The Many Sides of e-Learning

The Many Sides of e-Learning
Summary: e-Learning isn’t just for college classes anymore. Today, the many sides of e-Learning include everything from MOOCs and the education industry to workplace gamification and engaging scenarios. Because e-Learning has so many benefits, it continues to become more popular as a way to engage learners through games, interactive assessments and more—even in a corporate environment.

Take a look at these popular—and always engaging uses for e-Learning:

MOOCs
Massive open online courses are free online courses aimed at large-scale interactive participation. Coursera, edX and Udacity are all examples of MOOC providers, but they’re not the only ones who are offering free e-Learning courses to large groups of students. This sounds awesome for learners, but what’s the benefit for MOOC providers? Some, like universities, target alumni, while other institutions use MOOCs to reach out to a wider audience, market their brand identity or even get media coverage. To learn more about MOOCs, read this blog post: Industry Review: All About MOOCs.

Compliance Training
This mandatory training ensures that employees know about the ethical, legal and reporting requirements and policies of the organization. Compliance training includes everything from courses on basic security and confidentiality principles to a code of conduct in the workplace. While this type of training encourages good privacy and safety practices, respect of fellow coworkers and more, it’s often stereotyped as boring. Here are a few ways to make sure your compliance training isn’t labeled as boring: Compliance Training Doesn’t Have To Be Boring.

Education
LinguiSystems, an international publisher of educational materials for speech-language pathologists, uses e-Learning to offer interactive education materials. They chose an authoring tool to create e-Learning modules that speech-language pathologists could purchase to use with students on their caseloads and track cumulative practice. And they used that authoring tool to transfer years of paper-based educational materials to online, interactive versions, like skill-based assessments, which they uploaded to their learning management system.

Gamification
Health Education Yorkshire and the Humber used an authoring tool to create a serious e-Learning game to train—and engage—employees. The e-Learning game features a clickable map that allows employees to navigate around and direct their own learning. Because the serious game is more engaging and social than a typical training course, they received a lot of positive feedback from employees. To read some other gamification ideas, tips and experts’ thoughts on this powerful e-Learning trend, check out this blog post: Great Reads on Gamification.

Scenarios
Grays Harbor Community Hospital created a zombie-themed scenario for an e-Learning course. They chose a popular theme in movies and books to engage learners, but they saved time by building the zombie module in a simple way. (This is a good tip when you’re working with a short timeline or limited budget.) The hospital added audio and video to their scenario, along with photos and text using the tools included in their authoring tool. You can read more about creating a scenario like this here: Engage Your Learners with a Zombie e-Learning Scenario.

These are just a few of the many sides of e-Learning. Have another one to add to this list? Share it in the comments below!

Looking for an authoring tool to help you create engaging e-Learning, no matter what industry you’re in? Sign up for a free 30-day trial of new Lectora® 12, and start creating e-Learning that gets results today.