The Painstaking Art of Developing Successful eLearning
Creating eLearning is nothing less than making a Swiss Watch.
While the learner experiences a good curriculum design with intuitive and real-life scenarios, just like the owner of the watch who just sees the hands tick and the calendar move, only an instructional designer/ watch-maker understands what it takes to run it flawlessly.
There are a million moving pieces in an eLearning, which if missed or not put together correctly can result in an unsuccessful training. Here are some of the key pieces that an instructional designer must include to make training successful.
1. KISS (Keep it Short and Simple)
For an SME even the tiniest detail is as important as it gets. But an Instructional Designer must think through the Cognitive Load. It is here where the nice to have chaff is sorted from the need to have wheat. This helps the learner remember the key takeaways without losing focus.
The thumb-rule of content delivery is to break the content into small logical chunks that get to the meat in few minutes and wrap it up before it gets too lengthy. Such chunking not only saves learners time but helps in linking relevant information for better long term recall.
During my early days as an Instructional Designer I was tasked to develop an eLearning course on monotonous content such as Banking Regulations, and my mentor had only one instruction for me. Make it Fun!
Since then, I took this as my primary resolution for all the courses that I developed.
eLearning can be fun, or engaging.
If an Instructional Designer blames the content for boring courses, it means he needs to work more on the content. Whether it is Soft Skills training, Information Security, or KYC Documentation, they all can be fun or engaging, if not both.
But what if the content doesn’t lend itself to humor? Well, then we can use relevant real-life examples to connect the content to the learner.
For further reading, visit our: eLearning Development Blog
