10 Pro Tips For Developing Engaging eLearning

10 Pro Tips For Developing Engaging eLearning
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Summary: Want to create an impactful eLearning course but don’t know where to start? Read on to know a clear-cut path.

How To Start Developing Engaging eLearning

Creating content that can impact meaningful knowledge is a difficult task. When it comes to eLearning, it becomes even more difficult as you don’t have an instructor/teacher to fill in the knowledge gaps. In the absence of an instructor, the responsibility of making learners curious enough to learn, engaging them throughout, and ensuring long-term knowledge recollection falls completely on your digital learning content. Only a well-crafted eLearning course can resonate with your learners to deliver optimum results.

While there is no single secret to creating a successful eLearning course, you still begin by ensuring that your course is relevant and relatable. A good digital learning program must keep up with the ever-changing needs of modern learners. It should integrate well into the busy schedules of your employees, without compromising on the quality of learning.

How do you ensure that your eLearning course delivers the maximum impact? Let’s look at 10 pro tips that you can implement in the eLearning development process:

1. Structure Content Carefully

No one likes long and tedious courses, especially in the digital format. That’s why you need to make a proactive effort to keep the courses short and sweet. Begin by defining clear-cut learning objectives, which don’t leave any ambiguity as to what your learners are going to take away from the course.

Thoroughly analyze the content inputs that you have and select only the "need to know" content and some key "good to know" content. This will help your learners stay focused and not get confused by too much information.

2. Design Pages Optimally

The importance of design for your course cannot be overstated. A neat, minimalistic design will help your learners focus on the content better. As a thumb rule, don’t clutter a page with too much information and keep headings easily distinguishable from the body text.

A clean layout is easy on the eyes of your learners and pulls them toward the course. It also maximizes the amount of knowledge on the page, thus making each one count.

3. Integrate Your Brand Image

Each company is unique in its own way. So why not make your courses reflect the same? Make sure that your eLearning course looks like it is the intellectual property of your organization. Be it color schemes, style guides, logo placement, or tone of language, everything should be in sync with your organization’s brand image.

Integrating your brand image increases the seriousness with which your employees undertake the training, as they can clearly see the effort you have invested in the development.

4. Focus On Readability

The importance of fonts in any digital content is paramount. The right font, in the right place, makes all the difference between a learner paying close attention to the content or ignoring it altogether. Use basic fonts when you are trying to convey a core idea, and when legibility is a top priority.

However, if you want learners to pay extra attention to an information nugget, don’t be afraid to use something eye-catching. The same goes for the headers and titles within your eLearning course. Increased readability automatically translates to a better grasp of knowledge.

5. Use A Mix Of Multimedia

Plain text can only do so much to grasp the attention of your learners. For your eCourse to fully recreate the classroom learning experience, it needs to have a good mix of multimedia elements such as images, videos, infographics, animations, and audio clips.

These engage learners better compared to plain text and create an immersive learning experience. Multimedia elements also help keep the course duration short as they can convey more in less time.

6. Include Interactivities

Most of the content you create will just passively involve your employees in the learning process. Your employees will remain beyond the boundary line, mere spectators. You can change this by using interactive elements.

Such elements involve learners in the learning process by demanding an active response before proceeding. Interactive elements such as game-based content, drag-and-drop activities, trigger-based actions and many more should be definitely part of your eLearning course.

7. Construct A Story

Using story-based modules can help you create an instant connection with your learners. Including a scenario in your course also helps learners relate to the actual work setting in which they are going to use the knowledge.

It is always recommended that you include a story-based module that features a situation or challenge your learners will face, along with relatable characters. You can even use stories to show how employees can apply the knowledge in their personal or professional lives.

8. Integrate Mobile Learning

Mobile phones have touched every aspect of our lives, so why shouldn’t learning reflect the same. It goes without saying that you should use responsive course design to ensure your eTraining works flawlessly across devices.

Besides this, you should also develop microlearning modules that are fine-tuned for the smaller screen sizes of mobile devices. Such modules convey just a single topic comprehensively, making them extremely useful for providing just-in-time support.

9. Have Scope For Exploration

Curiosity is what drives average people to do great things. That’s why it is important to keep it alive among your learners. Provide your learners with external links and resources that pave the way for a deeper study of the subject.

It might also be a good idea to provide them with case studies pertaining to the latest developments in their field. These might not be directly related to their day-to-day work, but would be a welcome addition to employees who are truly invested in their learning.

10. Don’t Forget Assessments

Just because these come at the end, doesn’t mean they be given any less importance. Assessments are gauges that help you measure how well your employees respond to the course, and how well they learned from them.

Using the latest authoring tools, you can move away from the conventional question-answer format and adapt more innovate ways to measure learning. Use click and reveal, branching scenarios, drag and drop, and many other interesting techniques for your assessments.

All of the points are just the tip of the iceberg. To fully realize your vision for a robust eLearning course, you should address each of the above aspects of course development.