I saw this video clip the other day on Instagram about how comedian and teacher, Leslie Robinson, views mandatory training videos.

It’s funny and it’s true!

What’s even better are the comments like this one:

“I had 7 of those to watch one day, tried watching them on different browser windows simultaneously, but no luck, those developers outsmarted me.”

“Yeah, they’re messing up our learning process” 🤣

Click here to view on Instagram.

The comments are loaded with good feedback that is so true to many e-learning courses and online training.

• Complaints about locked navigation
• Tips to not click complete until you meet a minimum time requirement
• Irrelevant information
• Stupid questions in the middle to get past the locked navigation

Here’s the deal. We all recognize that there’s something broken with e-learning. We’ve probably had to make these courses and also take them.

So what’s the solution?

Create Better E-Learning

Here are four tips to prime the pump:

• Show your clients this video and tell them they don’t want that or they’re wasting the organization’s time and money.
• Face the facts. Sometimes you can’t get past this type of training. It’s what the client wants. In that case, build the best and quickest course possible.
• Focus on the learner. Make the content more relevant to their needs. What will they learn? Why is it important?
• Get rid of locked navigation and find better ways to make the course more engaging.

What would you add this list?

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When it comes to courses, there are two key stakeholders: the person who commissions the course and the person who consumes it. Each of these stakeholders has their own objectives and needs for the course, and ensuring that these are met can be challenging.

For the person who commissions the course, their objectives will usually be closely aligned with their organization’s goals. However, these objectives may not always be in alignment with the needs of the learner. And for the person consuming the course, it’s important that their learning needs are met. In an ideal world, the course would be designed with their needs in mind, and be tailored to their individual needs and how the course is relevant to them. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case, and courses are often designed without taking the learner’s needs into account.

It’s vital that both the person commissioning the course and the person consuming it have their needs met if the course is to be successful. By taking into account the needs and objectives of both stakeholders, courses can be designed that are beneficial and enjoyable for both. We discussed that a bit here in this post, Three Ways to Make Your E-Learning Content Meaningful.

As an instructional designer, it’s up to you to be the bridge between the organization commissioning the course and the people who will be consuming it. You need to ensure that the course objectives align with the organization’s desired outcomes. The best way to do this is through performance consulting. This involves identifying the current state of the organization, why it isn’t getting the desired results, and what the e-learning course needs to do in order to achieve the desired outcome.

Many times, courses are built without any input from the learner and can be too simple, a waste of time, or irrelevant. I know from experience, taking hundreds of hours of “training” without ever being asked how it was relevant to my role. But it’s not always easy to create that bridge, especially when it’s mandated compliance training with no regard for learning outcomes.

That’s why, as a course creator, it’s important to be a bridge builder and find a way to connect the organization’s goals with the learning needs of the person consuming the course. It’s not always easy when a lot of training is mandated, such as compliance training with no regard for any real learning outcomes. However, it is important to try and influence the bridge building as much as possible, in a friendly and encouraging manner.

Bridging the organization’s goals with the learner’s expectation is one way to ensure you create meaningful and effective online training.

What are some ways you build that bridge in your organization?

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I’m putting together notes for an upcoming webinar on How to Develop a Successful Online Learning Strategy. I’m not one for industry hype and like to take a more pragmatic approach when offering tips because they tend to align with the reality of where organizations are compared to what they think they should be.

I’ve been thinking about the promise of e-learning and everything you read in books and online and hear at conferences from thought leaders about what effective e-learning should be.

E-Learning Thought Leader

There’s a disconnect between thought leaders and the reality of the e-learning industry. I think that disconnect happens because many of the thought leaders are also consultants and course vendors who get hired to build training.

Their perspective is different.

They are brought in by senior level management with business objectives that require some sort of training intervention. That manager typically has a healthy budget which can influence the development of the right type of training. Because they’re spending real money, they are also accountable to real results.

Because of this, the hired vendor has a commitment from the organization and the opportunity to do the level of analysis required to build and implement an effective training program. Plus, the majority of the courses they build tend to be performance-based courses tied to performance metrics.

E-Learning Course Builder

On the flip side, many of the people who build e-learning courses day-to-day aren’t afforded the same luxury.

