fixing-elearning-courses

Isn’t it true that we expect eLearning to be a huge winner? Why isn’t your eLearning course firing on all cylinders if this is the case? This question may have a more straightforward answer than you believe. A few fundamental issues appear to confuse eLearning practitioners regardless of their size or sector.

You may be pleased with your course design and the content you included. You designed an educational, appealing course and available on any device. So, what’s the problem? Specific components, similar to a cocktail, can wipe out the effectiveness. So, let’s scroll down and look at some of the factors that could be obstructing your efforts to educate your personnel and achieve new and positive outcomes.

How Can You Make Your eLearning Course Work?
elearning course
Learning Always Happens Both Ways

Nowadays, it appears as if individuals are creating two types of material. It’s divided into heavy data about products or services and fluff. Both are incredibly upsetting, and people are becoming better at recognizing when to leave as time goes on. Here’s a challenge for you: Did you approach the course from a giving or a receiving plus learning viewpoint while structuring and designing it?

The response is critical since it could be why your student is completely disengaged from the course, which would explain why they aren’t putting what they’ve learned into practice, or worse, why they aren’t even finishing the course. They will not accompany you on your journey if they do not see its worth.

Here are some ideas for you:

Put yourself in the position of the learner. Have you completed the course?

  • Observe someone completing the course. How long had they been slouching and looking bored before they started slouching and looking bored?
  • Finally, have you ever explained why it’s important for them to learn this task, method, or change?

Consider the above questions to turn the tables and force you to consider how well and entertaining your course is to consume.

Experiment With Active Learning

Many business training materials are as dull as a rice cracker. It doesn’t have to be that way! Learners can become actively involved in their learning process by balancing passive and active content.

The term “passive content” refers to content that the learner only needs to consume. Passive learning content includes listening to a podcast, viewing a video, and reading notes. On the other hand, Active content encourages learners to think, solve problems, and practice their knowledge and abilities.

So, how do you come up with engaging content? Simulations are a wonderful place to begin. Present your team with a role-playing activity in customer service training, for example, where one member is dissatisfied, and the other members must discover a solution.

Have You Considered the Content?

We’re very sure your eLearning courses are jam-packed with high-quality content, but so are a lot of people’s favorite novels and movies. The capacity to digest something also testifies to its quality. No matter how valuable the material is, it won’t be regarded as good if no one can read it. So it’s most likely not what you’re offering, but how you’re sharing it.

So, presuming you have everything you need, you might be packing it incorrectly. What exactly do I mean? Here are several examples:

  • Is it simple to locate the content? Make it simple to find what you’re looking for. Is everything logically and efficiently tagged and organized? Everyone enjoys entering a course and discovering exactly what they were looking for.
  • When discussing accomplishments, begin with the well-known easier explanations or steps. Then go on to the more unknown and difficult material. Stick to Nintendo’s strategy; we all want to go through the levels of difficulty.
  • Explain the benefits while introducing new terminology, tasks, or trying to encourage a behavioral change. Individuals’ involvement and determination are influenced by their understanding of what they are doing and why they are doing it.
  • Is it too crowded on the slides? We are inherently drawn to visually ordered layouts as humans.

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Consider All Types of Learners

You only need to be trendy to create eLearning content that stays! Because it’s almost certain that students will have a wide range of learning styles and preferences. Some people are visual learners, while others prefer audio, and still, others prefer to dip their toes in the water.

The best method to incorporate everyone in the learning process and ensure everyone feels involved is to balance visual, aural, and kinesthetic eLearning content aspects. Present skills, information, and concepts using a range of videos, visual, and written materials and activities, such as branching scenarios and group projects.

An LO (learning objective) is usually better suited to a particular material format. Written notes are more suited to LOs that need learners to “list” information. However, there may be some repetition when presenting content to suit all three learning types. Don’t be concerned! This method can lead to enhanced retention and understanding.

What About Incorporating Recent Trends?

If you recall, your workforce is constantly flooded with information, as we described before. You want to make sure this doesn’t end up on their to-do-later list.

Because you won’t always be the one to express how important something is, exposing them to community chats or forums will allow them to connect with individuals who can help them see training as a way to progress.

  • How applicable is this training to their day-to-day responsibilities? Your students should never feel as if they are wasting their time in your class. Keep things as relevant and to-the-point as possible, and they’ll want to participate and stay involved.
  • What will happen, as we already stated, as a result of this? How soon do you think it will be? Your students are expecting specific things from your course. You must live up to these expectations.
  • You designed this program with a specific goal in mind. But what about the other way around? What’s in it for them? Please spread the word.
  • Are you offering them a change in their lives? Giving an example of how their life can be different before and after taking your course might help you highlight the importance of your course. This provides them a defined aim and a sense of what to expect, as well as a distant target to concentrate on.

