For most people, elearning is seen in a positive light given its vast number of benefits. It is giving people the opportunity to learn from anywhere at anytime, and all at a reasonable cost. These three benefits alone are the reason why millions of people enjoy taking elearning courses each year.

But not everything that glitters is gold – at least that’s what is being said by the latest infographic released by Articulate (see below).

Of all the frustrations shared in the graphic, the one that is the biggest challenge to overcome is the opinion that elearning can be extremely boring.

I know this to be true, as I have take plenty of boring elearning courses. I believe that this all stems from elearning’s roots being in Microsoft PowerPoint – slides and bullet points can be pretty dull.

To combat this, many elearning programs have developed slick functionality that makes it easy to include hot-spots, sliders, and other dynamic elements to courses with just a few clicks.

This does help, but at a certain point too much of these items can become more of a distraction.

Of course, creating engaging elearning is also difficult to do when the content itself is boring. It’s not impossible, but indeed difficult.

My suggestion is to not overload your elearning courses with too many bells & whistles and instead focus on breaking the monotony by inserting checkpoints, samples, examples, quizzes, surveys, and short video clips (where possible).

Having just a few of these items will keep the learner engaged as it will get them thinking about the content from different perspectives. It also beats going through the course slide-by-slide reading bullet points that are accompanied by Clipart 🙂 .