From my experience, the internal e-learning teams often don’t have a seat at the table so they become order takers without access to the business intelligence (if that’s not an oxymoron) that determined the need for the course in the first place.

Which means they create a lot of content that’s not connected to measurable performance objectives. Thus many of the courses they create are informational or compliance courses not tied to applicable skills.

Also, there are a lot of single person-teams who have to do everything from content development to instructional design to graphic design to course authoring to publishing to LMS administration. And they do this with no significant budget. That’s a lot different than the vendor who gets the right types of resources to build effective e-learning.

In that world you can see how a vendor who has access to different resources and types of opportunities has a different perspective about e-learning effectiveness.

Build Better E-Learning

But how does any organization who doesn’t hire vendors build an effective e-learning program?

Here are some of the things I’ll cover in the webinar:

• Focus on both production efficiency and effectiveness as measures of success
• Understand the tools you use and develop a strategy around which ones to use and when
• Create a strategic content model to identify the type of course being built, the right objectives, and implementing the right performance support
• Upskill your e-learning developers so they are equipped to build the courses you need
• More 🙂

If you’re just getting started with e-learning or want to build a more effective online training program, watch the webinar.

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As a steward of an organization’s e-learning resources, it’s essential to make decisions that improve the bottom line. Aligning e-learning courses to the organization’s performance goals is key to ensuring positive results.

However, there are a number of other factors to consider when building out courses, such as cost and time savings. E-learning courses can reduce the cost incurred for facilitated classroom training, as well as increase accessibility for those who can’t attend scheduled training. Additionally, a great e-learning program can provide a return-on-investment to justify its presence within the organization.

By taking into account all of these factors, e-learning can add immense value to an organization. Here are three ways that you can state the value to your organization:

1. Cost: Focus on not just the cost of projects and development time, but also the value you bring in comparison to outsourcing. What would training programs cost if you weren’t doing them? Consider the long-term savings that often accompany in-house training.
2. Time: How quickly can you deliver the training? Time is money and delivering the training in a timely manner is critical. Consider how much time people spend in your course in comparison to the time commitment to learn a different way. Can you provide the same or better results in a shorter amount of time?
3. Performance: Increased performance has a direct impact on the bottom line. Link your course objectives to performance objectives to demonstrate the impact of the training. If assessment and performance metrics are difficult to quantify, look for alternative ways to demonstrate the effectiveness of the training, such as customer satisfaction or employee retention.

Courses should focus on specific performance improvements for best results; when this isn’t possible, cost and time improvements can be shown to demonstrate value.

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I get a lot of questions from organizations that are at the beginning of their e-learning journey and not quite sure how to get started. The following tips are three key considerations to get your program moving in the right direction.

What Type of Course Are You Building?

I like to keep things simple. Generally, there are two types of courses that get built: explainer and performance.

• Explainer courses present key content critical to the learning experience. This can be content like user manuals, video tutorials, company policies, etc. These courses generally combines content with context. For example, an explainer course not only shares information but adds context to how the information is relevant. But they generally stop at sharing the content and don’t include relevant practice opportunities.
• Performance courses focus on the performance expectations. What is the learner supposed to do? How can they learn it in the course? What activities get built in the course for the learner to practice and prove their skills and understanding?

Both types of courses have value. However, if you have clear performance expectations and you build an explainer type course, then you need to determine what activities outside the course are required for the learner to practice and prove.

Craft Clear Course Expectations

The end-goal isn’t to build a course. Instead, the course is a solution to meet the end-goal. Thus, the end-goal needs to be determined and clearly stated. After the person takes the course, what are they supposed to do?

Odds are that many of the explainer courses that are created have no “supposed to do” attached to them. And that’s why a lot of online courses aren’t effective.

• Create a clear objective.
• Determine how to measure it in the course and outside of the course.
• Build practice activities and an assessment that provides proof of understanding.
• Get connected to the team that can provide the metrics outside the course so you can verify success.

Build to the Expectations of the Learner

This part is a bit challenging because often courses are designed around the content presentation and not the learner expectations. We’ve all taken annual compliance training. The content is valuable, but it’s usually not framed in a way that’s relevant to the learner. It’s content that’s mostly relevant to the organization and it’s framed that way.

