The 5 eLearning Practices You Need to Ditch Now
This blog post is a must-read for all eLearning professionals hoping to become better ones this year. We need to STOP doing things in order to improve results or make time for new strategies. Let's make today the day where we stop spending time on the aspects of eLearning that don't work and instead use the time we save to create new and better tactics.
Here’s what to stay away from and why — complete with recommended alternatives:
Create, publish and forget
eLearning and HR professionals sometimes will just create a course, publish it and forget all about it. Evaluation of your courses is essential but often under used. Certainly, one benefit of eLearning is the ability to modify content without having to redistribute materials or retrain instructors. Therefore, take advantage of the tools available to you, and don’t be afraid of your mistakes – correct them!
What to Do Instead:
Focus on getting feedback. See if the eLearning class is comparable to previously offered instructor-led class. Specifically look for technical problems; sometimes students are hesitant to point out flaws unless specifically asked.
Evaluate. Evaluation definitely helps you to improve your eLearning so that it’s even a greater success next time round. Student performance, course design and instruction and media quality are just some of the aspects that should be monitored.
Creating Complex and Lengthy Courses
We’ve all been in an eLearning course or training session that seemed to go on for an eternity. Questionable eLearning professionals would adopt this practice to quickly build eLearning courses just by transferring content online.
This practice ruins user experience and could make learners hate your courses and never wanto come back. Not to mention, it’s completely boring.
What to Do Instead:
Keep your eLearning courses resourceful! But only in a way that reasonably provides value and builds upon your audience’s immediate context. Make courses that crisp with relevant content so that learners can remember only the important features.
Sacrifice content from the course. First, realize that the course can’t go on forever. Then, break that complex and lengthy material down into digestible and manageable modules. The best solution is not exactly – simply, as long as you can keep the learner engaged. Make sure to remember the factors that hold their attention, for example short videos (maximum 5 minutes each), animations and visual representations.
Developing Emotionless Courses
Why create eLearning courses that nobody wants to take? Chances are that you’re courses are missing the key ingredient that could make learners care about the information. Many eLearning courses use to be dry, text-heavy, and emotionless. If you really have absolutely no idea how to insert some excitement, you should think of how a customer experience works. You want to design experiences, not just learning. You can’t make learners learn, you can only create environments that are conducive to learning. You’ll see how factoring emotion into your eLearning is going to take it to the next level, where it really works.
What to Do Instead:
Help learners emotionally understand why this experience is important to them, and maintain that interest through the entire course. If people care, they learn better. Period. We need to get beyond just the cognitive level, and address the emotional level. More specifically ensure interest in the stories you use to illustrate examples or even better, use photographs that create a strong emotional connections.
Including Unrealistic Business Scenarios
Stop creating scenarios that don’t place the student in their context. If it’s something your learners don’t believe or identify with, and if they can't take what they’ve learned in the eLearning program and actually transfer it to their day job, then your eLearning course will completely fall on its face.
What to Do Instead:
Be realistic. Focus on your audience’s reality. Get to know your audience, identify common problems that must be resolved, the specialized or specific vocabulary of their work environment, and their reactions to various cases. For example, the images and videos should portray settings, style of dress, and accurate “jargon” for your workforce. If your content is realistic, relevant, and directed at them, they will feel identified with the scenario depicted, thus retaining the information as eagerly.
Writing easy and downright stupid quiz questions
We’ve all seen poorly written quiz questions where there’s one good answer choice and all of the rest are obviously not right. You want to stay away from these types of questions. They hold no real value, are pointless and don’t do anything to measure the learner. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’ll find effectively test your learners with these lame quizzes, because you won’t.
What to Do Instead:
You need to focus on getting better wrong choices from your subject matter expert. Don’t just make up stuff as filler. If you prefer, cut down the choices, for example instead of five multiple choices, use just three. This means less work and you’re less likely to come up with a wasted choice. Remember that every course doesn’t necessarily needs a quiz at the end. Don’t just include a quiz for the sake of it.
What would you add to this list, or rather, delete from your own eLearning strategy?
