In yesterday’s Advisor you learned about what you should do when revamping or creating your e-learning courses. Here’s what you shouldn’t do.
Don’ts
Forget to Identify and Understand Who Your Courses Are For
One of the most substantial errors any e-learning professional can make when developing e-learning courses is forgetting to assess and analyze beforehand their learning audiences or the subject matter their courses will cover. When developing your e-learning courses with clear learning objectives, don’t forget:
- Who will be taking and interacting with the courses themselves.
- What they expect and hope to achieve when taking your courses.
- What they know and don’t know about the subject matter covered in your courses.
- How they want and expect to interact and engage with the material in each course. (Do they want videos, documents, collaborative platforms, or something else? What will help them learn the material the best?)
Make Course Modules Too Long or Complicated
While e-learning courses should be comprehensive, make sure to keep each module inside each course as brief as possible. Keep video content under a few minutes. Make text documents 2 pages long or fewer. And don’t make complicated modules with more than one learning objective in them. Otherwise, your learners will get distracted with other content on the Internet or things going on around them as they’re on their laptops or looking at their smartphones.
You should, however, include multiple links to additional resources and media at the end of each module with related course content so that learners can take a deeper dive into topics they’re interested in learning more about on their own time.
Neglect to Promote Your Courses
Even if you’ve created the greatest e-learning courses on Earth, no one will take them if they don’t know about them or see why they’re valuable to them. Share promotional e-mails and status updates that highlight your new and popular courses often so employees know how to access them and why they’ll want to access them. Gaining executive buy-in also ensures other managers and leaders across your organization will help you promote your e-learning courses as well. This way, your courses will always have a steady stream of participants.
Fail to Consult Analytics and Petition Feedback
Being able to consult analytics and data that your e-learning platform automatically collects to continually improve your e-learning courses is one of the best benefits of administering e-learning courses. On a rolling basis, you should see how many course participants you have, who is participating, assessment scores, behavioral analytics and more. And petition learners for feedback about your e-learning courses (especially when they’re new) so you know if they’re effective and engaging. Consulting analytics and petitioning your learners for feedback is the only way to continually improve and enhance your e-learning course offerings.
If you want to reap all the benefits that e-learning offers, be sure to follow the don’ts for creating e-learning courses listed above, as well as the do’s mentioned in yesterday’s Advisor.