Of course your e-learning software comes with a great assortment of e-learning templates and characters to use in your online training courses. But, really, who doesn’t like additional free illustrations to use in e-learning courses?

Recently, I shared a few free illustrations that can be modified for your online training. Hopefully, you found a use for them.

Free Illustrations for E-Learning

Here are a few more from Open Doodles. What I like about them is that they’re simple and they’d work great for an informal course or one where you want a more organic look and feel.

Modify the Free Illustrations

What’s nice about these illustrations is that you can modify them simply with a few clicks.

On the site, you’ll see the option to download the graphics, modify them or even download some compositions.

Ideas for Free Illustrations

Download the files as SVG and you can edit them. If you’re not sure how to use them, they offer a few examples that may give you some ideas.

I’d consider them to be good decorative images to either set a tone for your course or add some visual interest.

Hope you enjoy. Be sure to give props to those made them available.

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There are so many creative examples in the e-learning community. Many of them you can see in the weekly e-learning challenges. If you don’t have it on your docket to review them every week, you should. You can checkout the recap every Thursday for some good inspiration and often fun examples.

Here’s an e-learning example from Sarah Hodge that wasn’t part of the e-learning challenges but is a great example. Some of the things I like about this demo:

Check out her example. And the next step is to try to figure out how it’s built. That’s a great way to learn to use your e-learning software.

• Creative use of animations throughout, starting with the opening transition
• Excellent use of simple graphics to create an engaging interaction
• Good self assessment…not everything needs to be graded; and this could be used in all sorts of contexts
• Reuses some items shared in the community
• Visual prompts for right/wrong; learner self assess and the colors dynamically change on drag
• Subtle (and appropriate sound effects); often we don’t use these

Sarah Hodge does great work and she has some other cool e-learning examples in the community. I love her How to Fight a Bear and Live demo (which I featured before) and this Mad Libs design, another fun assessment idea with a free download.

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Effective e-learning is more than putting together screens of information and presenting them to learners. Instead it’s a process of curating content and then communicating it in a way that the learner understands and ultimately can apply.

The challenge sometimes rests in how the content is communicated, which then determines the level of understanding for proper application.

In a previous post, we did a quick overview of some of the challenges with communication and how to overcome them. Today, I’d like to take a quick look at the basic communication process and how that impacts what we do with our online course design.

Overview of the Communication Process

Here is the basic communication process.

• Generally, there’s a message and this has to go from one person to the other.
• The first person encodes the message into something that the other person can receive.
• The message is transmitted via some medium.
• The message is received and decoded.
• And the process flips and repeats itself between encoding, transmission, and decoding.

Hopefully what’s communicated is clear. If not, the process of going back and forth establishes clarity.

How Does the Communication Process Impact E-Learning

In a facilitated learning environment, the facilitator presents content. The learner receives it. If there’s some dissonance between the encoding and decoding, it’s easy enough to reconcile it.

Generally the facilitator can tell if there’s some confusion and the learner has plenty of opportunity to ask for clarification when things aren’t understood. There’s a lot of give and take.

This becomes a problem with most e-learning courses since they tend to be pushed out to the learner, usually with no opportunity to seek clarification. Because of this, it’s important to consider the content and how to assess the learner’s understanding through the course so that you can provide the appropriate feedback.

This is the point where many courses fail. Many organizations build courses heavy on information delivery and light on true assessment. And I don’t mean end-of-course quiz assessments. I mean continual assessment throughout the course to gauge the learner’s understanding of the content and with the right type of feedback.

Opportunities to Enhance the Communication Process for E-Learning

Here are a few quick thoughts on how to enhance the communication of the content and make up for places where there’s no back and forth.

• Content needs to be meaningful. Review the course content and structure it so it makes sense to the learner. This can happen with clear objectives and placing the content in a relevant, real-world context.
• Create meaningful activities. Step away from just content delivery and focus on meaningful and relevant learning activities. I like a backwards design approach. What does the learner need to do? Then design activities for them to prove they can do it. They may need to practice first; so design practice activities where you can assess their understanding and provide feedback. And then somewhere in that process, you construct the right content. This is better than a massive information dump.
• Account for barriers to effective communication and learning. Determine what obstacles exist between delivering and receiving the content. Many courses are text heavy and miss the opportunity to provide more memorable experiences with good visual support. And as noted above, many courses also lack relevance to the learner. This is often the case with compliance training, which drives a lot of e-learning. Find ways to engage them with meaningful activities where they get to practice using the content and acquire the right feedback.

E-learning often has the challenge of mostly one-way communication, so it’s important to build the right mechanisms in the course to ensure the learner is learning and has ample opportunity for feedback.

What are some things you do?

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We often build a single course to suit all learners. This presents possible challenges to the learning process. Let’s take a look at why and discuss a few options to help remedy some it them.

Effective Communication Involves Common Understanding

We use words all the time that have loaded meaning and often don’t mean the same things to people. For example, even a word like e-learning can be a bit confusing. First, we don’t even have agreement on how to spell it. Is it eLearning, elearning, or e-learning?
In my world, e-learning involves the authoring of online courses with a rapid e-learning product like Articulate 360. For others, it’s any learning content in digital format. Thus, a PDF is e-learning just as much as a course authored in Storyline.

There’s even more confusion as we look at different industries. The corporate version of e-learning is a lot different than what you’d find in higher education or at the K-12 level.

It’s important to recognize this and ensure you have appropriate context when using words and phrases that may have different meaning. The best thing is to build context and clarity in the communication process.

Experience and Skill Level Impact Effective Communication

People don’t come to the e-learning course at the same level. We have different personal experiences impacted by things like our worldview, culture, and ethnicity. We also have different professional experiences (and some may even conflict with the course content). On top of that, we have different skill levels. For one the course may be too easy, and for the other, too difficult.

You can’t control those things about the learner. However, there are things you can do in your course design that may help resolve some issues. For example, a pre-assessment helps determine how much someone already knows and what they need to learn. From there you can opt out the experienced person, or create an adaptive process to accommodate different needs.

Personal Motivation Impacts Effective Communication

A lot of e-learning is pointless to the learner and most of those types of courses also tend to be boring and mind-numbing information dumps. On top of that, people are at various levels of motivation when it comes to engaging with the e-learning content.

There are many things that motivate people. And a lot of it is outside the realms of the course and not something you as a course creator can control. However, there are a lot of things that you can do to help motivate the learner.

If the course is relevant and meaningful, then it is received better than one disconnected from the person’s real world. No one complains, when they actually learn something.

Many courses are overly focused on content and not on application. Focus on what the person needs to do, and then build the course backwards from there.

Interactive engagement is also important. I try to do two things: get the person doing stuff on screen to pull them into the course. And most importantly, get them interacting with the content. This is usually built around decision-making activities similar to what they’d do in the real world.

People are complex and they come to the e-learning content with different experiences, skill levels, and attitudes. Effective communication in the e-learning process is built on understanding this and applying the right strategies.

What do you find to be some of the challenges during course development and communicating the content to those who take the e-learning courses?

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Most e-learning courses have some sort of stated learning objective. Ideally, the course is designed to meet the objective. From my experience, many of the objectives in e-learning courses aren’t very actionable. They lack clarity and most importantly, they lack measurement. And those are the two things you can do to ensure your e-learning courses are effective.

Create Clear Learning Objectives for Effective E-Learning

Many times we’ll see learning objectives like this: understand company policies or learn how to give feedback. These types of objectives are fuzzy. What does “understand” or “learn” mean?

Objectives should be more specific, such as, a new manager applies X policy in Y situation. The objective identifies the learner, what will be covered, and when it will be used.

Measure Understanding of Objectives for Effective E-Learning

When crafting learning objectives, you should at the same time think about how they are measured. If the goal is for the manager to understand company policies, then there has to be a way to prove understanding. Going back to the point above, the manager applies the correct policy in a given situation.

Thus, if you want to determine how well the manager understands a given policy, you craft a situation in which she has to apply it correctly. At this point, you have a way to measure understanding.

When outlining course objectives, step away from the fuzzy terms and focus on actionable words that also guide you towards a means of measurement. This helps you craft the right objectives, pull in the right content and activities, and build a way to properly assess understanding.

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E-learning courses generally fall into one of two buckets: tell people something or show them how to do something. One is all about the information and the other about performance. Both approaches have value.

The reality is that a lot of e-learning is information-based and mostly driven by compliance requirements. Outside of certification of completion, there’s little performance requirement other than compliance to the policies or directives.

For example, generally you don’t have an organization full of sexual harassers and then present a course on sexual harassment and all of a sudden they’re no longer harassing. Instead, the course informs about sexual harassment and the organization’s standard. And the expectation is compliance to that standard. In that sense, the course is information-based because other than compliance, there’s not a performance expectation.

Performance-based E-Learning

On the other side are performance-based courses where the goal is to change behaviors or teach new skills. Those are courses that make a difference (in the sense that one goes from A to B). So how do you know those courses will make a difference?

Here are a few key thoughts to help get there.

• What are the business objectives?
• Why aren’t they meeting those goals today?
• What training do they currently receive (if any)? Why hasn’t it worked?
• How is the course linked to meeting the objectives?
• What do you expect the learners to do after the course that they’re not doing today?
• How will you measure the success of the course?

Performance-based courses are tied to the performance requirements: what are they supposed to do to meet X objective?

