12 Steps To Creating An Outstanding Elearning Course
Elearning course design is a full-time job. There are many things to consider when designing an elearning course, and it's best to start early in the elearning development process.
This article will guide you through creating your first online learning experience using knowledge from an experienced professional.
Step 1: Identify Learning Outcomes
Knowledge is power. By identifying what your learners should know or do after completing the training, you have just identified what should appear in the elearning course if all goes according to plan.
If this sounds too easy so far, think again! It isn't uncommon for more than one desired outcome of training or even different outcomes for different learner groups. Think about the learning outcome before getting started.
Step 2: What is the Purpose of Learning
If your elearning course addresses company-wide problems or introduces new policies, you may need to create awareness and acceptance of the change. Suppose your elearning course is about an ongoing problem, such as lack of productivity or low quality. In that case, you may need to address resistance and try to reduce it with some education on the impact of these issues. What you want learners to do after completing your training can sometimes be just as important as what they learn by participating in it! Spend some time determining what you hope will happen when participants complete this training. This might not entirely drive all of your decisions surrounding this course, but if nothing else motivates you to create it, then it's as good as lost.
Step 3: Identify the Audience and Prerequisites
Just as your elearning course should have a purpose, you should also know who will be taking it and what they should already know before engaging in it. This is much easier if you only have one audience or learners with very similar backgrounds and skill sets.
If you need to address multiple audiences with different knowledge levels, consider creating multiple versions of the same content. Think about how much information to provide so that your audience knows before starting doesn't prevent them from completing the elearning course. Your pre-test results might help determine how much material is needed and which learning methods work best for various groups of learners.
Step 4: State the Learning Objectives
This is a great time to go back to the knowledge and skills identified in your course design and determine what should be covered in each module or unit of your elearning course.
While you're at it, consider how much time it would take for a learner to complete each section. Remember that your purpose might not require covering everything within an entire hour-long online training course.
You may need to break up complex topics into shorter courses or subsections if necessary. In general, the shorter the duration of a topic, the more you can expect from participants in terms of cognitive load.
For longer modules, provide multiple ways for your audience to navigate through the material so they can decide what kind of approach works best for them.
Step 5: Identify Your Content Decisions
Once you've clearly defined your audience, purpose, and learning objectives, it's time to figure out what content you'll need in your elearning course. This is where the fun begins! Think about what information will help learners achieve their goals most effectively.
For example, you might have some pre-written case studies, decision trees, or other documentation that can be easily converted into an online format. Or perhaps writing new content would be beneficial so there are no surprises when the course launches. Before deciding on this step, consider how much content is enough versus too much material.
Since you haven't created any of the elearning yet, you won't have any way of knowing whether you've included too much or not enough information. More importantly, your audience may have opinions about what they think is important versus what you think is important.
You can test this by asking a few employees to review an outline created from the knowledge and skills list. Or even better yet, get their feedback on some sample content before you spend a lot of time creating it!
Step 6: Planning for Design Decisions
Now that you know the design decisions your elearning course will need to make, it's time to make them! This step could be as simple as choosing the template in Articulate Storyline, choosing storyboards in Adobe Captivate, or selecting courses with similar objectives in an LMS or eLearning Agency.
Some of these decisions can be made along with the content, but you should at least identify the key features before moving on. For example, if your course needs branching, try prototyping it to ensure it accomplishes everything you need while saving time and resources during development.
It's especially important to consider visual design in this step. Since elearning courses often involve a lot of text, visuals can help keep learners engaged and teach concepts more effectively.
In addition, if your elearning will include video tutorials or animations, you'll want to create storyboards for those elements as well.
Step 7: Designing Your Elearning Course
In this very fun step, you get to actually design what your eLearning course will look like! You might use Articulate Storyline or PowerPoint to create a slide-based course, Captivate to create a Flash-based course, or build a course of your own in an eLearning authoring tool.
This is where you'll have the most leeway when it comes to designing the look and feel of your elearning course. Just make sure that any design decisions support the purpose, content decisions, learning objectives, design issues (like usability see below), and type of eLearning (for example, elearning with audio versus video).
After designing your eLearning course in terms of text and visuals, it's time to consider the sounds, music, voice-over talent, and even the video. If you have a lot of in-video animation or other visuals that will be in motion while audio is playing, then you're going to want to do some pre-production work for your videos.
This might include storyboarding (which may seem like it's too early), voice recording sessions, or creating animatics. Not only does this reduce editing time during eLearning development, but it also gives you time to make revisions based on viewer feedback.
When considering sound effects and background music, keep the following tips in mind: Try listening to different options within the same genre; they'll often feel very similar at first glance.
For example, orchestral music can be broken down into symphonic, classical, or cinematic genres. Choose music that doesn't distract from what's being said. When choosing sound effects, remember that more is not always better.
For example, if you're creating an elearning course about effectively managing projects, adding a lion's roar makes it harder for learners to focus on your main points.
Step 9: Timeline Development
Now that you have wireframes, storyboards, and sample content identified, step back and consider how this all fits together within the context of the overall course. This is especially important if you plan to use videos or animations in your elearning because it might be challenging to plan out interaction events for those tools without seeing them first!
It's best to develop a course timeline so you can get an idea of how many slides or videos you'll need to create, edit, and publish. A good rule-of-thumb is that every minute of video will end up requiring 7+ hours of editing time, but this could vary greatly depending on your elearning goals.
Step 10: Designing for Usability
One way to make sure that learners are engaged with your eLearning course is by making it easy to navigate. That's why this step is all about usability; it ensures that everything you create has a purpose and doesn't distract from learning objectives.
Step 11: Writing for eLearning
Some courses are very easy to develop because they contain very little text. But most learning programs have at least some amount of text, so this is not an option. What is an option? You can create video narrations or screencasts with voice-over, which is far faster than writing any amount of text! This step happens after you've created your storyboard drafts before you start recording voice-overs and editing audio files - so if this will be a part of your elearning development efforts, add it in between steps 6 and 7.
Step 12: Publishing Your Elearning Course
When all else has been taken care of, you can finally publish your eLearning course to the web or an LMS. This might seem like a no-brainer, but make sure you've got everything in writing (or at least thoroughly documented) before sending it out. Also consider creating a style guide for future updates and revisions to follow.
Conclusion
Creating an elearning course is a process that requires dedication, creativity, and expertise. Our team of experts at TheLearning LAB elearning agency is here to help you make the most out of your educational resources.
We've put together 12 steps for designing an outstanding elearning course so it can be used in any context, from formal learning environments to informal online courses.
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