With an increase in digital transformation, developing an eLearning course is not a complex task for any company. Anyone can create an Elearning course, But is it effective? The real challenge for any eLearning developer is to make the eLearning course more effective and engaging. The eLearning course should proceed straight to the point rather than going over a pointless dissertation.
Below are some tips that help me create an effective eLearning course over a wide range of materials or curriculum.
Define your Course. Why should one take it?
The first step while creating an effective eLearning course is, defining why the learner should take this training. In a fast-paced world, the learner needs to understand why and how your course will help them solve their problem.
Define your course, make the learners understand after completion of your course what skills they will develop and how they will develop, and why these skills are useful and worth learning. Once they get it, they tend to complete the course enthusiastically.
Study your Audience Well
While drafting your eLearning course, one must always study their respective target audience. The more you know about your audience’s learning behavior, the easier it gets to shape your course that could match with their learning pattern.
Creating an eLearning course in fluent french for the audience who barely knows french is a classic case of not knowing the audience. While evaluating your audience, focus on the factors such as their educational level, technical knowledge, demographics, knowledge about the subject matter, etc.
Research thoroughly about Subject Matter
Always research well about the subject matter. There is no clear rule of time required for drafting a storyboard for an eLearning course, but you need to take an ample amount of time for researching the Subject Matter. The reason is simple, the learning capabilities of the audience are always different, some might not grasp the information within the course. You need to be ready to answer the claims made within the course and explain them through some examples.
Qualitative Content Design
The content, texts articulated in the course should be brief as well as short, and crisp as much as possible before launching the course. The tone should be conversational and engaging. Get rid of wordiness in the sentence by replacing nouns with verbs. For example, “The Math teacher gave advice for changing the problem-solving technique” can be written as “The Math teacher advised changing the problem-solving technique”.
The ideal length of the sentence should be between 15-20 words, to keep the interest of the learner. While above such tips are to shorten the sentence, but it is also important to apply such tips without changing the clarity or meaning of the sentence. It is essential in creating an eLearning course to maintain the balance between the two.
Convey it with Visuals
Could you convey it with visuals better than texts? If yes, eliminate the texts and written information and convert it into visually appealing graphical recreations. Live-action videos, infographics or interactivity, and gamification can help in creating an effective learning course. This can an effective way to a course that would be a boring textual presentation into something engaging to the learners.
Leverage the power of Elearning authoring tools
There is a consistent development in eLearning tech, and with this development, eLearning professionals now have a multitude of eLearning tools available to use. One should leverage every tool in their capacity to create an effective learning experience. Figure out a way to take full advantage of eLearning tools and other design tools before developing the course so that you can optimize your time and resources without compromising the quality of the course.
Evaluate the Course Comprehensively
Evaluation of course, is one of the important aspects of creating an effective eLearning course. Evaluation provides you with necessary information about the learner’s progress and effectiveness of the course. Future learning activities and content can be optimized by studying the evaluation results.
Conclusion
E-Learning and development is still an effective training method in the 21st century. Thanks to the constant development in technologies, Instructional designers have a variety of ways to make their course effective, provided that they have to find an optimal way through these various methods and techniques. Developing an effective eLearning course is a sort of challenge, maybe you can overpower those challenges by implementing the above tips and suggestions.