However, the organization is paying you to build a course which costs money. And then your course pulls people from productive work which also costs money. If you have a 60-minute course and 100 people have to take it (assuming an average cost per employee is $100); that’s about $600,000 per 100 people. That is a lot of money. Is your course getting at least $600,000 of value?

You may not be able to control whether or not the course gets built, but you can definitely advocate to build the best type of course. And the best type of course considers the learner and how the content is relevant and meaningful.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to consider when jumpstarting your e-learning program. The key consideration is whether or not the course is built around performance expectations and then designing a product that meets those goals.

What would you add to this list if someone asked about getting their e-learning program started?

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The organization’s ultimate goal is not to build a course. Instead, the goal is to meet some sort of performance need. And in that sense, the e-learning course is a solution to meet an objective.

And this is where e-learning often falls down.

Effective training programs successfully meet learning objectives that aren’t fuzzy and non-measurable. On top of that, e-learning is usually just part of the overall training program. So it’s not the end-goal.

I’m often asked about how to build better e-learning. From my perspective, many of the courses I see aren’t very good. There are all sorts of reasons for this, but the main reason is that the courses share so much content that they present the illusion that they’re complete. But usually, they’re just content-heavy andnot tied to any meaningful objectives. Thus, they usually produce little to no tangible benefit for the organization.

If you didn’t see it, here’s an interesting article where training gets a large part of the blame for an organization’s $8 billion attrition rate. Is it fair that training gets the blame? I don’t know. But the key consideration for those of us in training is that we need to be aware of the perception and make sure that our programs are designed to actually meet objectives.

When we design e-learning courses, we need to think about the overall objective of the training program and design our courses to meet that objective. All too often, I see courses that are nothing more than glorified and interactive PowerPoint slides. These courses might be fine if the only objective is to provide information, but if the objective is to actually change behavior or improve performance, then these types of courses are doomed to fail.

The bottom line is that a course is only as good as the objectives it’s designed to meet. If you’re not sure what the objectives of your training program are, then you need to go back to the drawing board. But if you have a clear understanding of the objectives, then you can design a course that will actually help your organization meet those objectives.

And that’s the challenge for many of us who build courses. We build a lot of content that we call e-learning. But does what we build contribute to success? How do you know?

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I’m a big fan of e-learning! I’ve been in the industry for almost 30 years and I think it’s a great way to learn. I also think it’s a great way to keep people engaged in their work.

I recently had the chance to ask a group of people about their training experiences and I was surprised by how negative much of their feedback was. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not surprised that there are problems with many training courses. I’m just surprised that so many people have such negative things to say about them.

People complain about the courses they’re taking, the quality of the courses, and the fact that they’re often forced to take courses they don’t want to take.

I understand where this negativity comes from. Most people only take courses because they have to, not because they want to. And let’s be honest, a lot of courses are pretty meaningless. They’re boring, uninteresting, and poorly designed.

But I think there’s a way to change this. I think we can make e-learning more valuable for learners by making a few simple changes.

• Make sure the courses we’re creating are actually worth taking. They should be interesting, engaging, and relevant. You’re asking a person to commit their time to the course, we should respect that.
• Learners need a reason to take the course. We need to tap into what motivates them and give them a motivation to learn.
• The courses should be an actual learning experience and not just content. It’s content with context. They should be interactive and engaging, not just a glorified brochure.

If we can make these changes, I think we can make e-learning more valuable for learners. And that’s something we should all be striving for.

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When I first learned to build e-learning courses, the general instruction for building e-learning content was to craft some learning objectives, organize and present the content, and then assess the learners using some sort of simple quiz. I think that’s how a lot of people learned to build courses with many of them following a similar structure.

Back in those days, the course authoring tools weren’t easily available and building something overly sophisticated required a lot more resources. Thus, many courses were relatively simple in terms of the instructional design and the e-learning content. Nowadays, there are much more sophisticated authoring tools available, so you can build e-learning courses that are more creative and engaging.

While the tools are easier to use and there is more information available on how to build a better e-learning course, most courses still follow the same general structure: objectives, content, and quiz.

