A guest post by Elizabeth Pawlicki, Training Program Manager, Articulate.

If you’re a Google Chrome 89+ user you now have access to Live Caption which is an accessibility feature that provides real-time captions for audio that plays through the browser.

This is a really excellent feature for audio that runs through your browser when viewing courses that have videos or narration, especially if the audio doesn’t have captions. Check it out below.

Initial Thoughts on Google Live Caption

I tested the Live Captions on a few different e-learning products that had audio including courses in Storyline 360, Rise 360, and Review 360. The captions worked well, surprisingly well, as you can see in the image below.

I also like that even if you turn off the audio, the captions work. As a user I am no longer constrained by whether or not the audio I am consuming has closed captions built-in to the product. The browser does the heavy lifting.

This is a big step forward for those who require captioned audio. I look forward to how this feature evolves going forward.

How to Access Google Live Caption

• First, make sure you’re using Google Chrome 89 or higher.
• Click the three dots on the top right.
• Then go to Settings and select Advanced>Accessibility.
• Click the toggle for Live Caption.

Once you have enabled Live Caption, you’ll see an option to toggle the captions on and off without going in and out of the settings.

Key Considerations for Google Live Caption

• This tip requires Google Chrome 89 or above. If you have learners who need captions and you can’t provide them in time, you at least have the option to recommend Chrome 89.
• It’s a new feature so there are some limitations such as size, position, and language. However, I assume the feature will be enhanced and my guess is other browsers will play catch up.
• From what I can tell the caption choices in Windows OS don’t seem to impact the captions displayed in the browser.

Google Live Caption is a step in the right direction and a great tool for those who need captions when they’re not provided.

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Here’s a quick tip for those building e-learning courses: as a course developer you serve as the intermediary between the organization and the learner. You are the bridge between both parties.

Not All E-Learning Courses Require Learning

Before we continue, let’s assume that we’re not talking about compliance training which often doesn’t have specific learning objectives. With compliance training, the organization commissions the course to meet some sort of compliance requirement.

However, the person who takes the course wouldn’t be taking it to meet real objectives. They’re only taking it to meet some mandated requirement.

In that world, learning isn’t necessarily the primary objective. It doesn’t mean there’s no learning, it just means that learning isn’t the course objective.

Performance-based Learning Objectives

We’ll assume we’re talking about performance-based training where the organization has a certain objective or requirement for the learner and the learner desires to apply what is learned to meet the organization’s objective.

You as the course developer are a bridge between these two parties. You need to build a course that meets the organization’s goals. At the same time, you need to build a course that is meaningful and relevant to the person who takes it.

How is this done?

• Put on the performance consulting hat to determine the real training needs.
• Determine measurable objectives for the course.
• Ensure the objectives are relevant and meaningful to the learner.

The organization (or customer) has specific needs. The learner has specific needs. Your analysis is about marrying those two needs. What does the organization want to do and what to the learners need to do?

I meet with the customer to understand what they want and why. I also like to know why it’s currently not the way they want it. And then I like to meet with the people who need the training. What are they currently doing? Why aren’t they able to meet the objectives? What do they need?

Often, I find there’s a disconnect between the client’s requirement and how the work is done in the real world. Being a bridge between the two parties helps you identify these issues and work to resolve them.

This is a simple tip but one I see neglected often. One thing you do want to avoid is only taking content from the client and never considering the way it’s used by the person who needs to learn it. I see this all the time and it ensures the least optimal training possible.

What are ways that you bridge the interests between the client and those who take the e-learning courses?

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“Help, I am just getting started with e-learning and don’t know where to start!”

There’s obviously a lot that goes into e-learning. And creating courses can be a bit daunting for those less experienced. So let’s break it down a bit to help you get started.

People Don’t Have Course Deficiencies

People don’t sit around waiting to take e-learning courses. Those courses exist as a solution to something. The goal isn’t to build the course. The goal is to meet some objective and the course is a means to getting there.

This seems obvious, but a lot of e-learning is usually repurposed content with no real connection to any tangible objective.

The best place to started is to make sure you’re building a course to meet a need.

