Why You Should Try Concept-Led eLearning Design
With concept-led eLearning design you’ll fail fast… but succeed faster! If you're already sold on why concept-led eLearning design is important but want to know how to do it, read the Conceptualize Guide. Otherwise... here are 3 reasons to take concept-led design for a test-drive:
1. Your Learning Is More Likely To Hit The Mark
To be successful, your digital learning should be fixing issues, driving change, modifying habits, bridging gaps, or motivating, enabling and empowering learners to grow. To accomplish this, you'll need to give your learners a mixture of useful and relevant performance resources. You'll also need to provide experiences that are memorable to get your audience thinking and building understanding over time.
Given that you only have an average of seven seconds to get your learners' attention, you need to use approaches that hit the mark with relevant, performance-focused, engaging and helpful content that will capture your audience's attention. If you start with your content, rather than the bigger picture, you risk missing the mark and failing to hook your learners.
2. You'll Avoid Falling At The Final Hurdle
You could spend hours building out your digital learning content before you realize an idea doesn't work. A concept-led approach allows you to quickly examine your design concepts before you apply them; you should be able to filter out ideas in 10 minutes or less.
Save yourself the trouble of making changes days into your build by setting time aside upfront to explore and lay out your ideas. You can test these concepts and find out what works (and what doesn't) early on. Testing a variety of Style options, wireframes or quick prototypes are a few examples of how you can do this.
3. You Won't Have To Rely On Your Own Assumptions
When you're designing learning content on your own, you can end up relying on your own assumptions about your learners’ needs, the types of devices they use to access your content and how well they understand the subject.
It makes sense to involve others in the testing process to get your eLearning content right. Producing prototypes is quick to do, and it pays off in the end. It gives you the chance to collaborate with a pilot group and test your assumptions. They're also more likely to be invested in the outcome and promote it to others to help increase user engagement.
How To Take A Concept-Led Approach
This may be a totally new way of working for you, or something you think you could get better at.
The Conceptualize Guide, the second resource from the 5C Framework Toolkit, will help you turn your needs into a vision for an effective, engaging piece of digital learning. The guide will help you to:
- Work outward from your central goal (with a handy template).
- Get ideas to inform the design of your digital learning.
- Plot out a structure for your learning experience.
- Think about how to prototype, test and iterate.
