Make sure that your course is not only easy to understand but also
high in quality, including high standards in instructional design, media,
usability, appearance and editorial.
Check Your Visuals:
So if we know that people will most definitely be judging your courses by
their visual appearance, you'll want to make sure you create very
appealing ones.
Check the following aspects:
Quality: Check if graphics actually serve a purpose and enhance rather than depress
learning. Make sure pictures aren´t pixilated, or are 1990´s clipart .
Relevance: Verify your visuals aren’t just decorative. Using visuals simply for the sake of
using it isn’t right. Make sure they apply to the training in a logical manner and
reinforces the information.
Consistency: Be sure you are incorporating images that are consistent with the content
on the screen.
Clean look and feel: One concern is that many eLearning courses get crowded out
with too much visual data. So, it´s key you start using graphics wisely. Verify that visuals
are there because they have too.
Review Your Course Design:
The page design of your eLearning course is critical to the learning process.
It provides the backbone for how learners consume information.
Keep in mind the following tips:
Keep a balance: There should be a good balance of text, images, and multi-media in
order to grab your learners’ attention.
Content should be organized: The navigation of content should be intuitive and it
should be immediately clear to the learner what topics and content items are
featured within a course. Simple interface design makes it simple for someone to
navigate through your course and find just what they need.
Look for simplicity: The secret is to KISS eLearning content, keep it simple and stupid.
Use a clean design, reasonable and consistent font size and leave a decent amount of
white space on the screen. Try to be consistent. Too much variation distracts from the
learning objectives.
Boost content effectiveness:
Often, the content drafts are simply bad – poorly written, or very confusing.
This forces you to audit content frequently.
Here are a couple of tips to follow as you're checking your eLearning content:
Learner-centered: eLearning content should be relevant to learners’ needs, roles and
responsibilities in professional life. Verify your course has information that can help
learners complete their daily tasks effectively.
Easy to grasp: Don´t just dump information and present it in the same boring way.
Feed the learners a little bit at a time by chunking content, using bullet points,
avoiding long sentences, or breaking information into steps.
Crystal clear: eLearning works best when it’s modular, with focused segments that have
a clear purpose and could stand on their own as a piece of learning. If you believe
something may not be clear, you might want to revisit the content and clarify or
cut down the material to clarify focus.
Updated: To be effective, contents need to evolve with the times. Updated information
helps to support the credibility of your courses and make the case that it's a trustworthy
resource. If it’s outdated… it’s no longer effective. So, dust off the cob webs constantly!
Leverage interaction:
If you consider your course is a passive and one-way learning experience
where your learners just click and read, then you could try making your
course more interactive.
When you audit your course´s screens, check that the following is true:
It´s Fun: Incorporate games to evaluate the students knowledge. They are fun,
competitive, rewarding, interactive, and attention-grabbing.
There´s no “busy work” interactivity: Interactions should be there only necessary and
only when it helps support your learning objectives. Use interactions to reinforce the
accomplishmentof mastering a new topic.
It´s Thought-provoking: Watching a videos isn't interactive. Effective interactivity askes
learners to think and respond, rather than simply reacting to an moving image.
It´s practical and realistic: By adding scenarios and simulations learners are situated in
real-life scenarios where they can try on their skills, solve problems and practice what
they know. Making the course practical, activity based and realistic is your priority.
Navigation
A good eLearning course has a good navigation. Therefore, it is fundamental
to create courses that have an friendly direction and that include the
intuitiveness people look for.
Navigation adds to the quality of your courses, so follow this advice:
Learner Must be in Control: When possible, free up the navigation and let learners have
control. If the user can manage aspects as the pace and sequence, motivation
increases.
Make sure content is adaptable: Course need to respond to the level of knowledge of
each learner. The ability to customize the response to the user’s level of knowledge is
very important.
Intuitive since the beginning: Your main concern should be that the navigation process
is intuitive. Evaluate, buttons, nav bars, menus, headings, search bars. These elements
will let you know if your course is user-friendly or not.
Once you've completed this four-point audit of your main eLearning courses,
you should start to see some improvement in learner engagement levels and
the performance of those courses.
Then you can use the same set of steps to improve upon the rest of the
courses in your company.