Focus on the performance requirement and the actions associated with it. Then build your training around that. In a sense, I like the course to “throw people into the pool.” This gets them to make the types of decisions they’ll make in the real world. If the course is performance-based, design it around those decisions rather than pages of content and policies. All of that content is important, but you can tease it out in the decision-making process and subsequent consequences.

Courses make a difference when they make things different. If you course doesn’t change behaviors or teach new skills, then it’s probably not performance-based. And how you approach the design of it is different than just pushing out information.

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You just spent months working on an e-learning project. You tested it. Got feedback. Made adjustments. And now you’re ready to launch.

But then the person for whom you’ve been building the project says, “Before we launch, let’s get my manager’s approval.”

And at that point, things to start to unravel. The boss wants to make changes. The legal team gets involved. Marketing comes into make sure the messaging is right. And so it goes.

This stuff happens. We’ve all been there.

When building an e-learning course, one of the first things to do is find out who the final authority of the project is and get that person involved right away. You need to understand why the course exists and what it will take to get it launched.

A few core goals when meeting with the final authority:

• Clarify objectives
• Identify metrics for success
• Determine the review and approval process
• Get an approved budget

Above is a list of a few considerations, but there are plenty more. The main thing is to get the key decision makers involved early and identify who is the final authority. From there determine the scope of the project and get an agreed upon service level agreement or contract.

And then work from that.

Don’t let your project slip away without those details and be derailed right before you’re done.

Two questions:

• What types of things derail your e-learning projects?
• What process do you use to come to an agreement before starting?

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E-learning templates can be a bit challenging. On one hand, they speed up production. And then on the other they may introduce constraints in the learning experience design.

An e-learning course screen has a specific structure. It’s usually rectangular and contains text and imagery. The text and imagery are laid out on the screen and is constrained by up, down, left and right placement. Of course, the possibilities for layouts can be endless, but there are probably just a few dozen layouts that make sense for e-learning courses.

Here are a couple of recent posts where we discussed the anatomy of e-learning templates and how to get the most value out of templates.

E-learning Template Value

Templates work for repetitive processes because they can be used over and over again. For example, most courses have some sort of simple list of learning objectives. While the course content may change, those course screens are usually consistent.

E-learning Template Constraints

Courses consist of content that is contextual. And from a learning experience, that contextual content has specific teaching requirements. For example, if I teach how to use software, then the screens are dependent on screenshots. And if I teach how to interact with a customer, the visual context is best represented in a manner similar to how you may interact with the customer.

I may find some good general layouts for simple content, but as soon as I have to work with specific content, I find that there’s a lot of tweaking and adjustments made to the templates that may mean I save more time just starting from scratch.

E-Learning Template Hybrids

I like to separate my templates into three parts and find the most value in using templates in the first and third.

• Entering the course
• Course content
• Exiting the course

Most courses have the same or similar starting points with welcome screens, instructions, objectives, sections, etc. And they also have similar exit points such as summary screens, next steps, and exit instructions.

Those two parts, the entering and exiting of courses, are perfect for templates. The templates are easy to insert, update, and contextualize. The middle part that deals with the actual course content is different.

Course content templates are great for simple text layouts. They break down as the content design becomes more specific. That’s fine, just use templates for the beginning and end and for simple text. But don’t waste time trying to force content into a template. Or worse, don’t create a template and force the course authors to make the content comply with a template.

Templates are great for e-learning. However, they exist to save time. Keeping templates for easy-to-repeat screens makes sense. Forcing content to fit templates probably doesn’t. But that’s OK. Just use the template screens where you need them and start with blank screens where they need customization. Don’t waste time fitting a square peg into a round hole.

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“We have to lock the course. If we don’t, the people will just skip all of the content until they get to the end.”

If you build e-learning courses, you probably hear this all the time. But here’s why you need to unlock your course.

Being Exposed to Information Isn’t the Same as Learning

Just because people are forced into the content doesn’t mean they’re learning from it. Reading, seeing, or hearing information is just a small part of the learning experience.

Locking the course navigation can only measure a person’s access to the content. It can’t measure their attention span or their understanding of the content.

People See the Content Based on Previous Experience

Experience and bias cloud our understanding of what we learn. A new learner may struggle to figure out what goes where and when. And a more experience learner is plugging information into predefined boxes and categories.

Locking course navigation assumes everyone approaches the content the same way and at the same speed. A new person may need more time, whereas a more tenured person can quickly skim and move on. Trying to control the navigation creates a frustrating experience.

Some People Need Context

Personally before I learn something new, I like to gain a big picture understanding. For example, if I get a new resource book, I skim in, look over the chapters, check out illustrations, and perhaps glance in the back and references. This helps me get a sense of what’s in there and where things will go.

I like the same when I take online training. I want to build some context which helps me know how everything fits together. It throws me off, if I am forced to go through the content A to Z with no ability to jump around and peek a bit.

