10 Ingredients To Make Your eLearning Course a Success
How do you develop your eLearning courses so that they’re relevant to your learners? It’s not as easy as simply slapping together some content, throwing it online, and hoping people will stick around long enough to complete it.🚀
There are actually several things you can do to make sure your eLearning course reaches those goals and keeps learners engaged.
This guide will show you the 10 ingredients to include in your next eLearning course that will make it relevant, unique, and engaging for your learners.
1) Set Realistic Goals For Your Elearning Course 🚀
We’ve all heard that success is within your reach, but how do you actually reach it? Start by defining what success will look like for your eLearning course.
Take some time to reflect on what you want your elearner to know or be able to do when they complete it. It may sound obvious, but if you don’t have any specific learning objectives, your elearning course will probably be irrelevant.
Ideally, your content should align with multiple goals; however, one simple goal—such as comprehension of an idea—can easily translate into several skills and behaviors.
Think about who will take your eLearning course and define different ways they can benefit from completing it.
You could even set SMART (specific measurable attainable relevant realistic timely) goals based on how participants act after taking an eLearning course as well.
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2) Include Interesting Characters in Your Elearning Course 🏄
Characters are essential to making an eLearning course relevant. These can be employees, clients, or even customers. Whatever you choose, try and pick someone your audience can relate to.
If possible, ask for actual photos from people in your target demographic so you can create an avatar of them. There is no greater way to build empathy than seeing a real person who looks like someone you know working in one of your instructional elearning videos instead of just an actor with bad hair and unmemorable lines.
Consider that in most eLearning courses users will spend hundreds of hours absorbing content through stories. The only way they'll feel close enough to learn more about their industry is if they've got something meaningful attached to it.
Therefore, it's important that you create credible scenarios – something many companies have struggled with recently when using the standard check-the-box stories. How do we fix that? By selecting interesting characters that communicate realistically; nothing truly relatable ever happens without obstacles involved.
It may take time to build up momentum but avoid skipping over any steps or chances will slip away faster than you realize because users need smooth transitions within their learning experience! 🏁
3) Ensure Your Elearning Course is addressing A Problem
If you are thinking about creating an eLearning course, you probably already have some type of problem that your course is trying to solve. However, it’s important to note that your goal isn’t necessarily to just fix something for someone; rather, create an elearning experience that gives people more knowledge and understanding.
Think about how you can deliver information in a way that makes it memorable and actionable. The ultimate goal is to give your audience a complete picture – one where they truly understand what they need to know.
By definition, then, courses should be more than just short presentations filled with facts (which no one will remember anyway). Instead, offer strategic guidance: tie all concepts together by giving tangible examples or discussing results so that learning becomes relevant.
The final result is greater awareness and better perception of their role within the organization or field as well as their part in solving real-world problems within their domain or industry. 🏁
4) Your Elearning Courses Should Proffer Solutions
Evaluate your audience - Training that doesn’t align with your audience’s needs and wants is training that won’t succeed. There are countless ways to evaluate learner needs and preferences, whether through surveys, interviews, or focus groups.
Even if it feels like guesswork at first, you can hone in on what makes your audience tick through testing ideas, soliciting feedback, and tweaking along the way.
One tip: Identify pain points – Why do people need training? What barriers stand in their way of success? How can you solve these problems for them? It’s important to identify core problems—sometimes multiple solutions may work—but coming up with one specific solution will help ensure relevance from beginning to end.
5) Research Is Important When Creating Elearning Courses
Before you begin creating an elearning online course, it’s essential to research what makes an effective one. What are your goals for your elearner? What kind of value do you want to deliver? Who will be taking your course and why should they care about it?
The answers to these questions should have a direct impact on how you craft your elearning content.
In addition, you need to have enough practice and hands-on activities to ensure your learners are familiar with everything they need to know. These will increase elearning effectiveness and help them grasp concepts more quickly.
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6) Clear Instructional Videos/Images/Documentation is Vital IN Elearning Course Creation
Clear instructional videos, images, and documentation are imperative to provide your learners with a clear path on how to learn from your elearning course. It’s also important to make sure that you keep all of these elements updated throughout your course.
With clear, consistent guidance for every module, you can be sure that everyone who uses your course is on-track and engaged in elearning material that works for them.
In addition, add documents like how-to manuals or checklists throughout modules so that users can refer back if they need a quick refresher. Regularly update these resources as well so learners always have an accurate document for each part of their training.
7) Engaging Quizzes And Assessments Are Vital in Elearning
If you’re using an online learning platform like TheLearning LAB, one way to keep learners engaged is to build interactive assessments. And by interactive, these are tools that are connected to content and provide feedback with direct relevance to what learners just learned.
For example, quizzes and flashcards are good because they reinforce learning; virtual manipulatives (counters, calculators) are great because they help learners learn abstract concepts; embedded knowledge checks and saving it for later activities can encourage retention over time.
Every learner is different; what works for one might not work for another.
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8) Your Elearning Course Should Be Tailored To Audience Need
It might seem obvious, but every course you create should be tailored to your target audience’s needs. While there are many sizes fits all courses that work well, they are often not as effective as courses targeted at specific groups.
Consider how a general course on leadership will be received by new interns, middle managers, and CEOs. The differences in what they need to learn and how they want it delivered will affect everything from course design and content delivery to platform selection.
A good place to start is with your organization’s learning strategy or even better, do some research into how other organizations have implemented their own strategies.
ELEARNING AGENCY & PLATFORM
Whether you’re an instructional designer, training manager, or business leader, TheLearning LAB makes it easy to create and share learning content. Use our platform to develop and customize any kind of learning experience including virtual classroom courses, microlearning, and video-based training.
All your content is automatically hosted in our library of templates and organized into custom-built courses that are ready for students. When learners need to get up to speed quickly on any topic, they can use TheLearning LAB as their own personal library of modules so they can easily find what they need when they need it.
You don’t have to be an expert in instructional design or computer programming because everything you do is guided by our wizard-based software tools.