Developing E-Learning training courses isn’t as easy as just deciding on a whim to take your training courses to new heights. A lot of hard work goes into developing E-Learning training courses that meet the needs of your organization and give learners information they need to know. Here are some tips for ensuring that the E-Learning training course you develop will be a success:
- Assess your needs. While there can be many different topics that are suitable for E-Learning environments, some are not. You should consider the material you need to train people on and in what manner they need to receive that information.
- Plan the content. The key to any successful E-Learning training course is the content. Clear, concise content can help you make the biggest impact on your trainees. You’ll also want to make sure that the course material is relevant to the learner.
- Design the course for clarity. You want your course to look good, but you also need to make sure that it effectively communicates the content. Focus on solid instructional design and visual communication elements when developing your E-Learning training course.
- Get managers involved. The involvement of managers should be more than just sending a link to employees and telling them when to have the course completed by. Managers should give employees opportunities to demonstrate the things they’ve learned in the course.
- Offer refresher training. To keep people from forgetting all that they have learned, offer follow-up E-Learning training courses or sessions with refresher content. This will help them retain information.
The key to conducting successful E-Learning training lies in being able to tap into the learner’s need for the course content and finding a way to engage them in the content effectively. With these tips for success, you’ll find that your E-Learning training courses communicate the content you need to share with trainees in a way that they’ll be responsive to.
One of the concerns with e-learning is that most agencies are not following these tips. Our agency has decided that we can save on costs by doing more e-learning. I don’t disagree with this. Unfortunately, what has happened is different offices have sent lots of information out to contractors and asked them to make them “e-learning” courses. All this amounts to is boring, click and read e-information and it is giving e-learning a bad reputation within the agency. I am trying to correct that through the implimentation of an organized approach to developing e-learning courses based on some of the tips outlined here. One of the requirements for my team in developing this approach is to do some benchmarking with organizations who have successfully converted and have good e-learning programs. If anyone has a good program and good approach that works well, please share some ideas.
Nice, Andrew. We have to begin with the end user in mind. If we want training to be more effective, we have to first understand who is being trained and how they’ll use the knowledge, skills, and abilities.
E-Learning may be the answer or part of a larger answer. Sometimes training in tandem with different forms (classroom, e-Learning, mobile, gaming, etc.) may actually provide a better long-term solution for students to learn and maintain proficiency.
Dave, you’re right, a blended approach to training will definitely prove more effective. One of the biggest challenges to implimentation is getting the organization to see beyond the traditional idea of the training event (a day or a week in the classroom) and focus on the individuals learning and development of skills over a period of time.