E-learning best practices: 9 cornerstones of effective course creation
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This article was originally published on Easygenerator's blog.
Most people in the workforce are experts in a certain field and are happy to share their knowledge with others. However, very few people are experts when it comes to creating e-learning courses. That’s why we have identified nine cornerstones — or e-learning best practices — that can guide you in producing an effective e-learning content design.
What are e-learning best practices?
In e-learning, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Effective e-learning content is tailored to learners’ objectives and needs as well as your organization’s wider structure, resources, and goals. Still, there are a few established best practices for e-learning design to ensure that regardless of the topic or your previous course creation experience, the final content is optimized for learner engagement and effectiveness. Below, we’ll take a look at some of these e-learning best practices to show you how you can design useful e-learning content that effectively meets your organization’s learning needs.
1. Use learning objectives
A clear learning objective is a must-have to start. Before you do anything else, start by setting a?SMART goal?for your course or assessment. This is one of the best practices for e-learning design that ensures your course is set up for success from the get-go. What will your learners know or be able to do after they have completed your course? Your course’s goal helps you define one or more specific learning objectives.
2. Create courses in the right order
When creating a new e-learning course, most people start by writing educational content and then maybe add a few questions at the end. The problem with this approach is that you wind up with?PowerPoint-like courses?that are neither engaging nor effective.
The right order for creating high-impact courses is:
There are two key advantages to following this approach. First, it allows you to keep your courses shorter and more effective. Second, it helps you as an author to focus only on sharing content that is relevant to the course or resource.
Read more about creating courses in the right order. And learn more about?how to optimize your e-learning design?to fit your organization’s unique learning needs.
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3. Use various course templates to beat the forgetting curve
In 1885, psychologist and memory researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered that human beings forget 90% of what they learn within just hours of learning it. This is because of the way our brain is wired.
Repetition is the key to retaining knowledge. Therefore, the most effective courses are not lengthy, one-time sessions, but a series of small, repetitive units offered over time. This means providing learners with opportunities to repeat the learning in different forms. Varying your course templates can help you achieve the most effective educational structure.
Using a variety of question types can also help your learners?beat the forgetting curve. Our research has shown that 56% of e-learning question types used in Easygenerator are single- or multiple-choice. Don’t just repeat, ask the question and offer the knowledge in different formats, e.g. a quiz, a scenario question, text, visuals, video. In other words, you should make use of a variety of question types in order to gain maximum impact from your course.
Additionally, keep in mind that learners may want to access their learning content from different devices so your content should be designed with these different formats in mind. To learn more about creating courses that are easily accessible across platforms, check out our tips about?how to create responsive e-learning.
At Easygenerator, we make it easy to switch up your learning content by offering an extensive library of diverse (and responsive!) course templates that can be used for free.?Check our courses templates?to get started today.
4. E-learning design: bite-size is the right size
When it comes to effective e-learning design, big things come in small packages. Avoid designing courses or assessments that are too large for people to easily digest.
As an e-learning best practice, aim for a course length of 5 to 15 minutes. If you cannot reach your learning goal within 30 minutes, split it into multiple learning objectives or use a learning path (create a series of courses).
Use short paragraphs and sentences and get straight to the point. Ideally, no more than 25% of your sentences should exceed 20 words.
Want to know more? Read the rest of the article here.