Consider Going Creative with eLearning

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Is your small- to medium-sized training team looking for a way to creatively expand their training platform? Looking at alternative ways to share your training message versus just having a training session? Do you find your team is limited in what tools they have or how to use these tools? There are creative ways to use eLearning to spread the information and there are easy ways to turn a “blah” eLearning session into a really interesting learning experience for the learner, ensuring better learning results from eLearning platforms.

Think about the best eLearning experience you have had. What factors contributed to its success? The more meaningful the learners find an eLearning experience, the better their knowledge retention. Here are some factors that may have contributed to a successful eLearning experience:

  • Kept the learning objectives clear, and course expectations realistic
  • Followed a learner-centered approach
  • Addressed the learner’s emotions (i.e., fun, competitiveness, etc.)
  • Used interactivity (appropriate to the message)
  • Presented real world benefits (the learner should perceive training as beneficial to them, not punishment)
  • Gave and asked for feedback (throughout the course, not just at the end)

Development agreements signed off by subject matter experts {SMEs), project sponsors, and developers set expectations of the course, prerequisites, planned date of completion, SME availability, etc. Don’t expect developers to know the business, processes, history, etc. This is the role of the SME. Communication of what the learner should know and be able to do at the end is critical along with the more important elements of the message to be communicated.

Three Ways to Design Better eLearning

It is difficult to find developers who have both graphic and visual communications skill sets. Setting design rules can help to make the results more cohesive across the entire eLearning program. At WPS, we use the Successive Approximation Model to bring in other people to check for other skills along the way.

  1. Create Beautiful Slides.
  • Slides that have too much on them, where the font is too small to read, with bold, red and other attention-getters all together are overwhelming. Simple grammar and spelling errors are distracting and animation and visuals that load over the top of each other obscure the message.
  • Graphic design for eLearning relates to the way your course looks and feels. This is how your fonts, colors, images, graphics, layouts, and effects work together to create a cohesive design. For example, a slide can have only text with some bulleted items. Alternatively, using the same text with a relevant graphic, icon, or picture for each of the bulleted items is more pleasing to the eye and better retained.
  • Graphic design and visual communication are equally important…in different ways. Graphic design and visual communications should work together to help elevate your message, and make it easier for your learners to understand, remember, and apply the learning concepts.
  • Why use eLearning templates? Although eLearning templates offer a lot of benefits, the truth is, there’s a huge misconception that if you plug your boring content into a beautiful eLearning template, it will make your content less boring. Unfortunately, it’s just not that simple. Here are three reasons why eLearning templates won’t fix your bad content and how to avoid this issue in your next eLearning project.
  1. Garbage in, garbage out.
  2. Good eLearning design begins before you open the authoring tool. Storyboarding is highly recommended.
  3. PowerPoint does not equal eLearning (although it can be useful in the storyboarding process). It also makes it easier to share the developing program with others who do not have access to the eLearning authoring tool.

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  • Create a color template to be used across the eLearning programs. Some resources to consider are Adobe Color CC, Flat UI Colors, Material Design Color Palette. This will unify the programs to give them a similar look throughout.
  • Establish a topography. This includes the fonts and type styles as well as the type size at each level of the slide text. Identify where bold, italics, and bullet types can be used and what a bullet point should look like (dot, box, heart, etc.)
  1. Create an Effective User Interface.
  • When you’re designing an eLearning course, how often do you think about the learner experience? And by learner experience, I don’t mean the learning content! When I say “learner experience,” I’m talking about the actual experience your learners have when interacting with your course.
  • Four tips for effective user interface
  1. Provide a clear path forward. Make it obvious how to advance the course and control the features of the eLearning program. Most eLearning courses require the learner to do something to advance to the next slide. This might be as simple as clicking the Next button or answering a question correctly. Although this might seem like a no-brainer, it’s amazing how often we overly complicate the process. Test it on someone who has not used your eLearning platform before.
  2. Keep it simple. I’ve always been a big fan of simplicity in design. The funny thing about simplicity is how hard it is to achieve. It’s only after an eLearning course has gone through several iterations of design is simplicity ultimately obtained. Naturally, when you’re new to eLearning, it’s easy to overly complicate your course design—navigation might be clunky or there are several ways to advance from one slide to another.
  3. When it comes to user interface design for eLearning, less is more! It’s not always best to give the learner several options that accomplish the same thing.
  4. Always create an eLearning prototype. Creating an eLearning course can sometimes feel like a shot in the dark. This is especially true when you’re unsure about your SME’s expectations. The truth is, not all SMEs have the same understanding of how an eLearning course is supposed to look and feel. The prototype can help align expectations with the SME and it can help you accurately scope the project, helping to save time and money on large changes.
  1. Three ways to transform bullet points into eLearning.
  • Turn them into a diagram. For example, rather than a bulleted list of steps to take, create a graphic of arrows that lead from left to right with the steps in sequence. Place the text within each arrow.
  • Create a graphic that fits the text of the bullet and pair the text with the bullet.
  • Change the way the bullets look. For example, use a clipboard graphic with check marks to add as each point is made in the audio.

Final Tips

In terms of the ideal length of an eLearning course, 15 to 20 minutes is probably the maximum for all components. Shorter is better. More expansive content can be split into multiple eLearning modules as well.

When looking for photos and icons to use, check with your marketing department. They often have subscriptions to various graphics tools. A couple of suggested sites include PEXELS for photos and ICONSDB for icons.

Fred Volkman is Supervisor of Instructional Design at WPS Health Solutions. He presented a session on this topic at the 2017 QATC Annual Conference. He can be reached at fred.volkman@wpsic.com.[/one_half_last]