
Our experience in e-learning, animation and interactive learning means we can look beyond the individual screens and consider the learning experience as a whole. We can help with visual updates, interactions, accessibility, animation, assessments and SCORM delivery without automatically turning a relatively straightforward requirement into a large bespoke development project.
That's particularly important for organisations with libraries of legacy training. You don't necessarily need to replace everything. You need to know where your investment will make the biggest difference.
Refresh, Rebuild or Start Again?
If you're reviewing an existing course, we'd suggest asking five questions before deciding what to do:
Is the content still accurate and relevant?
Does the learning structure still work?
Can the course meet your current accessibility requirements without fundamental changes?
Are the source files and technology still practical to maintain?
Will updating the existing course genuinely cost less than rebuilding it properly?
If the answer to most of those questions is yes, a refresh may be all you need.
If you're finding fundamental problems with the content, accessibility, technology and learning design, starting again may be the better investment.
The important thing is to make that decision before the work begins.
In our experience, the most expensive approach is often neither refreshing nor rebuilding. It's spending money repeatedly patching a course that everyone already knows isn't really working.
So feel free to contact us, if your e-learning needs refresh.
