From Outdated to Outstanding: Revising your product’s content to make it shine

Discover how to revise your solution’s instructional materials to stay relevant, enhance learner experience, and drive better outcomes.

In today’s fast-paced world, an edtech product can quickly lose its relevance and effectiveness as instructional strategies in the classroom evolve. All too often, we encounter solutions that are showing their age, with outdated instructional strategies or content that no longer aligns with contemporary practices. Staying on top of this ensures your solution remains a valuable part of educators’ essential practice. 

Shifts in Business Strategy

As your strategic priorities shift to address market demands, how you position or package your solution might need to as well. Sometimes that means engineering a new feature or enhancement. In most cases though, it’s more likely that the content accompanying the solution is what needs attention. Too many products neglect digital pedagogy— helping educators understand the how and when to teach with it. Revising and enhancing the content accompanying your solution to better align with changing market trends is often a smaller investment than engineering a new feature, and doing so can help maintain your product’s relevance and effectiveness.

Key business strategy considerations for revising your product materials include:

• Changes to Product Offerings: When new features are introduced, or old user interfaces are phased out, all your training, sales, and user materials need to be updated to reflect these changes. This is an opportunity to think strategically about creating new materials, rather than just updating customer support materials, that also show instructional value to its users (often educators or students). 
• Demand for New Knowledge and Skills: Edtech solutions must continuously adapt to new market demands to stay relevant. This might include new industry standards, emerging technologies, best practices from the science of learning, or evolving customer expectations. The best way to address these changes is by maintaining strong, research-based instructional practices that support digital pedagogy. 
• Evolving Compliance Requirements: Your materials must be revised to incorporate the latest regulations and standards to ensure ongoing compliance. Examples include addressing accessibility or Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines. Meeting these standards helps build trust and credibility with education users.

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Changes in Utilization

If you’re seeing a change in utilization, average duration of use, or frequency of use, these all could be signs of the solution’s misalignment to market needs. Materials are designed with specific goals in mind, and their effectiveness must be regularly assessed and adjusted to ensure your solution aligns to meet the needs of your users.

Some indicators that signal the need to revise the instructional materials for your solution include: 

• Decline in Usage: If a product or service does not deliver the expected results, educators may use it less. It might be time to reassess and revise the materials to better engage and retain learners. Look at recent user feedback and analytics to identify areas where materials might be the cause.
• Poor Product Interface: Is customer support finding an increasing number of complaints or confusion reported by users after a recent product update? It could be the interface, or it could be that the accompanying instructional materials no longer match the solution screenshots. Regular updates are necessary to maintain the accuracy and relevance of your materials. This ensures that learners are equipped with the most current and accurate information.
• Issues with Learner Experience: The overall learner experience is critical for effective materials. Improper sequencing of learning events or lack of sound instructional design and pedagogical knowledge can affect user comprehension and retention. We can help you logically restructure content, enhance interactive elements, and tailor learning experiences to the needs of your users. 

Develop a Review Strategy

Developing a comprehensive review strategy is essential to keep your materials up-to-date and effective. Our approach includes:

• Collecting Feedback: We gather feedback from learners and educators using your solution to provide you with valuable insights into the effectiveness of your current support materials to find areas that may require enhancement or revision.
• Assessing Needs: We conduct a thorough inventory of your current materials and identify priority areas for improvement (i.e., those corroborated with user feedback). This includes reviewing content accuracy, relevance, and alignment with your business goals and learner needs.
• Revising and Creating Content: Our team of experts will work with you to update and create content that reflects the latest market trends and best practices in digital pedagogy.
• Optimizing Instructional Design: For training materials, we employ our deep expertise in online instructional design to enhance the learner experience. This includes optimizing the sequence of learning events, incorporating interactive elements, and using proven pedagogical strategies to improve engagement and retention.
• Updating for Compliance: If needed, we can help you make updates to your content for compliance with accessibility or data privacy and security practices.
• Reviewing Results: After a few months we check back and measure the results to see what additional adjustments might be necessary. At this point we also help you establish a schedule of regular review checkpoints to keep your materials current and effective over time.

By implementing a proactive review strategy to address shifts in business strategy and utilization, you can ensure your instructional support materials remain relevant, effective, and aligned with market priorities. Our approach not only enhances the learning experience but also drives better outcomes, ensuring long-term success for both learners and your solution. Contact us today to explore how we can help you update and revise the content surrounding your solution.