Things to Consider When Getting Started

• Meet with your client and determine what the training requirements are for the e-learning projects. Your goal is to establish measurable objectives. To do so, you need to know if the request from the client is really met with a training solution. Often, it’s not. Focus on what the expected outcome is and not just that a course is to be built.
• Get the client thinking. I usually send over a list of a few core questions so that they’re prepared and have thought about some of the issues like the audience and what they hope to accomplish.
• Determine timelines. When is the project due? How much time do you have to work on it? Is the request in line with time available? What is the least work you can do to meet the objectives?
• Are there existing resources? Collateral from other projects? Data? If you need access to subject matter experts or others on the team, it’s important to know that and how you’ll get that access.
• Is there a budget? Many organizations just expect that courses get built because you have the e-learning software, but they don’t offer a budget for the assets and work that may be required to be successful. Find out if there’s a budget.
• Identify the final authority on who can make the important decisions and sign off on work. And then you want that person involved before you do any significant production. The last thing you want is a “final course” that needs to be reviewed. Ideally, all the content is reviewed and signed off prior to any significant construction.
• Leave the initial meeting with next steps and action items. And every meeting you have after should require some decisions. If not, don’t have a meeting.

There’s obviously a lot that goes into build an e-learning course and this is just a few quick bullet points. The main things before building any e-learning course: make sure you need a course, determine objectives, and determine who owns the project.

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Instructional design isn’t really that complicated. At its core, it’s about teaching something to someone who acquires new skills and knowledge and can apply them to meet some objective.

The challenge with a lot of e-learning is that courses are designed to be presentations of content, but not focused enough on the teaching and application. Content is obviously a key component of learning. But learning is a process where the content is synthesized with experience, activities, and feedback to do something new or perhaps better. Just looking at content with no application of what’s learned is a deficient instructional design process.

Content by itself is mostly irrelevant. Content pasted into an authoring tool doesn’t make it a course or great learning experience. The e-learning course isn’t the objective. The objective is to accomplish something specific, and the course is part of the solution to do that.

Step Away from the Solution

When I first learned about instructional design, we focused on backwards design where we looked at observable skills and then what was required to get the person there.

The natural inclination is to package content. But you need to step away from content. Instead look at what actions are required of the learner and then step backwards into the content. Here’s a simple way to think about backwards design.

In the real world:

• What does the person need to do?
• How do they demonstrate that they can do it?
• How do they practice the skills required to demonstrate them?

In the e-learning course:

• How do they demonstrate their understanding in the course? What assessment activities can you create?
• What practice activities can you build for them to practice the skills?
• How much do they need to learn to practice?
• What content do they need to learn so that they can practice?

This is a simplified version of backwards design. The main focus is on the desired action and not content. What does the learner need to do? How do they practice it? What do they need to know? At some point you get to the content that supports the activity. This is how you get to the right content for the course versus just a content dump that becomes the course.

As you can see, focusing on action gets you to performance. And content is there to support what needs to be learned. You don’t start with content because it’s not tied to an action. And that’s where most courses fail.

The next time you build a course, identify the measurable performance expectations. What do they need to do? And then build backwards which will help determine the content you need.

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Good news! It’s easier than ever to “build” e-learning. And because of this, subject matter experts build a lot of e-learning courses. This makes sense for a lot of reasons.

Subject matter experts have experience and depth of knowledge. They’re close to the subject and can keep things from becoming muddled by not involving a complicated production process or bringing on others who may confuse things. Training specialists (for all our good intentions) can complicate things and that’s not always good for the speed of business.

However, subject matter experts can often be too close to the content. It’s easy to forget that it took years to attain their expertise and that may not factor into what it takes for a new person to learn. Also, to a subject matter expert, everything is important. And not having an outside perspective means that the course may be too heavy on content that is irrelevant and not appropriate for the learning activities.

So where does a subject matter expert turn to build an effective course?

Content Doesn’t Equal Training

It’s common for subject matter experts (and organizations) to see everything as a content deficiency; and the solution is to build courses that require exposure to the content.

Putting content into a “course” doesn’t make it a course. Also, a lot of content in e-learning courses already exists in PDFs, websites, and other collateral.

How does copying and pasting it into a new medium make it better?

Not Everything Needs Training

“People are making this mistake.” Build a course.

“We have a new software program.” Build a course.

“Our customers aren’t happy.” Build a course.

“Here’s what they need to know about our organization.” Build a course.

Training works when focused on meaningful change that is measured through some sort of activity. Whatever deficiencies exist in not meeting the objectives may be caused by issues not related to training.

Some common issues that create gaps are poor management and communication in the organization. These things impact motivation. And they’re not easily solved by training. Other issues are environmental: perhaps the employees don’t have access to the right resources or technology.

Customers may be unhappy with things outside of the employee’s reach such as policies, sitting on hold forever, or the way ecommerce works. Those are also things not resolved with training.

Information vs Performance

Not all courses are the same. Some courses are informational where all that is required is exposure to the information (and perhaps a quick quiz).

