5 Tips for ELearning Success

By: Justin Ferriman • September 18, 2014
Filed Under:

devNot all elearning is created equally. In fact, there are many programs out there that lack fundamental instructional design techniques. As a result, the courses lack in effectiveness.

In order to create truly effective courses, there is much to learn about the best practices in instructional design, learning theory, and other areas like gamification. Someone could immerse themselves into this field and still never master everything there is to know!

However, not all people who create elearning are formally trained instructional designers. For some people, elearning development is an added job responsibility under special circumstances at their employer. In fact, this probably happens more often than not as many companies believe that elearning can be done in-house by their human resources department.

For those of you in this situation, the following tips will prove a useful starting place for your elearning projects.

Tips for Maximizing the Success of Your ELearning

1. Know the audience. This is important so that you can frame the content accordingly. It also helps you build proper objectives.

2. Respect people’s time. Hardly anyone has time to sit through a two hour course. Break-up the content where possible.

3. Adhere to standard design principles. Stick with a legible font family, pay attention to spacing, choose appropriate colors for diagrams and images.

4. Focus on content first. There are a lot of “bells and whistles” that can be easily added to elearning courses, but they can quickly become distracting.

5. Create a storyboard. This is the framework that guides the entire course development process. It will help you to focus on the content first as well.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter