Creative tips and tricks

3 Ways To Instantly Kill the effectiveness of e-Learning -

Mar 23, 2022

1. Poor Cosmetics

You shouldn't judge a book by its cover... but you do it every day. If your course looks anything similar to powerpoint presentations, your course's effectiveness has suffered the blow. The corporate arena as well as educational settings are suffering from "death-by-powerpoint" every single day. One of the worst things anyone would want to do is spend hours advancing slides in a "player" in lieu of Microsoft PowerPoint. This is a potential danger for anyone who develops using Articulate, SNAP by Lectora, or any other plugin. If you decide to use them, ensure that there is some form of animation and strategic infusion of flash components.

2. Making Transition Based on Assumptions

Once, I reviewed the e-learning course of a colleague, ensuring that the content was logical, as well as the course's flow. Well, the content was right on, surely because of the many hours spent meeting with SMEs and laying out the company's process. It wasn't that poor, as each lecture and subject was presented in a nice sequential order. So what killed it? The changes. My colleague was guilty to jump from one subject to the next without creating an logical connection. Most of the time the only thing required was a sentence or two explaining what the reader had been reading and what's going to be discussed the next time (and what the reasons). A simple solution to a major difficulty. If this class was used in its entirety, students would get frustrated since the material flow was not properly linked.

3. Consistency

It's a great one and could be the largest of them all. It is applicable to both the look and feel of the training as well as the contents. If your course isn't uniform with either one of these areas people won't be able to trust your details. The most inconsistent aspects of courses include:

  • In one instance, then using the full version of the acronym in another.
  • E-Learning, e-Learning and e-Learning or the term "e-learning ... If you're using a term that starts with an underscore, ensure that you're using it the same way
  • Bullet point font colors change
  • The font size can change
  • Animations that feature the same item are different
  • The content of the summary can be structured in different ways for different classes
  • Course flow (pick an instructional format that you will stick with it across all lessons)

I am sure that there many other killers of the course out there (heck, I can think of three others right now... Perhaps it's time to write a post) These three are among most common and the easiest to correct when it comes to development.