Other courses are tied to performance expectations. These courses need better analysis and the right types of content and activities to ensure that skills are acquired and demonstrated by the learner. Looking at screens of bullet points will not help.

How to Build Successful E-Learning

Determine the learning objectives and how success is measured. The default for many organizations is to repackage content. But that’s not learning. Learning involves being able to use the content to make real-world decisions that meet the learning objectives.

Assuming the course is performance-based, focus on the required activities and not on the content. What do you want the person to do? Build the training around that. And the content supports getting there.

There’s a lot more to be said. But if you’re just getting started, focus on the action and what the person needs to DO. If there’s no action, that means it probably doesn’t need to be a course and perhaps a job aid is all that is required.

Bonus: here’s a good checklist when starting your course.

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I see a lot of e-learning courses and to be honest many of them are not as good as they could be. They tend to be what we anticipate from corporate e-learning: screen after screen of content with lots of next buttons and then a final quiz. You have to work with what you have. Sometimes the training content isn’t good (like the leads from Mitch and Murray) and you can’t do much with it. But often, when it comes to the content, what could be interactive is static; and what could look engaging, looks discordant.

Why? Here are a couple of reasons why that’s the case with some recommendations to make improvements.

E-Learning Designers Lack Technical Skills

Good news: e-learning software makes it easy to build courses. Virtually anyone can build a course. However, the software doesn’t “build” the course. That requires some skill.

There’s a lot that goes into crafting a good course and it requires multiple disciplines. Instructional design is different than programming which is different than visual design which is even more different than specific software expertise with e-learning tools such as Storyline 360. However, many organizations buy the easy-to-use software and then place the burden on a single person to have a broad range of skills that could, in their own right, be separate career paths. That’s a big burden.

We’re not all graphic designers and UX experts, which explains some of the discordant aspects of the course. But we can learn the basics of the skills we need and that helps clean things up and lets us know when we’re outside our skillset.

Solution:

• Instructional design is not pushing content. It’s about teaching. Make the content relevant and frame it around real-world decision-making and you’ll create a better learning experience.
• Develop a solid foundation of basic skills needed to craft a good course: things like instructional & visual design, etc. You won’t become a pro in all things, but you’ll learn enough to know the difference and what to look for in your course design; and know when to bring on experts to do the things you can’t.
• Stay in your lane. For example, if you don’t have strong visual design skills, don’t try to be a visual designer. That’s when things start to look a bit clunky. In those cases, stick with a simple template or use form-based Rise 360 over Storyline 360 because you won’t have to make as many design decisions and the course will look good and work well.

Companies Don’t Invest in the Resources

Companies spend what they need to meet their business objectives. A lot of e-learning is compliance training where the only objective is to get the course in front of people and verified by the end of the year. In that world, it doesn’t make sense to spend more than you need in time and money to get courses developed and delivered. And that’s why so many e-learning courses aren’t interesting or engaging.

However, if you want to build good courses, you must commit to that and invest the right resources.

Solution:

• Determine what type of course you’re building to better allocate resources. Generally, courses are one of two types: explainer courses or performance-based courses. Don’t overbuild a course that has no expectations but a certificate of completion. Save your resources for performance-based courses with clear, measurable objectives. They tend to require more production which takes more time and money.
• Understand what resources you need. E-learning software is one thing. Building a good course with it is something different. Do you need a designer to help produce the core structure and some templates? Do you need a graphics person? Are you looking for some custom programming or a specific type of interactivity that requires advanced skills? Figure that out and plan on it.
• Create a budget to pay for what you need. Many organizations just buy the software and leave it at that. But it takes more than software to build effective e-learning. And like any useful product, it requires the right investment. Propose a budget for your courses.

There are a lot of other ways to improve e-learning courses. But making an investment in skills and resources is a good place to start.

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When people talk about effective e-learning it’s usually around meeting performance objectives. Many take the position that any e-learning course that isn’t performance-based is wrong; and inevitably, you run into a lot of lamenting about the dangers of click-and-read e-learning.

First off, is a click-and-read course really “dangerous?”

I think swimming in shark-infested waters is dangerous. Clicking a series of next buttons is not the same level of danger (unless that next button was connected to the 108-minute countdown timer in Lost).

Granted there are some bad e-learning courses, but that’s not because they’re click-and-read. It’s mostly because they’re not designed well. An e-learning course is a tool in the learning process.  Sometimes it’s the only tool and sometimes it’s one of many. And how it’s used is of most importance.