Here are some crucial pointers: Do you know for whom you’re creating your course? Answering this question will provide you with a lot of information about creating your course. Giving your audience what they want and need adds value to your training. If the information isn’t oriented toward the correct audience, it doesn’t matter how well the information is presented or how great the course appears.

Make a Learning Route That is Intuitive

It’s not only about the material for creating an online course. It’s also important to consider how you organize it. It would be best to use modules to develop similar themes and satisfy similar learning objectives.

Begin an eLearning program with more straightforward content and gradually increase the level of complexity until learners can put their new skills or knowledge into practice. Learners will feel more confident and rewarded for their efforts to expand their knowledge at a manageable rate.

The first content in a module, for example, might be designed to give learners a fundamental comprehension of a subject or the ability to retain information. You may include definitions and explanations and a few basic examples in the form of notes or an infographic.

You can build eLearning content that focuses more on practice and opportunities as the module continues.

Introduce Variety

Do you find yourself stuck in a hole with no idea what you can do? You’ve gone over your text-based course several times, looking for red flags, but you can’t find any. It’s in the correct order, it’s pertinent, and it’s all useful. What else could there possibly be?

Well, relying simply on a simple text format for your course can result in poor course performance!

When assessing your course, think about the following questions:

Suppose you’ve gone through your course and determined that your learning materials are text-heavy. In that case, you’ll need to make some design modifications and begin repurposing some of the knowledge into various formats. You must switch from text-heavy to engaging and interactive courses.

Fortunately, eLearning provides a wide range of possibilities for connecting with your staff. You can mix and match different forms of media to produce a balanced mix of learning preferences for your audience.

Here are a few simple ideas to get you started:

  • Layering the data is a good idea. While the first point or points may be apparent at first sight, further information can be found by selecting the ‘additional information’ button, which reveals more text. Allowing your pupil to pluck material off the page will help to simplify it and keep disruptive or overpowering behavior at bay.
  • Make use of hotspot displays. Information is linked to specific places in an image using hotspots. If the learner chooses to click on a little bubble that pops up with extra information, the student scrolls over the image. This, like the previous principle, helps to reduce page clutter while making vital information intuitively discoverable. 
  • Make a video; you can use animation or storytelling to communicate the more boring content in an engaging way. A video is also a great approach to quickly show the big picture of how a procedure will work.
  • To demonstrate examples, use settings and personalities. People are sometimes so overwhelmed by learning that they are unable to visualize what is being explained to them. This, once again, will take any notion a step further by assisting people in overcoming their uncertainties or misunderstandings.
Prioritize Quality

Nobody likes to watch a poorly made movie or read a book with several mistakes. So, why would students want their eLearning to be any different? Furthermore, errors detract from the learning process and lead to a negative learning experience.

Always include a suitable amount of quality assurance when filming a video, recording a podcast, creating an infographic, or writing notes. There should be no distracting background noises in the voice (such as talking head videos and podcasts). Get a second pair of eyes to proofread your written content. This will help you avoid those pesky grammar and spelling mistakes.

Speak the Appropriate Language

Learning content is only interesting when you build it in the language of the intended audience. This necessitates it being both understandable and relatable to the learner. You risk losing learners’ attention if they have to re-read a sentence or rewind a video until the penny sinks.

As a result, make sure your material is targeted at the appropriate level and includes terms that your audience will comprehend. Doing some background research on your target audience is always a brilliant idea. However, if you’re still unsure whether they’ll understand a notion, go with the more straightforward method. If learners believe you are covering material they already know, they will move on to the next task.

Using industry jargon in highly specialized courses can also help make content more approachable.

Be Unique

We live in a content curation world. It’s easy to pick the stuff that corresponds to your themes and call it a course, especially with a limitless supply of amazing videos, articles, and online resources.

Now, not all content curating is terrible. It can be pretty effective, and it often provides learners with a more diverse perspective and a fascinating set of learning activities. However, if you want your online course to take off genuinely, it must be unique.

Make sure that your subject matter expert-created at least 50% of the content for your eLearning course. Create notes, infographics, and movies that students won’t find anywhere else!

Conclusion

It’s hardly rocket science to create an engaging eLearning program that your audience will like. E-learning, when done correctly, can yield significant economic results by aligning with employees’ schedules rather than working against them.

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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