This makes sense because it’s organized, seems logical, and most e-learning course expectations probably lean more into the explainer-type content than performance. So it’s more about presenting content and a simple assessment than it is a robust learning experience.

This approach is very similar to how we’d build products on an assembly line in a factory. Design something that generally meets the needs for most people and push it out to everyone. There’s nothing wrong with this approach per se. If your content is well-designed and engaging, it can work just fine. This is especially true if all you need is tracked completion and there are no real performance requirements for the course.

However, it does have its downsides. For one, it assumes that all of the information is equally relevant to the learners and meets their learning needs. And in a world where learners are used to getting what they want when they want it, the one-size-fits-all approach to e-learning just doesn’t cut it anymore.

So what’s the solution?

Here are three general ideas to stimulate your thinking when it comes to e-learning content:

• Stay in the right lane. This may sound a bit cynical, but many courses may be important to the organization and annual compliance, but not relevant to the end user. Assembly line courses are fine for that. Don’t overbuild them and get the learners in and out and back to something more productive.
• As note above, keep the content-heavy courses simple and build the right decision-making activities in the courses that are more meaningful and tied to performance metrics.
• The key to successful learning is meaningful content and activities. Ultimately, the courses should be relevant to the learners and mirror how they’d use the content in real life. Create situations that simulate the decisions they need to make and present your content through those simulations rather than as a a series of bullet-point screens.

That’s enough to get you thinking. What would you add?

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“Step away from the solution.”

I say this all the time when building courses. It helps me and my clients focus on the training program’s core objective. The course we’re building exists to help meet the performance objective; but the course itself is not the objective.

This takes us back to what we discussed earlier: the problem of locking the course navigation. Usually the rationale is that all of the content needs to be viewed. Or, learners will skip past everything to get in and out of the course as fast as they can. Or how do we know they are learning?

The course exists for a purpose and the objective of the course isn’t the course itself. The course is a means to get to the objective. When framed from that perspective, the concern shouldn’t be “how do I guarantee that they don’t skip anything?” Instead, it should be “how do I know that they learned what they need to learn?”

The challenge is to get your client to see this. In the past, I’ve used the following illustration to help clients and subject matter experts see this.

Suppose you have a course where the learner gets a list and needs to buy some items. That’s the performance expectation. And think of your course content like the supermarket. The shelves are filled with all sorts of items.

While there are lots of goodies on the shelves, walking up and down the aisle and looking at everything is irrelevant to their learning expectations.

The learners, armed with the list and instructions, do their shopping. You’re not assessing them on how they shopped – you’re assessing them on whether they bought the right products on the list.

Now some people know how the supermarket is laid out, can find their items, and check out in record time. They’re pros!

Some people like me, need to orient to what’s there. They need to go up and down the aisles. They need to compare products. They want more context. It doesn’t matter if they take 10 minutes or an hour to do it. The performance expectation is to complete the shopping list. That’s what you assess. How well they did shows their level of understanding. Looking at the items in the store or spending a specified amount of time is mostly irrelevant.

Going back to e-elearning…

The learner’s understanding is more important than whether they are looking at a screen or not. You don’t need to make learners sit through information they already know. Instead create a way to assess the learner’s level of understanding. If they don’t know the material, you would know that through the assessment and can direct them in the course to learn what they need.

Ultimately, you establish performance expectations and in the course set a way to assess the learner’s level of understanding. If they can prove they understand, then wasting time in the course is moot. If they can’t, then they go through the content until they can. This way, you don’t have to worry about course navigation or whether a person is skipping the content or not. You can test if they skipped it by testing their understanding. That’s a better measure of success and a better learning experience.

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I often see community members asking how to lock down a course. In fact, it is one of the most common questions. The reason for this is that people want to make sure learners see everything in the course. This is especially important in compliance training, where the goal is to ensure that everyone takes the course and is exposed to all the material. Thus, many clients ask that all of the course is locked so that people can’t “skip” any of the important information.

If the goal is to create an online course so that you can report that it was completed by the end of the year and everyone who participated saw everything in it, then locking the course probably makes sense.

Skip Locked E-Learning & Measure Success a Different Way

But, if you want to achieve real results, then locking the course is not the best solution. Instead, focus on the learner’s understanding of the content. You’ll create more effective e-learning courses this way.

