A Guide to Creating eLearning Courses Like a Pro

With eLearning and your LMS there are 2 routes you can take — either purchase pre-made courses or create your own. Lets assume that you have decided to create your own courses.

Now what?

Courses creation is both an art and science combined. It needs a focus on research to understand your audience and creative flair to deliver the contents in an engaging way.

What we have done is created below a list of key things to consider when creating an eLearning course.

These are aspects which are crucial to the success of your course but you still need to be flexible with your approach — feedback is your friend and if it leads you down one route, make sure there’s evidence to back this up.

1. Passionately Understand the Needs of your Audience

I say passion because it’s so important but yet so few individuals take the time to understand their audience and their needs.

So how do you research this?

Chances are you will be creating courses for an industry that you have either gathered a lot of experience in or at least one that you could consider yourself to be an expert in.

Take advantage of this knowledge and start from here. You will personally know right away what is considered mandatory in your industry such as Fire Safety etc.

These are the fundamentals of your courses, however, supplementary/additional courses will be needed.

Side note: Decide now if you will try to get creative with the fundamentals or stick to a standard template (this may save you money but depending on your audience it could hurt engagement).

So how do you understand your audience? Your team?

Simple. You need to ask questions. Ask for feedback and general input, constantly.

2. Create a Clear Learning Design Concept

Amongst your research, questionnaires, and surveys you are most likely to have understood the needs of your audience.

The difficult part is thinking about the design concept to engage and motivate the audience. Unfortunately, even when the needs are met if the courses are not visually appealing or haven’t been thought about for long-term use it can cause friction and hurt engagement.

Things that need to be considered during this process:

• Types of interactions — Mid-course tests, interactive videos, content etc.
• Layout of the course — How many videos? Duration of the videos? Number of tests?
• Structure — How will everything be put together as a final product to go live with?

Something that many people speak of in the startup world to measure business ideal viability is to create an MVP — Minimum Viable Product — which will provide at least some glimpse of the idea.

The MVP phase will need to have a rapid prototyping focus which works, initially, on a feedback loop. Have a test group, provide prototypes, gather feedback, implement most useful feedback and loop back around.

3. The Creative

If you happen to have a brand book of standardised requirements — font types, colours, logos, graphics etc — then you are already a little bit a head in the process of styling and design the courses.

This is a crucial aspect to consider for maximum engagement and use by your audience. Again there’s a certain amount of creativity that needs to go with mandatory training, however, it helps to stick with a style across all courses and ensure that it resembles the branding/styling of the company throughout.

Consistency throughout content and courses is key as it eliminates any potential confusion as the user may assume that a change in styling may not be from the same provider.

Final designs can be given the OK during quality assurance stages, this will include feedback from users and test groups. External input is always valuable at this point. You would never call your baby ugly!

4. Find Stakeholders and Work with Them

If you are the creator of your course there’s going to be a lot of passion that, unfortunately, will cloud your judgement on everything.

Having multiple stakeholders throughout the design and research phase provides you with more eyes, more knowledge and more experience. Stakeholders do not have to just be technical people who are building the platform or creating the video.

They can be anyone within your business, in fact, it’s encouraged to work with people from all functions of the business.

5. Ensuring Quality

Last and not least, quality assurance. This is the moment you find out if everything that was envisioned actually works. If it’s enjoyed or picked up by users. If the research was viable.

There’s a lot to consider during this stage too.

You need to expect a lot of grammar checking, re-watching videos over and over, re-reading content and re-taking tests over and over. It’s not for a lost cause though. It’s for the audience.

Depending on the size and scale of your operation and the elearning needs you have. It may be wise to run with Beta and Alpha releases with only a handful of people. Remember the feedback loop? It’s amazing for eliminating excess hours spent trying ideas and messing around with text.