12 Steps to Creating an Elearning Course From Scratch
Creating an eLearning course might seem like an extremely simple task until it's time to actually create one. Developing a course that effectively teaches knowledge and skills is a complicated process that can make anyone give up.
If you're looking to create an eLearning course, here are 12 tips to guide you on creating your first course. These tips are steps that make up the entire process of course creation, which means you can start implementing them right away.
1. Conduct a Needs Analysis: Why the eLearning course?
When starting a new eLearning project, it's important to first take a step back and decide whether or not an eLearning course can actually address the issues you're trying to solve. Sometimes, the problem may be caused by something other than a lack of knowledge and skills, which an eLearning course provides. It can be hard realizing this from the beginning, which is why you need to do a needs analysis.
When it comes to conducting a needs analysis, one of the first things to do is to collect data. You have an array of options to choose from including surveys, interviews, focus groups, and more in-depth data collection methods that provides insights about past training, desired results, and the current state of your workforce.
Keep in mind that the goal is to capture the strengths and weaknesses of your learners. After collating the results from the data collection, look for knowledge gaps and problems so you can ascertain your learner's performance and identify knowledge and skill gaps. This will inform your plan for design since you have a thorough understanding of what they need.
At the end of this step, you should be able to answer the following questions:
· What problem is this training going to solve?
· What are the expected outcomes?
· In what way is the organization or client going to benefit from this training? How will it help them achieve their business goals?
ELearning Agency
2. Conduct an Audience Analysis: Who are the learners for your eLearning course?
Knowing your audience goes a long way in determining how you create the content. For instance, you don't want to write a course entirely in French for a group of people just beginning to learn French. Such an attempt is sure to fail. Analyzing your audience will help you discover their technical capabilities, existing knowledge, basic demographics, and how they can use the knowledge the course provides.
Part of eLearning course design failures come from not having a firm knowledge of your audience. This may lead to the courses being too difficult or too easy or completely irrelevant to the employees' job.
After conducting an audience analysis, you should be able to answer the following questions:
· What is their current role and background?
· What are their expectations?
· What prior knowledge do they have?
· What are their current skills?
· What is using this content going to be like for them in their roles?
3. Conduct a Content Analysis: What elearning content is relevant and useful?
Now that you have established the purpose of your course and who your audience is, you're almost close to developing the course content. A course can be quite rich and detailed but have no value for learners. So the goal isn't just to share knowledge but provide what your audience will find relevant and helpful. This is why this step is critical.
The idea is to search for content using the problem you found out in the first step. You can easily do this by breaking the content into different categories and types:
· Categories: Declarative, procedural, and situated.
· Types: Fact, concept, process, procedure, principles, interpersonal skills, and attitudes.
· Structure: Now sort the content using the type of groupings above to see how the information is interconnected and how important each piece is, what category is most prevalent, information gaps, and how the information should be arranged.
ELearning Agency - content development
4. Define your elearning objectives
Learning objectives refer to the expected outcome of the training, especially in the sense of what learners should be capable of by the end of it.
Be clear about the learning objectives as it will help you measure how successful the eLearning course is. When you have figured out what you want the training to achieve, ensure that the content doesn't stray far from them.
If you're not confident of the objectives you've created, you can check how solid they are using the SMART criteria:
· Specific: What exactly should the course achieve?
· Measurable: Can the progress of the objectives be measured?
· Achievable: Are the objectives realistic enough to be achieved?
· Relevant: How will the objective help your audience?
· Time-sensitive: Can learners accomplish the objectives by the end of the course?
5. Create your instructional design strategy
You need to figure out an effective way to communicate the course content to your audience and this is what this step is about. An instructional strategy refers to the approach or method by which your course will be developed to engage learners. Examples of strategies you can use include: storytelling, discovery learning, situational learning, etc. To make the right choice, think about:
· The type of content: How best to teach a fact or concept
· Impact: How to make the training relevant and helpful
· Objective: How best the objectives can be achieved
Elearning Platform
6. Create a storyboard
A storyboard is a rough, graphic representation of how the text, pictures and other elements will look on a page. It is a powerful way to visually present your content so you can see how your page will look and determine how best to put the elements together.
This is a critical stage, so make sure your client has seen and approved the content. You don't want to go ahead on your own only for your client to disapprove of the content later.
7. Decide on which technology to use
Deciding on the authoring tools to use and the most suitable learning management system can make or mar the entire eLearning course creation. Factors to take into consideration include the reviews from other designers, available features, cost, etc.
It also helps to ask questions like:
· How many people will be accessing the program at one time? What's the average and the maximum?
· Is your hardware (including servers, database, and computers) capable of handling the creation?
· Will learners access the course using the company's devices or their own?
· Are there applications required to be installed?
· Does your company have enough bandwidth to run the courses?
· Any plan for security and backing up the information? Etc.
ELearning Platform
8. Develop your prototype
An eLearning prototype is a mini-version of how your complete functional course will look like. It is a representation of the look and feel of the project. is also used to test out technical functionality. The goal is to find the best fit before wasting resources on designing the whole course then finding out something doesn't work. Make sure your client approves the prototype before you move to the next step.
9. Create the elearning course
Now go ahead and start creating the course but make sure you follow the objectives you outlined in the previous steps. Course designers make use of different models when creating a course. Some of the most popular are: ADDIE/Sam, Gagne's 9 principles, Action Mapping, etc.
eLearning Platform - content development
10. Review and publish Your Elearning course
Present the elearning course content to both your team and your client, and let them give you their feedback. Use the corrections to improve the course content and then publish!
11. Promote and market your elearning course
A course is only useful when learners know about it. Your next job is to get the course across to those it was designed for. Develop both an internal and external promotion plan so you can create awareness of the course.
12. Review the effectiveness of yoru elearning course
There's no other way to determine how effective your elearning course has been except by receiving feedback from learners that have purchased your course. The feedback they give will provide insights about what you did right and wrong so you can make your next course better. Also, you might want to involve both your team and your client in evaluating the results.