I’ve put together 3 simple, yet powerful little known secrets that I have used for eLearning success in my 24 years’ as a corporate eLearning Developer. If you use these tips during content development, you should gain a solid positive outcome. Your SMEs, your learners and your stakeholders will be thanking you. Point blank, it’s really all about understanding people, the way they think and how you communicate with them.
1. Understand Your Audience
As I mentioned before, know your learners. You can impress any stakeholder with a stunning zoom-in feature of the corporate logo synced with music for an intro or some cool animation with conditional action-variable features, but if your learners don't get what you’re really trying to teach them and be able to put it into practice in their job, you've kinda sunk the battleship.
So here's first what you gotta figure out about your learners:
- What do they know/don’t know about what is going to be taught?
- Where is their background from? Are they out in the field, are they in the office, or are they executive management?
- Are they from only one state, are they international?
- What motivates them to learn? Are they interactive doers?
- Do they already know this content ? If so, give them a pre-assessment so they can skip to the more advanced section of the eLearning so they don't have to take the basics again. Believe me, they'll appreciate it, and so will your stakeholders in the end, because those advanced learners will take less time from being on the job to take the training. And we all know the saying, "time is money".
You need to get into their heads as you start to formulate and design your content with them in mind.
2. Bond With Your SMEs
Have a really good sit down with them. Bonus points if the course has been taught before and there’s a facilitator with previous subject knowledge, or better yet, if the SME has already been the classroom facilitator.
After getting a handle on where your learners are coming from, and after grasping the content with the SME, lastly, gain an understanding of any past teaching of this material from a facilitator.
3. Pilot Test After You've Tested
Make sure when you think you’re done with the eLearning and you have tested it and have it on your LMS, that you have a handful of learners that can be your control testers, before you flip the switch to go global with the rest of the company. Your testers should be selected as a diverse group from as many types of avenues of your audience that’ll be taking the eLearning.
Create on your LMS or intranet, a course forum or blog that can list a series of questions to get them thinking. Have room for them to indicate and identify things that are not working properly as they go through the eLearning, where they can add comments, indicate things that are not quite understood, and can add ideas they have. They may provide you with actual use cases they’ve had in the field or in the office that have happened to them.
With a cutoff deadline in place for feedback look through the material. With your SME and facilitator, analyze some of the comments and make easy changes. If there is something that would be "nice to have" that would take a while to include in the eLearning but would stifle the dissemination of the project, just keep the project going and fit it in if you have time for the next group of learners.
Depending upon the project, disburse your eLearning increasingly larger and larger groups. If there are some people that would like to comment about the eLearning, have them email you. Feedback is always great for future eLearning projects.
Hope this helps. Remember that understanding your learners, and communicating with SMEs is key!