Odds are you have a lot of learners who feel the same way. Some want to review everything. Some need a lot of information. Some want to touch and play around a bit.

Open the course up and let those who want to jump to activities to go there and vice versa.

Focus on Understanding

The ultimate objective is that the person learns. The key is getting them to demonstrate their level of understanding. Instead of focusing on screen after screen of content and locking the navigation, create the locks around activities where they can demonstrate their understanding.

For example, let them skip reading company policies. Instead, have them apply the policy to a relevant situation. You can lock the course at that point. They need to complete X activity to demonstrate that they understand the policy. Give them freedom to move around to learn and collect what they need. But lock the course based on the activity that measures their understanding.

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There’s a lot to say about gamified e-learning. I’ve shared some ideas in previous posts with links to some examples, free templates, production ideas, and recommended books.

One thing that seems to be a common challenge for many e-learning developers is crafting the right visuals for a gamified experience. Even though gamification and games aren’t the same thing, often I look for game user interfaces (GUI) to provide some simple visual ideas. They offer a visual design that is cohesive and includes a lot of common objects, such as content holders, progress indicators, badges, and buttons.

Many stock image sites sell GUIs. Below is a screenshot from Deposit Photos. If you have a subscription to one of these services, you’re all set.

If you’re not in a position to buy a GUI, here are a few free options. You can also search some of these sites for additional free GUIs. I’m sure you’ll find more that the few I share.

Even if you can’t use the free GUI, it’s worth spending some time reviewing what types of assets and content buckets they offer. That may give you some ideas for your own interfaces. Keep in mind, most of these free downloads require other tools to open and edit the files.

Free Game UI: Jungle Game

Craftpix.net has a lot of free game image resources. They do require a free account to download the GUI.

• Download the free game ui
• The file uses the Soup of Justice font
• License: free for commercial use

Free Game UI: Cartoon Game 1

Graphic Burger is another site that shares a lot of free stock assets. I like this GUI and use it in one of my workshops where we learn to work with variables.

• Download the free game ui
• License: free for commercial use

Free Game UI: Cartoon Game 2

DesignShock often shares free resources. You do have to look at the license agreement to make sure they resources can be used for commercial work.

• Download the the free game ui
• License: free for personal use; slight fee for commercial

If you use any of these types of interfaces, I’d love to see what you’ve done. Feel free to share the links in the comments section.

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I present at a lot of conferences and workshops. I’ve always thought about having captions during the live presentations. They come in handy for the person who can’t hear and needs them. And they potentially add value for the person who can’t quite hear everything: maybe the room is disruptive or the speaker talks too fast. Or perhaps, English isn’t the first language and hearing and processing is a little slower.

In either case, having a transcript in real time is valuable. Here are a couple of options to have transcriptions of your live presentations using tools you already have.

Live Transcriptions & Closed Captions in Google Slide Presentations

Here’s an example of live transcription and closed captions in Google Slides. I even show how you could use it doing a software demo in a live presentation. I find the transcription on Google Slides is a lot faster and a bit more accurate than in PowerPoint.

Click here to view the tutorial on YouTube.

Live Transcription & Closed Captions in PowerPoint Presentations

Here’s an example of live transcription and closed captions (or subtitles) in PowerPoint. The transcription is really fast and it dynamically adjusts to be more contextual. You can also translate the transcript in real time. It’s almost magical.

Click here to view the tutorial on YouTube.

It’s probably not practical to do a live transcription for a software workshop. I think the transcription may confuse things because of the naming of features and procedural steps. But for regular presentations it seems to work really well.

I recommend putting the captions on top and make them as large as possible. This allows people in the back of the room to see them better. If they’re on the bottom they may not be visible.

Anyone use these features for your live presentations? If so, any extra tips?

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Rise 360 is a great application to create e-learning. It’s form-based so it’s easy to use. Pull all of your instructional content together. Then go into Rise 360, select from dozens of various content blocks, and add your content.

Super easy. No programming required and because of the way it works, it doesn’t require any design work.

But what do you do if you want some graphics or illustrations to go with your Rise 360 courses?

Check out these open source illustrations from unDraw.co. They look nice and they’re free to use for commercial projects. You can download PNG or SVG versions of the illustrations.

Here’s why I think these free illustrations work well with Rise 360.

• In Rise 360, you set a core accent color.

• In unDraw, you set an accent color.

• Use the same accent colors for the Rise 360 course and the unDraw illustrations and they look like they belong together.
• The illustrations are editable if you use an SVG editor. And because they’re open source you can customize them to your hearts desire.

Here’s an example where I matched the accent color in Rise 360 with the free illustrations from unDraw.

If you need some quick, easy-to-use free illustrations to complement your Rise 360 courses, then give these a try.

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Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.