How Subject Matter Experts Help Build Great Courses

Getting the most out of your subject matter experts

Think about this: a subject matter expert walks into your kickoff meeting with a decade of experience and a folder full of slides. They know the content inside and out. They may have been teaching it on-site. And now you’re asking for their help building an e-learning courses.

They probably have a pretty good idea about how they’d build the course.

They have a lot of content and experience, but your job isn’t to transfer all of that SME content into a course. Your job is to help them figure out what actually matters to the learner. And then build the best course to meet the objectives.

Working with their content

Start by asking your SME to explain the subject as if you know nothing about it. This keeps the conversation open and helps you spot assumptions they might otherwise skip over. During the information-gathering phase, let everything in. You don’t want them to self-edit and accidentally cut critical information.

Here are a few approaches that work well during content gathering:

• Ask your SME to explain things in plain language, assuming you have zero prior knowledge.
• Gather as much information as possible before deciding what stays or goes.
• Separate “need to know” from “nice to know” content early.
• Keep content anchored to the training objectives.
• If you work with multiple SMEs on the same topic, let them review each other’s work. Overlapping comments often highlight the most important material.
• Use AI to record their answers because that will help you organize what they’re sharing and pair it with their content.

Avoid entering design or layout conversations until the raw content is settled. Those discussions pull SMEs away from the substance of the content and into preferences about how the course should be designed.

Instead of waiting for your SME to hand you information, ask targeted questions and draft the answers yourself using AI. Then let them review and correct your draft. It’s faster for them, and you end up with content that’s already shaped for learning.

Helping them think like an instructional designer

Most SMEs have never thought about how people learn. They’ve spent their careers becoming experts, not teachers. A little context can shift their thinking without overwhelming them. This especially helps them think past the typical content dumps of bullet-point screens.

You don’t need to give them a full course on instructional design. Share a couple of e-learning examples and a short article about what makes a course work. That’s usually enough.

When you’re working through the content together, try a few approaches that help SMEs shift from expert to educator:

• Ask them to put themselves in the learner’s shoes. What would someone new to the topic need to do on their first day?
• Shift the conversation from “what should learners know?” to “what should learners be able to do?” And then how you would observe it.
• Remind them that a 20-minute course can’t cover 20 years of expertise. Focus on what’s essential.
• Use real work scenarios to make key points concrete. Ask SMEs to share situations where this knowledge made a difference.

Ask your SME: what are the top three things you want learners to walk away with? That one question often cuts through the noise.

Key takeaways

Building a strong working relationship with your SMEs pays off on every project. When you approach the next collaboration, come prepared with a clear gathering process and a few focused questions. The habits you build here will shape the quality of every course you create.