You’ve been assigned to create your first training course, and the deadline is approaching quickly. So, what’s next? That’s a bit abrupt beginning sentence for an article, but that’s how it can seem when you get your first eLearning content production project. Where do you begin? What kind of final output is needed? What is even possible within the project’s schedule and budget constraints? There are numerous issues to be answered, but one of the most important is, “what type of material will you choose from the various eLearning content types?”
You might ask if there is a perfect roadmap for creating relevant and exciting types of eLearning content. Still, given the unique circumstances of each project, it’s impossible to cover everything in one strategy.
The following are some of the various factors:
- The size of your group
- Quantity of content
- The topic at hand
- The appropriate form of content distribution
- The knowledge of the audience
- Your company’s objectives
Let’s look at the various eLearning content types to decide which ones best suit your eLearning project.
Table of Contents
What Are the Most Popular eLearning Content Types?
Slide-based Content
When most people hear the term types of eLearning, they immediately think of slide-based courses. They entail the user participating in a self-paced course in which they examine slides with interactive units and the narration and other multimedia features. These courses frequently resemble PowerPoint presentations in appearance and feel.
In a myriad of scenarios, this type of information may be advantageous. Consider using it if you’re looking for a way to:
- You may already have learning resources in the form of presentations, documents, PDFs, or other formats that you can quickly convert into an online course.
- You need to convert some offline training to an online version quickly.
- You want to put onboarding new employees on autopilot.
- You need to obtain some fast refresher training on a new product or service.
When it comes to slide-based types of eLearning, there are a few things to avoid. The first is to create them in the style of a dull presentation that will not engage learners. The second is devoting too much effort to their creation. Fortunately, PlayAblo can assist you in both situations. With our software, you may import current slide content and transform it into a course in a few clicks or create types of eLearning content from scratch in minutes.
Quizzes
Quizzes, exams, assessments, or knowledge checks – whatever you choose to call them – are an essential part of nearly all types of eLearning. Why? Quizzes help you to keep track of your learners’ knowledge and guarantee that you meet your training’s learning objectives. They’re also a fun and interactive method to break up the content in your training modules and provide a natural breakpoint between important subjects that helps learners feel like they’re progressing through the course.
The types of eLearning courses you’re creating, whether official or informal, accredited or not, and a variety of other criteria will influence how and when you employ quizzes. In general, when organizing your course, keep the following in mind:
- At the end of subjects or modules, knowledge tests may be more appropriate than a long final quiz for short, informal courses.
- Consider a more formal final assessment with comments and information slides for longer courses.
Videos
Video content is now viral, and for a good reason: it’s always more interesting than just text or photographs. You can incorporate video content in your types of eLearning in a variety of ways:
Videos that can be used in silos: You can only use video as a form of content. You could, for example, make a series of films on a soft skill like conversations during a meeting.
Embedded videos: In your types of eLearning, you can include videos. The video could feature original content, public domain footage, or stock footage. This methodology has the advantage of allowing you to use video for specific sections while also incorporating more interactive aspects within the course.
Playback of a live training session or a webinar: This strategy entails simply uploading recordings of previous live or virtual classroom training to an LMS or other platform and making them available online. This is a fantastic and low-cost option to use video in your eLearning curriculum.
Different forms of video-based types of eLearning are commonly used in training, including, but not limited to:
Video tutorials: These are the well-known ‘how-to videos,’ frequently include on-screen text, call-out boxes, and other features.
Screencasts of the presenter: These show both your screen and the video from your camera simultaneously.
Software Tutorials: You use them to instruct students on how to use the software. When you move the cursor, press keys, or click screen components, the video capture tool will usually identify these activities and add visual signals to the video, such as highlighting boxes on data entry fields.
Interactive Videos
Learner apathy or lack of involvement can disadvantage traditional training films, especially in lengthier formats. This is where interactive videos come in handy. We can now deliver video interactions such as hotspots and quizzes thanks to advances in technology. This is the perfect choice when you want to provide consumers the ability to interact with video-based types of eLearning by allowing them to click, drag, scroll, hover, gesture, and perform other digital actions.
Samsung designed an interactive film that takes users through the camera’s various capabilities and navigation buttons. An interactive menu allows viewers to select whatever topics they wish to learn more about and instruct them on how.
VR and AR
Virtual and augmented reality are two new and successful techniques to give students real-world experience. Virtual reality is ideal for learning both human relationships and practical skills in real-world circumstances. Simulations allow you to practice reenacting real-life incidents and choose the best course of action.
Using VR and AR is a fantastic approach to train those who put their health at risk at work in a secure setting. For example, in the medical and health industries, a simulation of blood-borne pathogen cleanup might include spills and exposure scenarios that would be impossible to recreate in other eLearning content types.
