What to Look for in Off-the-Shelf eLearning Content

Off-the-shelf eLearning content is ready-made training that you license from a provider and deliver through your LMS. It is the fastest way to cover standard topics such as compliance, safety, leadership and professional skills without building every course yourself.

The hard part is choosing well. Libraries vary in learning design, accuracy, how often they are updated and how well they work with your LMS. This guide covers what to evaluate before you buy, with a checklist you can use with your own learners.

Why Off-the-Shelf Content Still Leads Learning Content Budgets

Off-the-shelf content continues to take the largest share of digital learning content spend. In Fosway Group’s Digital Learning Content Strategy research, 41% of organizations planned to spend more than half of their content budget on off-the-shelf materials, compared with 15% for user-generated content.

Investment is growing in other formats too. 55% of organizations expected to increase spending on user-generated content and just over half on custom content, compared with 33% for off-the-shelf content. That points to a maturing market where off-the-shelf content provides breadth and custom content covers what makes each organization unique.

Why Content Quality Matters More Than Library Size

Learners are saturated with online courses, and enthusiasm fades when content is dull or dated. Only 1 in 8 organizations in Fosway’s research reported that digital learning fatigue was declining. A large catalog does little good if learners will not finish the courses, so quality and learning experience should drive the buying decision.

How to Evaluate Off-the-Shelf eLearning Content: A Checklist

Our research shows that the selection criteria for learning content should focus on the following themes and priorities: learning experience, IT compatibility, proven expertise, breadth of content, quality of partnering and cost. Learning experience is the number one criteria for selecting content, with 96% saying the learning experience is essential or important to selecting content. And rightly so.

Source: Digital Learning Content Strategy Research, Fosway Group

So what is it about the learning content experience that really matters? You can use the following checklist to assess suppliers yourself, or even better, get learners to use the list when they help you assess the learning you are looking to source. You can weight these depending on the context and part of the learning cycle you are looking to support. Not all of them will always be as important as others. And perhaps that’s an important part of your assessment process: to understand what your audience really wants.

Learning Experience

Digital Learning Design

• Interactivity: Learners do something in each module, such as answering, choosing or practicing.
• Structure, chunking and modularity: Content is broken into short modules you can assign on their own.
• Pacing and reinforcement: Key points are repeated and reinforced over time.
• Practice: Learners apply skills before they are assessed.
• Wider learning support resources: Job aids, guides or checklists support learning after the course.
• Assessment methodology: Assessments test application of knowledge, beyond recall.

Digital Learning Navigation

• Simple navigation and intuitiveness: Learners know where to go next without instructions.
• Clarity of iconography: Icons and buttons are clear and labeled.
• Consistency of layout: Every course in the library follows the same layout.
• Progress tracking: Learners can see how far they have come and what is left.
• Bite-sized durations: Modules fit into a short break in the workday.

Visual Design, Interactivity, and Media

• Media richness: Courses use video, audio and graphics where they help understanding.
• Clear layout and professionalism of appearance: Design looks current and consistent.
• Appropriateness of media, reality aligned: Scenarios and visuals look like your learners’ workplaces.
• Use of sound: Audio is clear, optional where possible and captioned.
• Gamification: Points, badges or challenges are used where they add motivation.

Language Tone and Style

• Journalistic style and reading ease: Copy is plain, direct and easy to scan.
• Aligned to our brand tone: The voice fits your organization, or the provider lets you adjust it.

LMS Compatibility

Confirm the content runs in your LMS without rework. Ask which standards the courses use (SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, xAPI or AICC), whether completions and scores report correctly, and whether courses work on mobile.

Accuracy and Update Frequency

Ask how often courses are reviewed, who reviews them and how updates reach your learners. This matters most for compliance, safety and cybersecurity topics, where outdated content creates risk.

Breadth of the Catalog

Check that the library covers the topics, roles, languages and regions you need now and in the next few years, so you are not managing several providers to fill gaps.

Provider Expertise and Partnership

Look at who builds the content and their subject-matter credentials. Ask what support the provider offers for rollout, curation and reporting.

Cost and Licensing

Compare pricing models (per learner, per course or full-library access) and check whether the license lets you edit, brand or combine courses with your own content.

Off-the-Shelf vs. Custom Content: Where Each Fits

Off-the-shelf content works best for topics most organizations share. Custom content works best for your own policies, products and processes. Most learning programs use both. For compliance training specifically, see our guide to pre-built vs. custom compliance courses, and for a broader view, our build vs. buy decision framework.

Make Off-the-Shelf Content Work Inside Your Learning Program

While sourcing quality content is important, so is aligning your content and delivery strategy to your audience and their needs, which is why engaging with your audiences around sourcing content is so important. It’s no good having content that doesn’t help your learners.

More importantly, think about how the content fits into your overall learning culture and how other performance processes support it. Motivation is a critical part of learning so harness motivational triggers including career planning, performance management, and feedback to energize employees through an agile input, action, feedback, and reflection learning cycle which brings learning content to life.

Finally, think hard about how the learning landscape is evolving and the impact of digital learning fatigue. To truly address that we need to think about pushing more adaptive learning, which can raise the efficiency and personalization of learning, as well as more immersive forms of scenario and simulation-led learning. The world of learning content is raising its game, and alongside that make sure you recalibrate your expectations of your learning experiences too.

Litmos Content Libraries bring together more than 17,000 courses from Litmos and partner catalogs including BizLibrary, HSI and dss+, and you can combine them with your own courses in the same learning paths.