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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Like many of you, I’m not a big fan of meetings because most of them tend to be presentations. The entire time I’m thinking, “Why didn’t they just record a presentation and send that out rather than have a bunch of people sit in a meeting with no expectations or action items? Seems like a big waste of time.”

We’ve all been in those meetings. And we don’t like them. Why?

Because while on the surface the purpose of the meeting seems meaningful, for most attendees the meetings are largely irrelevant with lots of “need to know” but not enough “need to do.”

Take that same emotion and apply it to typical e-learning courses, especially annual compliance and certification training. Most of those courses have what appears to be valuable content, but for the learner, the course is a lot of “need to know” but very little “need to do.”

And that’s why people click through the course at rapid speed and try to get to the quiz as fast as possible.

This is why we see so many questions on how to lock the navigation, because course owners know people aren’t going to sit through that boring, irrelevant content.

In an ideal world, the course is structured so it’s meaningful and relevant and the best learning experience possible. But that’s probably not going to happen, especially not with most compliance training.

That’s OK. The reality is that most of those courses are mandatory and there’s not much we can do. However, instead of fighting this, let’s look at a few simple ways to make these courses better.

Quiz Tip #1: Provide a Pre-Test

Don’t fight skipping to the quiz. Instead, put it up front. Give the learners who know the content the opportunity to prove it upfront.

If they can pass the quiz, then they demonstrate they know the content (or at least to the level that you’re quizzing). Pass the quiz, get credit for completion. Don’t pass the quiz, go to page 1 of the course.

Click here to view the example quiz.

• Bonus: download the free quiz template here.

Quiz Tip #2: Create Pressure to Review the Content

Ask questions in the quiz where you suspect they’re probably skipping. Don’t ask  trick questions, but essential questions that cover the core content. When they’re not sure how to answer, they’ll go look it up.

In the screenshot below, odds are that the person isn’t familiar with RCW and all of the answers are viable, so they’re probably forced to go look up the answer to the question rather than risk missing it.

I can guarantee you, as they’re asked something very specific that they don’t know, they’ll jump right into the content to look for it. And then you’ll have them in the course, learning what they need to know to pass the quiz.

Quiz Tip #3: Make the Quiz the Course

Don’t start with slide after slide of content. Instead start with the first quiz question. And then regardless of how they answer, provide the core content.

You can’t insert fifty slides of content. So, as the course author, it forces you to determine the core content that you want them to know and then create the appropriate question to assess that knowledge.

Bonus tip: you can also make it more engaging by setting up the questions like a scenario rather than basic quiz questions.

Click here to view sample quiz.

There’s a reason people jump the content and go to the quiz. In an ideal world, the course is meaningful and relevant to what they need to learn. That’s probably enough to keep them in the course. However, if you do find they’re skipping the content, above are three good alternatives to try.

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Much of online training is content that’s created with an e-learning authoring tool and positioned as e-learning courses. However, these courses aren’t necessarily the best at getting people to learn. I know there are some in our industry who’ll stand on their soap boxes and tell everyone how that’s not real e-learning in the first place. They’re free to do that, but they’re wrong.

It’s real e-learning, it just may not be complete e-learning. It all depends on the course objectives.

Content is Part of the Learning Experience

When it comes to content, I don’t see the difference between a PDF, PowerPoint slide deck, web page, or “e-learning course.” It’s just content packaged in different mediums. And the content is part of the learning experience. If anything, the “e-learning course” can add a level of interactivity and novelty that the other mediums can’t.

They key point here is that content is part of the learning experience, but it’s not THE learning experience. And that’s where the criticism is valid. Content needs context which highlights its relevance to the learner.

If you just build a content-focused course and the course has performance expectations, then you need to consider two things for the learner:

• How do they practice using the content?
• How can they demonstrate their understanding?

Creating superficial interactivity and simple multiple choice quiz questions isn’t enough.

Build a Practice & Prove-It Learning Experience Outside the E-Learning Course

When you boil it down, you can build practice and prove-it activities in the e-learning course or you can build them outside the course. Keep in mind, a multiple choice quiz is not a prove-it activity.

The e-learning course is part of the overall training goal. If the course is mostly content, you’ll need to build the practice and prove-it activities outside the course.

