As more services move online, providing digital resources and learning is becoming a must for organizations. But what makes a good online or eLearning course? In this blog, we will provide eleven tips on how to create an eLearning course that your visitors, customers and partners will love!
Benefits of creating an eLearning course
eLearning or online courses are convenient and accessible. As more people work and access services remotely, online courses are a scalable and efficient training option for companies. The key to succeeding with online training is to create eLearning courses that follow best practices.
Besides convenience, other reasons why you would want to make an effective online course are:
- Can be much more engaging: Conventional training is often long and tedious to complete for new trainees. Traditional instructor-led training typically involves a series of presentations delivered by the same speaker and can become repetitive. This lecture-style learning approach has been shown to be ineffective, with learners retaining only about 5% of the material presented. And, if you’re unlucky enough to have a monotone presenter, then the entire training becomes an experience you are hesitant to try again. Online courses lend themselves well to a mix of video, audio, and text and can be made more engaging through interactive activities, gamification, and testing. This way, your audience is more likely to be engaged in the training they receive and more inclined to take additional courses in the future.
- Can be completed on the employee’s schedule: Another downside to conventional training is the time requirement. Training can take days to complete and requires all trainees to be present at specific times and locations. If anyone is absent for any reason, training may need to be rescheduled. However, online courses can be taken when and where it is convenient for the learner, can be completed over multiple sessions, and don’t even need to be completed during regular work hours. This eliminates the need for rescheduling and leaves learners more time for personal activities and other responsibilities.
- Very resource-efficient for companies: In-person training costs time and money for the organization. They have to pay for trainers, travel, book rooms and schedule extra resources needed while employees are away on course. On the other hand, online courses are much easier to scale, making them a better investment. Courses can be reused. This means online courses are more cost-effective for budget-conscious organizations and for organizations experiencing rapid growth.
- Scalability: E-learning courses can be easily scaled to accommodate large numbers of learners without requiring significant additional resources. This is particularly beneficial for organizations or institutions looking to train a large workforce or employees across multiple time zones.
Learning through e-learning typically requires 40% to 60% less employee time than learning the same material in a traditional classroom setting (Brandon-Hall).
How to create eLearning courses
Now that you know why online courses are so beneficial, let’s talk about how you would go about putting one together. Of course, building great online courses requires time, dedication, and knowledge. Here are eleven tips that will help you create a successful online course.
- Start with learning objectives: Before you start writing any learning content, first decide what the purpose of the course is, in other words, what the learner should leave the course knowing or being able to do? Your learning objectives must be clear, concise, and measurable. It should quickly communicate what the learner will learn and how their proficiency will be measured.
- Research what’s already been done: An important part of creating any type of training is knowing what already exists. Make sure to research what other courses or programs were used to train employees before your course. You may be able to pull information, ideas or even a course structure from older material, while changing the format and adding new, relevant information to make the course more effective and engaging. Pulling content from old courses can reduce the research required and the time it takes to put the course together.
- Create a detailed outline of the content: Now that you have a topic, the next step is deciding what exactly you’re presenting. Plan out all the key points that you feel should be covered by your course, and then work on flushing out each point individually, either with your own knowledge, with your research, or by connecting with subject matter experts. Doing this should give you an idea of how long your course will be and how much information you will need to present.
- Add multi-media elements: An online course with just text will have a low uptake and completion rate. Plan to include a variety of media, such as images, charts, videos and audio recordings to accompany the text.
- Break up long content: If there is a long, content-heavy section, consider using a video or other visual elements to teach it. For example, interviews or videos of experts in the field can be used to improve specific parts. Alternatively, short audio recordings can also help break up long text sections.
- Add interactive activities: Interactive activities can help break up long sections of reading, or even long videos and help learners retain the content better. Ensuring that your learners are paying attention and can apply what they’ve learned to simple tasks will improve their engagement and make the experience more enjoyable. Activities can vary greatly depending on the course, but anything that requires users to click or type will work.
