What Mistakes To Avoid When Shifting From Face-To-Face To Online Learning
If you’re making the shift from face-to-face to online learning, you’re not alone. Digital learning offers a more flexible, cost effective, efficient way to meet learner needs at scale. But there are some hazards on this journey that will slow your transition down and hamper your success.
1. Assuming You Know Your Audience
“I know our learners; we’ve been delivering training to this audience for the last five years.”
This is the first and most fundamental mistake, because the world around your learners has changed – along with their needs and demands.
Don’t make assumptions about your learners. At the start of every new eLearning project, take the time to capture insight about your audience and understand what success really looks like and how you’re going to get there.
Download the Capture Needs Template to help understand your audience.
2. No Clear Look And Feel
“We all know our brand; design won’t be a problem.”
It's easy to overlook or not prioritize the feel and look of your digital learning content. This can become a big problem if you have multiple stakeholders working on producing online learning content. Even if you know your brand, this is a new format and could become unwieldy.
Make sure you clarify your design direction from the offset. Discover what’s most likely to engage your learners by conceptualizing a design approach, visual styles and templates when you start building your online learning content.
Test your design early in the beginning stages so you can fail fast, discover the best flow and structure to support your learners and know what types of interactions your audience needs.
This guide to Conceptualizing your eLearning Ideas will help you through the process.
3. Leaving Your Authors To Go It Alone
“Our authoring tool is easy to use, so our authors can get themselves up and running.”
Sure, eLearning software like Elucidat is easy to use, but providing your authors with focused training will help them get off the starting line and create higher quality content much faster.
BDO Norway used Elucidat's Fast-Track Onboarding program so their authors could very quickly get to grips with the platform. After working through online micro-topics, leveraging coaching time and virtual classroom sessions and practicing short exercises, the authors were equipped to take their online learning forward efficiently and effectively.
Read more about how BDO Norway shifted to online learning with Elucidat's support.
4. Getting Stuck Straight Into Creating Content
“We’ve got great content already; we just need to get it online.”
Diving into delivering your content may seem like a great place to start, but how are you going to deliver it in a way that best engages your audience to deliver the desired outcomes? What do the interactions look like?
Make sure you brainstorm and wireframe ideas based on what you know about your audience needs from the Capture Needs Template.
Take the opportunity to get feedback from peers and key stakeholders at this stage to ensure you’re structuring your learning in the most engaging way.
5. Hitting Publish Too Soon
“I’ve had a quick check over, so it’s ready to go live.”
After planning, designing and testing, it's tempting to immediately push the Publish button and send your learning out into the world.
But pushing it too soon can deprive you of learning from a thorough quality assurance and review process. Rather, take the time to check the quality of your digital learning content, including user experience, layouts, flow of content, interactions and links. A broken link or confusing navigation can frustrate your learners and ruin your chances of really engaging them with your learning content.
You can also leverage support for an in-depth quality review from Elucidat's Learner-Ready Service to ensure your content is ready for the online learning environment.
Learn about how Elucidat can help you get the best results from your digital learning.
Final Thoughts
To achieve success and an engaged audience, recognize the common mistakes of transitioning from a face-to-face format to digital learning. Strategize, plan, design, test, review and deploy for a smooth transition.
Need a powerful authoring tool for your online learning? Try Elucidat for free.