Here’s an example of how I did this on a previous project.

We trained machine operators. Initially they were trained on the production floor. But the training they received wasn’t consistent which proved a bit challenging for the new hires. So we built e-learning courses that covered the machines, how they worked, how they were maintained, and the production workflow. This gave the learners a solid understanding of the process and what was happening on the floor. Because of this, they entered the production environment with confidence and some context.

In the production environment, we created a working lab. The machines were slowed down and they focused on single tasks rather than the entire process. That let them practice applying what they learned in the e-learning courses. And we assigned a peer coach who monitored their work. At some point in the process, we put them on a live machine and they were able to demonstrate their new skills.

In this example, the e-learning courses were used to present content consistently and at a pace that worked for the learners. And the interactive learning experience happened outside the course on the shop floor.

Build a Practice & Prove-It Learning Experience as Part of the E-Learning Course

Building practice activities inside the course requires stepping back from the content a bit. Instead of focusing on the content that’s in the course, you need to focus on the decisions a person needs to make and then what content supports those decisions.

Generally speaking, content heavy courses follow a linear process from start to finish. However, a performance-based course focuses on how to use the content to make the appropriate decisions. To build a performance-based course, you need clear, measurable objectives. And then you build an environment that is relevant and meaningful to the learning experience.

When it comes to getting them to practice, I always say, “Let’s throw them in the pool!” Put them in situations where they have to make decisions or do something as if they were doing it in the real world.

For example, a typical content-based course explains the company’s sexual harassment policy and then finishes with a simple quiz. But a performance-based course puts the learner in a situation where they have to deal with sexual harassment issues. And then they make decisions (practice) that hopefully comply with the company’s policies. Based on their decision-making, they get fed the relevant content and feedback. And at some point in the process, they can prove the appropriate level of understanding.

They key point in all of this is that if you have performance requirements, but your courses are mostly explainer content (which is typical), then you need to consider how the learner can practice doing the things they should be able to do outside the course.  And that requires a blended solution where they go through prove-it activities to demonstrate their competence around the objectives and expectations.

The other option is to build meaningful decision-making activities inside the course, where they can practice making decisions and ultimately demonstrate their competencies.

So those click-and-read content-based courses are fine. However, if you have performance expectations and the practice-and-prove-it activities are not part of the online course, they’ll need to be built outside of it.

When you look at the courses you have to build, what percentage would you say are explainer content versus performance-based content?

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Copying text from images comes in handy especially when updating old e-learning courses. Sometimes you may not have the source file and have to work for older published content. In those cases, do a screen grab of the course and then extract the text from the image. Then copy and paste the text into the application you use to build your e-learning courses.

How to Copy Text from Images

You may already have some applications that can extract the image. Here are a couple of common ones:

• Microsoft OneNote
• Snag-it

If you don’t have either of those applications, that’s OK. I recommend using Microsoft PowerToys. It’s free and easy to use.

How to Copy Text from Images with Microsoft PowerToys

The steps for this are pretty simple. No need to do screen shots.

• Install Microsoft PowerToys.
• Locate the text you want to extract.
• Press Windows+Shift+T to activate the Text Extractor.
• Select the text.
• Paste into a document.

Here’s a quick video to show the process.

Click here to view the tutorial on YouTube.

As you can see, it’s pretty simple to copy and paste the text. So if you run into an issue where you have old courses but not the original source file, keep this tip in mind.

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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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One of the best ways to learn to build courses is to get inspiration from what others build. That’s one of the reasons I like the weekly challenges.

Everyone is presented with the same challenge, yet each challenge entry offers something unique. There’s always something to glean: from interesting visual design to creative use of the application’s features.

When I get the chance, I like to highlight the work that people put out there. Today, we’ll look at some of the examples from Samara Reyneke. Keep in mind that many of these are not complete courses but instead they’re prototypes created for the weekly challenges.

What I like about her examples:

• Visually rich design
• Custom navigation & prompts
• Interesting animations
• Engaging content design

Check out some of these examples below. You can also see more under her community profile.

E-Learning Example 1: Telling a Good Story

• View e-learning examples here.
• Weekly challenge #296

E-Learning Example 2: Space Adventure

• View e-learning examples here.