Dialogue Simulations
A dialogue simulation is eLearning content that mimics a real-life discussion with a customer or other third party. It’s ideal for teaching customer service, sales skills, and any different training situations that require two persons conversing in a risk-free environment to establish facts, bargain, and achieve mutually advantageous conclusions. Branching situations are common in good conversation simulations, where each employee’s action has ramifications that change the subsequent simulation stage.
You can add scenery, characters, and voiceovers to each scenario to make it more lifelike. You can utilize the built-in selection of assets or add your photos. Using professional content libraries, which have a significant number of characters of all ages, ethnic groups, and occupations, and a vast collection of places ideal for various circumstances is a terrific method to save time on course building.
Podcasts
Podcasts have grown in popularity to the point where they are now mainstream media that everyone is acquainted with. Organizations have begun to employ them as a convenient tool for learning and growth because they are already used in numerous fields of business.
Podcasts are portable and accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so employees can listen and learn whenever they want. They also provide various options to boost employee retention. They don’t require the audience to attend at a set time — they may listen to podcasts while doing nearly any other activity, including working.
Podcasts are excellent for non-assessable training, especially in psychology, motivation, and other soft skills. You can also use podcasts to offer lengthier format use cases and scenarios in the form of stories, which would be far too long for a conversation simulation, for example.
eBooks
This sort of eLearning content type isn’t as common as the others. Still, it’s an excellent method to share things like standard operating procedures, step-by-step processes, and other manuals with your staff while also providing a pleasant reading experience. If you have the existing training content in formats such as Word Files, PPTs, or PDFs, which have turned obsolete, you can easily convert them into an exciting eBook.
Built-in technologies in advanced LMS software can swiftly convert your documents into interactive digital flipbooks. You can save them to the LMS, share them with your students, and track their progress as they read. On mobile devices, books are fantastic to read. They adjust to screen size and position automatically, making them easy to read on iOS, Android, and Windows tablets and smartphones.
Games
To begin, we must differentiate between gamification and more serious games. Most LMSs use gamification, and you may be aware of the phrase and its primary applications – leaderboards and badges. These are fantastic, but there’s a whole other category of more intricate games that can be custom-made to appear more like what you’d see on a gaming system. These games have complex gameplay and rich graphics that reward the student for completing tasks or scoring points.
Serious gaming applications are limited only by your ideas and inventiveness. But keep in mind that just because something is gamified doesn’t mean it’s a superior learning experience — that depends on your ability as an instructional designer, not merely ‘throwing technology’ at a course and seeing what sticks.
For example, one of the Big 4 auditing firms, PricewaterhouseCoopers, adopted a gamification method for cybersecurity training. They created a Game of Threats, an interactive game that teaches both coaches and executives how to protect themselves against data breaches in a fun and engaging way.
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Additional Tips on How to Deploy the Different eLearning Content Types
Now that you understand the different eLearning content types, let us look at some clever tricks for ensuring that your content lives up to your and your learners’ expectations.
Identify the Various Gap Areas
Before creating your content, you should think of surveying your audience. Why? Well, it will enable you to have a better idea about their backgrounds, current knowledge, and experience. It would help if you asked your employees to take a pre-assessment test – to aid you in pinpointing gap areas, which you can then address in your training. With this knowledge, you can offer additional information or resources to specific areas for improvement.
Strategize
Make a list of essential themes and sub-points and divide them into three categories:
- What you MUST teach your employees: Information that is regarded essential for achieving learning objectives.
- What you SHOULD teach your employees: Content covering fundamental concepts that learners should be familiar with as a foundational aspect of the program.
- What your employees COULD know: Content that could help learners better comprehend the subject topic but isn’t critical or cornerstone knowledge. This knowledge might also be classified as good to have.
One of the most effective ways to help your team visualize the extent of each segment, topic, or lesson in your training is to plan course material by outlining topics.
Maintain a Content Library
Before starting any new eLearning project, one of the best ideas is to know precisely what you have in terms of previously existing content. Once you know what you already have in stock, the possibilities for reusing and repurposing old content are unlimited. So, when you go through your list, cross off the available items in your company and underline the ones that aren’t. This will also assist you in looking for:
- Material that is out of date, erroneous, or incomplete
- Feedback on how previously utilized content was used and how it functioned
- Issues that may cause the current program to perform poorly
- Is there anything else that you should include in the content?
Design a Storyboard
Use storyboarding to plan out the content’s flow, and don’t cram too many concepts into a single course. With a storyboard, you can construct your course while following an outline. This level of planning guarantees that you cover all of the vital aspects while avoiding the less important ones.
Conclusion
As instructional designers or training developers, you strive to create eLearning solutions that will assist your learners to improve their knowledge using the most effective approaches. It is critical to provide content that is simple for the learner to comprehend and remember. We hope that our blog has offered some valuable insights on how to develop your eLearning content.
Ad: PlayAblo’s Enterprise-Grade Micro-Learning platform is built for millennial learners. Micro-Learning, along with assessments and gamification features, ensures learning outcome measurement along with sustained engagement.
Find out more and request a custom demo!
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