eLearning presents an incredible opportunity to connect employees to high quality learning opportunities in the context of their workday- but there’s nothing more frustrating than a terrible elearning course. Poorly designed elearning courses can make your employees so frustrated they lose interest in any kind of learning opportunities, no matter how well designed.
Whether you’re shopping for elearning courses to use with your employees or creating elearning courses for sale on OpenSesame, here are the 5 things that make learners crazy… and suggestions for how to avoid them.
- Too much text! eLearning courses are not ebooks. No one wants to read a “book” about sexual harassment or safety regulations while on the clock. Dense text makes training longer and less effective, so use bullet points and real life scenarios to help keep people’s attention. For example, OSHA-Ladder Safety has a very clear structure and uses images and graphs to tell the story.
- Low quality videos! How long can you tolerate a lecture by a person who dresses like it’s 1981, repeating tired buzzwords and out-of-date advice? Bad videos make your course more than just boring – it becomes laughable. Keeping your training video from being the butt of an office-wide joke doesn’t require fancy production or special effects – just good information, clearly presented, in focus.
- Too much repetition! Too many courses cover the same material over and over again, making the course longer than it needs to be. This bores learners to tears. Let them decide how many times they wish to review a concept, and make it easy to navigate within your course. The Change Game is a very creative course that teaches you how to lead change by turning you into a spaceship captain, where every new module presents a unique scenario.
- Too many quizzes! Knowledge checks and quizzes are important components in training courses, but when it comes to tests of any kind, more is not necessarily better. Use graded interactions to reinforce the accomplishment of mastering a new topic – not as filler to make your course seem more valuable. What Supervisors Need to Know about Discriminatory Harassment inserts quizzes at appropriate intervals using an instant message conversation scenario making quizzes interesting for learners.
- Out-of-date content! Would you be interested in learning what models companies like yours used to optimize productivity in 1993? Do you want to know how to use Windows 98? Compliance requirements, safety regulations and business strategies are being innovated constantly. To be effective, courses need to evolve with the times. Android App Development for Beginners is a course that meets people’s training expectations in the smart device era.
eLearning is supposed to be effective and efficient. It should be a good investment for buyers, a sustainable business for sellers, and a competence improvement opportunity for trainees. For expert advice on creating elearning content people will love using, be sure to check out these 3 Tips to Developing Compelling Content that Sells Itself.
(Image by Jerry Bunker)