E-learning courses can be exciting or frustrating. It all depends on how you design and develop them. You need to take care of many things, when you develop an eLearning course. Let’s look at a few dos and don’ts for eLearning design.

Lets look at few Dos and Don’ts for successful E-learning Design:

Understand and know your audience:

The most important requirement for designing effective eLearning courses is to know your target audience well. It helps in the selection of objectives, illustrations, terminology, delivery format and helps address cultural issues effectively. To understand the target audience better, make sure you know Who is going to take your course? What do they want or expect from the course? How will they use the information and skills they learn, in their work? etc.

Use Scenarios : Scenarios motivate and encourage the learners to overcome the difficulties and avoid mistakes in the real world. They make courses look “real” and are useful instructional tools to narrate the key concepts and relate them to learners’s experience. Scenarios help learners to think out-of-the-box as work-related situations are discussed, thereby, helping the learner to absorb the content in an easy manner.

Add multimedia elements: The right use of various multimedia elements such as videos, audio, graphics, animations, etc., in your course, adds value to the learning content. Embedding interactivities such as Click On Tabs, Puzzles, Drag And Drop, Games, Slide Shows, etc., in eLearning courses, allows learners to explore, discover, try, practice and perform various tasks.

Use assessments frequently: Assessments should beat the core of the learning design process. How the assessments are designed depends on answers to the questions like

  • What are the learning objectives?
  • How is the learning content being approached?
  • How are the learning activities weaved into the design process?

Don’t include extra/ unneceessary content: It is a very tough task to decide what content is really useful to the learner. For this the best way would be to keep the background information of the learner in mind. When you know your learner well, you would understand what content the learner will find useful.

Don’t disrupt the flow: When the chunked content is not presented in a logical manner, the “connectivity” between the topics is lost. This may confuse the learners and they might also find it difficult to retain the information. It is better to chunk first at the screen level, then at the lesson level, followed by chunking at the unit level and finally at the course level.

Don’t focus on one device. Today’s learners will expect that they can begin an activity or mdoule  on their desktop at work and continue on their smartphone from another location. If they don’t have that option, they may decide to not utilize it at all, because they may feel like they are being inconvenienced just to complete the activity. thus ensure that you design an elearning activity or module  that is accessible on a variety of devices.

Online learning design can have a huge impact when these dos, don’ts and tips are followed!It can help your company develop an online learning program that will improve productivity and increase your bottom line.