Think of it this way; there are two parts to every course: the information the learners need and assessing their ability to process it (which can happen through various means).

Focus less on delivering the information, and more on collecting evidence of the learner’s understanding.

If you do need to lock the course down a bit, lock it at key decision points where you can assess the person’s ability to process the information you shared and make the types of decisions they need to make using it. And at those points, you can also provide the appropriate level of feedback.

Locking the course down may seem like a great solution, but it’s misguided because the course usually exists for reasons other than sharing content.

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As we’ve mentioned throughout this blog, the default for many e-learning courses is to focus exclusively (or mostly) on content presentation. This is fine for some courses, but effective online training requires that the content is wrapped around some performance expectations and corresponding activity where the learner can practice and demonstrate competency.

In previous posts we looked at two approaches to the Tell, Show, and Do model:

• Tell, Show, and Do: A Common Model to Build Better Online Courses
• Tell, Show, Do Plus Practice & Review to Build Effective Online Training

In today’s post, we’re going to kind of flip the process and present an activity first and then build from there. I call this the HAT model (because training people like acronyms).

• Hands-on activity: Before you dive too deep into the details of the instruction, create an activity. It’s a great way to assess where they’re at. Even if you don’t use it as a formal assessment, it helps the learner see where they’re at. It also assists in clarifying objectives as they work through an activity to solve some problem. If you want to create an adaptive process, you can use the activity as a way to filter beginners from tenured learners.
• Advice: During the activity you provide advice in response to the decisions the learner makes. You can also collate the decisions and results of the activity and then provide advice as an option to progress. For example: do the activity, offer advice, review the activity, and then final decisions. The advice is a way to fill in the gaps that may be exposed during the activity since they haven’t gotten all of the content upfront.
• Tell: Complete the activity. Provide feedback as required during a debrief and then go into tell mode where you can present more structured content and add additional detail.

I like this approach because it engages the learner at the front end. It does require more forethought in the analysis and design phase than just slapping together screen after screen of content. And sometimes it can be a hard sell to customers because they expect more linear type presentation where every possible bullet point is exposed.

Regardless of the model or technique you using in constructing courses, the most important part is getting the learner to apply and practice doing what they need to do. This provides opportunities for feedback and a means to evaluate their understanding of the content. It also helps you move the courses away from linear presentations to something more dynamic and effective.

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“Tell, Show, Do” is a common instructional design model. We featured that in a previous post. The model is a simple reminder that steers the course design away from the common content dump and focuses on the action in the learning, mainly the doing part.

But I like to add, “Tell, show, do! Then practice and review!” It rhymes and is another easy thing to remember about course design. I like discussing this with clients and subject matter experts who tend to focus too much on content.

Here’s a quick recap:

• Tell them what they’ll learn. This communicates the expectations and goals. It also provides context which allows the learner to see how the course is relevant and fits into their world and expectations.
• Show them what they will “do” so they can see it in action. Seeing it before practicing allows people to build some familiarity with the process and helps eliminate some of that “just getting started” anxiety.
• Do the task. At this point, the learner should do the task that they’ve been exposed to and seen in action. In an online course, the task is usually some sort of simulated decision-making. That can be something like a role-play activity or even software simulation where the user inputs data.
• Practice the task. This is a subset of the “doing” however, the key point here is the repetition that comes with practice. E-learning courses often are weak on practicing the task more than once or twice. And when the people are outside of the course, there should be some support to practice the task in a real-world setting. The more touches they get the more opportunities to learn.
• Review what they did. This is also a subset of “doing” and goes with the process of practice, feedback, practice, feedback…At the end of the day you need to assess their level of understanding and proficiency and provide next steps, such as certification of skill or perhaps some sort of remedial process to get more practice. One challenge in the e-learning and training space is that the manager or team leads tend to abdicate the learning to the course or training program. However, there’s a lot of opportunity to enhance the training with a consistent and thorough review process outside of the e-learning course.

This is a more fleshed out Tell, Show, Do model that considers more of the practice and feedback part of the learning process. I like this technique better than the first one because it includes the review and debriefing which includes the social part of learning where new learners get a sense of where they fit and how they’re doing.

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