Elearning is being used more than ever today, but it doesn’t mean that everyone likes it. In fact, there are some people that just flat-out hate it.

Now to be fair, sometimes it doesn’t matter how well you build an elearning course, some people just do not like taking them. However, sometimes the design of the course will dictate the reaction.

For example, despite all the great options available for course development software, for some reason PowerPoint is still a major influence. PowerPoint presentations are rarely exciting on their own, so using it as the sole way to deliver online training is usually not received well.

Besides the overuse of PowerPoint, people generally hate it when your elearning courses are any of the following:

1. Boring – No one wants to hear someone drone on while the PowerPoint slides automatically advance. Most would rather just read a transcript on the topic and be done with it instead.

2. Look Dated – Have you ever had to watch employee training videos that were made in the 1990’s?  If so, then you know how distracting (and irrelevant) an elearning program is perceived as when it looks 10+ years old.

3. Too Distracting – Spare viewers the spinning pictures, laser sound effects, and un-ending clickable regions. It pays to be concise.

4. Jargon Riddled- If your elearning is for a corporate audience, avoid overuse of acronyms, and other annoying business terms like “synergy” and “re-engineering”.

5. Poorly Designed – The foundation of your training is the template. Make sure that it is visually appealing and adheres to the leading design principles.

6. Typo Overloaded – Simply put, typos can instantly kill course credibility.

7. Strange Interactions – Today we can use all kinds of nifty tools to create clickable regions, drag-and-drop images, and so on. Just because you have these available doesn’t mean you should use them all.

8. Slow Loading – Elearning files can be quite large, make sure you have the infrastructure in place to effectively deliver them. No one wants to wait around for a course, graphic, video, or audio to load.

9. Lacking Substance – Sometimes it makes more sense to deliver new training content in the form of a job aid. Don’t stretch out a small amount of content in order to create an hour elearning course.

 

Reference:

Shift ELearning