E-Learning Example 3: Knuffle Bunny Challenge

• View e-learning examples here.
• Weekly challenge #312

E-Learning Example 4: Learning Experience Design

• View e-learning examples here.

E-Learning Example 5: The World of Bees

• View e-learning examples here.
• Weekly challenge #320

E-Learning Example 6: Email Etiquette

• View e-learning examples here.

Takeaways

• Thanks to Samara for sharing her courses and downloads.
• Make it a habit to at least look at the challenge recaps, even if you can’t participate in them.
• If you see something interesting, try to replicate it to learn how to build it yourself and then figure out where you can use that in your course design
• Many of the challenges also include download links so you can checkout the source files.

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It is important to manage the customer relationship while building courses, as customers may not always know what they want. Customers often default to building more training as a solution to issues, but course designers need to step in and provide the best solution.

Here are a few tips on managing the relationship with your customer.

• Is training the right solution for them? They want the person to go from point A to point B, but what are they doing now and why aren’t they getting there? How is training going to impact those reasons?
• It is important to establish clear expectations for the course you will be delivering. This can be done by analyzing the needs and writing up a service level agreement that details what they will receive and when.
• In order to ensure that your course is successful, it is important to set clear objectives and determine how you will measure them. This helps gauge whether or not objectives met.
• The customer’s expectations should be established at the beginning of the work. Then every effort should be made to exceed them.
• Make your customers look good by promoting their assistance and success. Write nice things about them to their managers. This helps get more of their time, especially if they’re also the subject matter expert.
• Courses should be effective, as noted above, but they should also be efficient. Manage your costs and calendar well. And make the learning experience and efficient use of the learner’s time.
• Do everything you can do to finish ahead of schedule. Many projects don’t because there’s a lot of scope creep where more gets added to the request. A good service level agreement helps resolve some of those issues.
• Pay attention to the project and anticipate issues. Then take care of them before they do become issues.
• After the project is delivered, I quickly review the service level agreement with the client and get them to sign it. I’ve worked on projects that failed (because the customer wanted a course that wasn’t needed) and somehow the blame got shifted down to the training team. By getting the client to review and accept the agreement, I can prevent that from happening.

This isn’t an exhaustive list. What are some things you’d recommend to someone just getting started?

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A guest post by Elizabeth Pawlicki, Senior Customer Advocacy Manager, Articulate.

Last week I was at Devlearn, one of my favorite events of the year. After no event in 2020 and a scaled-back Articulate presence in 2021, it was nice to be back and see some familiar faces and meet so many new people.

What I enjoy the most about Devlearn is DemoFest, where people show off real e-learning projects. And they showed up in big ways, with examples ranging from health literacy to escape games to how to make hamburgers. In fact, the Guild is going to do a webinar highlighting the various entries.

Personally, I like DemoFest because it gets me out of the weeds. I get to use Articulate 360 while helping customers, but I don’t often get to stretch my creative muscles and build big courses. That’s why I love the projects at DemoFest. What people share is so inspiring.

Another reason I like DemoFest is that it’s frustrating to see discussions in places like LinkedIn, where there’s lots of complaining about what everyone in the industry is doing wrong, but those same complainers rarely share their examples of what to do right.

Do you know why?

Because it’s easy to be a critic, especially when you don’t show your own work. It’s much more challenging to be vulnerable and put your work out there to be judged. Kudos to those who bravely shared their work (especially the student projects from Bloomsburg University).

Events like this are how I connect with our customers and hear all the cool things people are working on. I love talking to folks in the booth and hearing what kind of courses they’re building, but seeing someone sharing their work to hundreds of DemoFest attendees is really special. And what always strikes me is how impactful these courses can be. E-learning courses can contribute to cost savings, time savings, reduction of waste, and about a million other objectives.

What’s Your E-Learning Success Story?

Not everyone gets to go to Devlearn and share their courses. But everyone has a story. What courses are you building? How has e-learning helped your organization? I’m fired up from DevLearn and I’ll be doing a series of success stories and case studies about the great work our customers are doing.

Do you have something you want to share? I would love to chat with you. You can either fill out this form or send me an email at elizabeth@articulate.com.

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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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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.