The Essentials for Creating an Engaging eLearning Experience As An Instructional Designer
Understanding how to create an engaging eLearning experience can be quite a challenge for instructional designers who are new to the eLearning industry.
Whether you’re working in corporate or government settings, you need to consider your audience when planning the look and feel of your eLearning courses, as well as the content itself.
The good news is that, once you get past the basics, there are many resources available to help you develop more comprehensive instructional design plans and create better eLearning experiences than ever before.
Here are some essential tips to get you started on developing your own engaging eLearning experience.
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Identify your goal As an Elearning Course Instructional Designer
The first step in creating any kind of instructional design is identifying your goal. After all, it makes no sense to create a course if you don’t know what you want students to learn. For example, maybe you want learners to learn how to be more productive in Outlook or able to access files easily when they’re on-the-go. Without knowing what goals your course needs to meet, it’s impossible to develop meaningful instructional design. If you want your course to be engaging, then it must answer a very specific question and teach students how to do something – not just repeat information. Before putting pen to paper, make sure that there’s a real purpose behind your work.
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Determine the learning objectives
Before you can create a course, you need to know what learning objectives you’re trying to achieve. Determine what it is you want your learners to know, understand and be able to do after taking your course (this is known as the learning objective). For example, if you wanted them to learn how employees can integrate their work and personal lives, your learning objective would be: Learners will be able to use social media effectively in their personal and professional lives.
The best way to determine your learning objectives is by considering what kind of success on the job will look like once they complete it. In other words, what are they going to be doing differently or better because of what they learned from your course?
Choose the right format for your elearning course design
You’ve mapped out your learning objective, confirmed you have a valid idea, and developed a structured outline for your content. Now it’s time to choose which instructional design format will make your course engaging and effective. While there are plenty of formats out there, one size does not fit all in learning management systems or online courses.
In order to determine which format is best suited to your training needs, you should consider what type of learner you’re working with and how they prefer to learn. Some learners need more interaction than others while some require additional visual support. It’s also important to think about each component of your course (think: text, video and audio) and whether or not that component would be better-suited for specific types of media.
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Create a clear instructional map for your elearning course
Before you start building, take some time to create a clear map of what you're going to be teaching. This instructional map is one of your most important assets. It's what guides your development and helps you anticipate challenges before they crop up. You can use TheLearning LAB platform to create a simple visual map that outlines what learning objectives will be covered in each section of your project. That way, when it comes time to write your training script, there are no surprises: You already know how things are going to go.
Instructional maps also come in handy during implementation; if someone has questions about how a lesson works or why something is being taught at a certain point in time, referencing your instructional map can clear things up quickly—no long debates necessary. If you aren't sure how best to structure your content, creating an instructional map should help get everything straight in your head.
Provide enough practice opportunities
In an ideal world, learners would be able to practice each new concept until they're confident enough to move on. Unfortunately, many eLearning designers create courses that offer little more than a single opportunity per concept. And while learners might understand it their first time through, they may struggle when they revisit it weeks later. A good instructional design plan will spell out exactly how and when you'll provide opportunities for learners to practice. It's also important to have different types of practice activities—for example, exercises that allow learners to interact with content in a variety of ways. The more opportunities you can give them to try something out in a safe environment before they do it in real life, the better off your learning experience will be. Of course, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Rather than building one way to deliver practice into every lesson, focus on providing opportunities that are applicable across multiple lessons or scenarios in order to increase overall retention.
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Include real-world connections in your course design
Using real-world connections can engage learners in a way that other methods of instruction cannot. For example, if you are teaching about dog anatomy, you could use pictures of various dogs (that have been properly obtained) to explain different body parts.
While some people may argue that using real-world examples as part of your instructional design is cheating and doesn’t really make it elearning, it makes sense to use these types of techniques when they are relevant and helpful to your content. You want to keep your learners engaged and interested in what they are learning so that they retain more information throughout their training sessions.
If a concept or idea becomes boring or uninteresting, then many learners will likely give up trying to learn from it. By including real-world examples, you are showing your trainees that you understand how they think and how they learn; not just by what we tell them but also through seeing things demonstrated.
Consider metrics
Besides all of your other learning and instructional design plans, it’s essential to consider how you’ll measure your success with any given project. Think about it: How will you know if you’ve created a successful e-learning experience? What kind of metrics will help drive that assessment? Knowing where you want to go and why is critical to getting there in a meaningful way—and without wasting too much time or resources along the way. In fact, learning how to effectively use analytics tools—such as SurveyMonkey, or Google Analytics—isn’t just good practice; it could be one of your most powerful tools when creating an engaging e-learning experience.
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Creating an Engaging eLearning Experience
One of the best platforms for instructional designers to create an amazing elearning experience today is TheLearning LAB. At TheLearning LAB, we designed our product specifically with instructional designers in mind.
TheLearning LAB is part of the G Suite, so we can handle all content creation, delivery, and reporting from there.
This saves us time during development because we won't have to design any unique interfaces or software solutions, making our platform a win-win for both instructional designers and the students. Get in touch today.