Five Best Practices for Developing eLearning Courses
Online training and eLearning can deliver new information to your students or employees in a way that is interactive, convenient, and impactful. A well-designed course will ensure participants master new skills and understand how to apply new knowledge to their daily roles and environments. Whether you are using Adobe Captivate or Storyline 360, following best practices of eLearning development is central for effective and meaningful instruction.
Follow these 5 best practices of eLearning to design engaging and effective courses.
1. Adaptable on Any Device
One eLearning best practice is to ensure your course can be used on any device whether it is a computer, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. This means that your course must support an array of devices with diverse design, hardware, OS, and software specifications. It should be easy and enjoyable for your learners to access your courses on any device they have available to use. Both Adobe Captivate and Storyline 360 makes it easy to deliver courses to learners on any device.
2. Functional Design
Effective design requires the perfect balance between style and substance. Another best practice of eLearning is to design the course so that the content is clear, concise and consistent. It should also avoid any ambiguity. The content, activities, and assignments should always lead back to the overarching learning outcomes. One way to maintain a consistent and visually appealing course is to create a strong visual hierarchy. This will help reduce the cognitive load of a course by making it easier for the learner to move ahead and complete the tasks.
3. Intuitive Navigation
As an eLearning developer or instructional designer your goal should always be to create a user-friendly course. When learners can easily understand the navigation structure of the course they become more confident and are more motivated to complete the course. Encourage your learners to focus on learning instead of trying to figure out how to move to the next slide or pull up the Menu. According to elearningindustry.com providing general menu or “course map” of your course can give learners the opportunity to get an at-a-glance view of its content and a simply way to navigate to different lessons within the course.
4. Various Interactions
One of the amazing benefits to eLearning courses is that they can support multimedia elements that engage multiple senses unlike printed textbooks. Different types of learning activities that create an immersive learning experience include “case study” scenarios, multiple choice scenarios, explorations and so much more. Using Storyline 360 you can easily build any interaction with the slide layers, triggers, and states. Learners can trigger any actions by clicking, hovering over, or dragging any object.
One of the newest features of Adobe Captivate allows you to create experiential learning by creating virtual tours, crisis management, safety drills, first responder situations and more. Learn more here.
5. Practice and Feedback
You know the saying, practice makes perfect. Well the more you can engage learners by practicing the skills they have learned, the more effective your course will be. Repeated practice reinforces learners knowledge and sharpens their newly acquired skills. It is an eLearning best practice to provide immediate feedback after learners complete an activity to help gauge the effectiveness of the training. Feedback also helps learners by correcting their mistakes, guiding them to stay on track, and encouraging them to keep going. With the variables feature in Storyline 360, you can customize interactivity to the max with minimal effort.
By implementing these 5 best practices of eLearning you will be better equipped to create engaging content and effective eLearning courses.
If you want to advance on your instructional design skills, let’s connect. The Digital Workshop Center offers Adobe Captivate classes and your instructor is always live! We also offer other certificate programs that can help you master a new program or take your career to the next level! Contact us to learn more!