Instructional Design experts say that in order for you to design an effective eLearning course, you have to keep an eye on 5 main components: the audience, page design, course structure, content engagement, and usability. In the previous article, we discussed the first 2 main components; the audience and course structure. In this article, we will refer to the rest of them, which are: page design, content engagement, and course structure.
Your pages should be clear, well-organized, and simple. Try to avoid a design that is too complicated. Here are some tips to help you design good pages:
Templates will help you have a consistent course design and facilitate the work for you and your colleagues. Start your project by designing a good template where you set the fonts, the headers, and the colors that you will use for the rest of the project.
Remember to keep a good balance between graphs and texts. Although we know that graphs are a good tool to facilitate concepts and ideas, yet too many graphs will confuse your learners.
Think about navigation. Make your course easy to navigate and with a good logical sequence.
Do not load your page with a lot of information, do not use many colors, make it simple. Use enough white space while you design. Too many colors will distract your learners.
Content engagement is more important in eLearning than in onsite training. This is because most eLearning courses are designed to be self-paced. So you have to focus on how to engage your learners in your content to compensate for the lack of instructional interaction. Here are some steps to facilitate your job:
The more the learner interacts, the more he/she will learn. If graphs facilitate delivering the concept, then interactive graphs will facilitate the retention of the information and will encourage your learners to continue learning.
As you design eLearning content, make sure to include some hyperlinks to show the learners new concepts and to give them extra information about a new topic that they may find interesting.
Quizzes will help the learners to test their knowledge and make sure that they have learned the main concepts. Make sure to ask questions that test the understanding of the main objectives of the course and always provide feedback to each question so as to assist in the comprehension of your learners.
Gamification in learning means applying the rules of the game into the learning material. Encourage your learners to continue learning by providing them with rewarding badges, stickers, and points when they progress in the course. The easiest way to apply gamification is by using structural gamification. This concept rewards the progress of the learners through the course. For example, for every video they watch, they gain 100 points, and for every 3 videos, they may gain a badge, so on and so forth. There are many examples on the internet that show you how you can gamify your course. Structural gamification can be achieved with the help of a Learning Management System, or it could be designed with the help of your course's authoring tools.
Although you have done a great job in your design, some courses don’t function properly. So if you want to avoid this mess, make sure you test your project. Here are some steps that will help you test your eLearning course effectively.
Make sure that the course works properly from a technical point of view. Make sure that all links work and the course navigation is easy. The design should be faultless too. Make sure that the graphs appear perfectly under each resolution. And don't forget to test the course using a different device (tablet, PC, mobile phone) with a different operating system (Windows, Linux, Android, IOS).
Make someone check the scenario and the syntax of the content. Make sure there is no redundancy in the data. Test the sequence. Make sure it’s running smoothly and that the objective of the course is delivered. Remember! Proper testing for your course will increase the percentage of its success, so don’t ignore this step.