There are a lot of things that can make or break your eLearning course. If you don’t have a background in Instructional Systems Design, consider outsourcing, or at least have an ISD consultant review your lesson plan. Creating a bad course is really easy, but developing an effective and engaging eLearning course requires someone who has been trained in the entire ISD process. Training your people is too important and too costly to leave to novices. With that said, here are 5 tips to keep in mind for creating successful custom eLearning content:
1. Objectives, Objectives, Objectives
The assessments have to test the learning objectives, and the content needs to teach the objectives. This is fundamental, but you’d be surprised by how many courses I come across that don’t do this. I don’t care how awesome your media is or how engaging your interactive elements are. If you don’t tie your objectives to the training and the assessments, you have nothing. Actually, it can be worse than nothing since you would be training your people incorrectly.
While you’re at it, make sure before you begin development that you have good objectives in the first place. Objectives are the key element of any course. They should be easy to understand, easy to observe, and easy to measure. If they aren’t, they need to be fixed. Your client should sign off on the objectives, and you should go over them with your SME, before storyboarding.
2. Allow SMEs To Give You Content, But Not Build The Course
One of the biggest mistakes I see course developers making is giving too much control to the SMEs. While they are vital in providing the content-specific knowledge your course requires, oftentimes SMEs have their own opinion on how to design the course, or like to add extraneous information that go outside the scope of the training focus or objectives.
While I always listen to SME suggestions, it’s important for the Instructional Designer to design the course. If a SME determines that a process has changed or has a credible challenge to the focus of the course, you need to go back to the design phase and discuss revising the objectives with the key stakeholders before moving on to the content.
3. Focus On The Learning Process, Not The Teaching Process
Typically, if someone without a good ISD background is asked to create an eLearning course, they will often take the information from a previously existing course, such as a lesson plan from an instructor-led training, and simply cram them into boring, linear storyboards. Content, content, practice questions, test. Repeat. This is how you teach, but not necessarily the best way for people to learn.
eLearning courses should be designed better. Create engaging problem-solving scenarios with the content you have. Use multimedia and gaming elements to enhance, but not overwhelm your course, so people will actually look forward to training. The goal is to facilitate learning, and that won’t happen without engagement.