- Add assessments like online quizzes/tests: Online quizzes and tests help to improve information retention and let you know how well they are learning the material. By having learners recall information they’ve learned throughout the course, you reinforce learning and increase the likelihood of long-term retention. Informing learners that a quiz will be at the end of a section also incentivizes them to pay more attention than they normally would, out of anticipation of the evaluation they know is coming.
- Add fun: The idea of making training into a game is not a new one, but it is not very common either. Companies want to appear professional and take training seriously, so they often shy away from using games in training. However, gamification is an effective training method. In our virtual world, more people than ever actively play and enjoy games. By adding gamification, learners are much more engaged and open to learning.
- Use storyboarding to set course flow: With your content all decided on, you can now decide on the format that you will use to present it. This is called storyboarding, and it involves using a document to describe the text, media, audio, interactions, and navigation for each step of an eLearning course (LEAi helps to eliminate the storyboarding phase!).
- Invest in thoughtful course production: Once you have all these pieces, the next step is putting them all together in your online course authoring software. Take your time, break the course into parts, and don’t try to cram it all at once. Make sure you provide high-quality writing and well-thought-out media, testing, and gaming elements. When the writing and recording are all done, put it down for a few days and then come back to it later to review what you’ve written. You will be able to edit it and make any changes you feel are necessary much more effectively after not thinking about it for a while.
- Make your eLearning course even better: Although your course may be complete and you may not want to put any more work into writing it, a key way to improve it further is to get feedback from learners who went through your course. This can be done through a survey at the end of the course, or by reaching out to them individually. Ask them about how they thought the course was laid out, how good the information they were learning was, and if they felt that you were missing something. Taking this feedback and using it to modify what you’ve written will take your course to the next level, and will help improve any future training that is based on the same topic.
42% of companies say that eLearning has led to an increase in revenue (Ambient Insight)
Use eLearning for blended/hybrid learning
Often, companies will still want to have face to face training. This gives trainees the unique opportunity to directly communicate with an experienced instructor who already has the skills that they are learning.
To get the best of both worlds, hybrid learning or blended learning can be used. This entails online courses for most of the basic content, that would usually be boring to learn with conventional training, and then some in person training for more difficult skills, complex ideas or hands-on learning opportunities.
This way, companies can still save on resources, trainees stay engaged with their learning and work on their own pace, but still have the benefit of being able to ask questions directly or seek advice from qualified individuals.
82% of companies use eLearning to conduct at least some of their compliance training (Training Mag)
What are elearning authoring tools
eLearning authoring tools enable content creators to create a range of content, including text, images, videos, audio, and interactive elements such as quizzes and simulations. Many eLearning authoring tools offer pre-designed templates to create consistent, visually appealing course materials. They also enable the incorporation of interactivity, such as branching scenarios, clickable buttons, the ability to create a drag-and-drop quiz, animations, assessments, and quizzes to engage learners.
Look for authoring tools that support SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) or xAPI (Experience API) to ensure compatibility with Learning Management Systems (LMS). Collaboration tools allow multiple subject matter experts, authors and reviewers to work on content simultaneously.
There are many authoring tools, but don’t forget to consider LEAi.
Using LEAi to create eLearning courses
Online courses are an excellent source for learning that should be taken advantage of due to their convenience and ability to scale while not compromising on effectiveness. They resource efficient throughout their use and are an engaging way to receive new or updated training. They are also easily adaptable to any changes necessary.
To make the online course creation process even easier and faster, try using LEAi. This AI-enabled tool helps teams to create content for both online learning and instructor led training (ILT).
You don’t have to be a L&D (learning and development) specialist to use LEAi. Our tool is so easy to use that everyone from HR to sales enablement can convert existing content they have into online learning content – in minutes.
Key benefits of LEAi include:
- Import documents, blogs and other content that already exists in your organization to automatically create learning objectives and learning content
- Be guided by best practices with our LearnAdvisor
- Automatically create test questions based on the content that was imported
- Repurpose content easily for different modules and courses
- Translate courses into multiple languages
- Create short, punchy courses with our one-click microlearning
- Export your training content to formats like SCORM and xAPI. Or publish directly to your Skilljar LMS.
Contact us to learn how you can use LEAi to accelerate your online course creation!