E-Learning Only

When the e-learning course is the only tool used in the learning process, then it makes sense to ensure that the course contains a more dynamic learning experience and avoids the typical linear, click-and-read structure that only presents content and no activities to support learning.

This is where most of the complaints about bad e-learning originate. The e-learning courses have actionable objectives and thus should contain activities designed to practice and prove competency. However, they don’t. And if the content-heavy e-learning course is the only tool used in the training to meet the performance objective it’s a waste of time and won’t do what it’s supposed to do.

E-Learning Plus

The other day I was talking to a group of students about some classes they were taking for an e-learning certificate.  I asked what they did in the class. Guess what? They had to read a bunch of instructional design books. I yawned and said, “That’s so boring you won’t learn anything.” Books are literal page-turners. They’re old-school click-and-read learning.

Joking aside, a book is almost all content with no performance-based activity. However, that doesn’t make the book useless because it’s usually not the only part of the training program. In addition to reading, the students did reflective writing assignments, had group discussions, and then practiced applying what they learned in various projects.

In that sense it is ridiculous to suggest that because the book offered no interactivity, it was useless or boring. And the same can be said about click-and-read e-learning courses. The course is a resource that aids in learning. If it’s only content yet tied to actionable objectives, it needs to be coupled with other activities outside the course.

In previous projects I’ve used the e-learning course as a pre-meeting activity prior to face-to-face instruction. It allowed us to deliver the content consistently and gave the person freedom to go through it at their own speed and leisure. And then they came to our sessions at a point where we could do a quick review and jump into practice activities.

On another project, a lot of the core information was previously delivered in a loud production environment by various people who may not have been as motivated to stay on script. We separated the onboarding content from the hands-on activities. The onboarding content was delivered via e-learning. They learned about the production environment, the organization’s safety focus, and the machines they would be using. And then we sent them to the floor to work in a hands-on environment.

In both instances, the courses were mostly linear content with a few simple quiz questions. By themselves they were deficient. However, when the content was coupled with real-world activities it was part of a successful and effective training program.

And that’s how e-learning courses should be judged. If a training program has performance expectations with actionable objectives and it uses e-learning, then the course by itself needs to be more than content with appropriate assessment activities or the course needs to be coupled with real-world practice activities.

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A lot of people ask about building interactive e-learning and usually are dismissive of “click and read” e-learning. It’s easy to do that because most e-learning is boring and not very engaging. Often those courses are screen after screen of content with endless next buttons. And because of this, “click and read” gets a bad name.

Let’s unpack this a bit.

Content is content. We read books, articles, and blog posts. We listen to podcasts and radio. We watch television and videos. Most of this is linear content with little interactivity other than buttons to continue the progress or start the media.

Think about this, YouTube is the second largest search engine on the Internet. It processes about 3 billion searches a month. There is not a lot of interactivity on YouTube. Yet for millions it’s the go-to help guide and training resource.

I don’t know about you, but I use it all the time. I’ve learned to do pool repairs, fix holes in sheetrock, and all sorts of other things. It doesn’t mean I became an expert in those things; but I became expert enough to do what I needed.

And here’s the key point: at no time did I complain that the content I was consuming wasn’t interactive enough.

What does that mean for e-learning courses?

• Content isn’t boring. How it’s presented is. Focus on meaningful and relevant information.
• Courses that are relevant to the learners are engaging. Just like the YouTube videos. If the content meets a need, it’s engaging, even if not overly interactive.
• People don’t need to be complete experts on the topics taught. It’s better that they be situational experts and know how to use the content in meaningful situations.
• Content exists in the real world. Most e-learning is boring because it exists in a different world than the one the learner lives.

Learning is a combination of content presentation, consumption, and application. Just because a course isn’t interactive doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. Think of the e-learning course as just a part of the learning experience rather than the whole thing.

Create blended learning solutions where the e-learning represents content distribution and consumption that are blended with other in-world activities that represent the application of the content. This helps you step out of the trite “click and read e-learning is bad” trap.

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Articulate 360’s Content Library comes with thousands of e-learning templates. Each template is made up of theme fonts and theme colors. Theme fonts and colors are an easy way to manage and update course files.

Here’s a common issue and easy solution when troubleshooting e-learning courses. Instead of using theme colors many developers do quick color picks or custom colors. This is fine until you need to make a change to the slide and the colors aren’t updating when you change the theme color.

Our template developers have a simple technique to check the theme colors and make sure that they’re used throughout the various template slides.

Here are the steps:

• Create a new color theme.
• Make every color bright yellow.
• Save the theme colors.
• When you apply this theme, everything on the slide should use those colors.

Whenever you need to test a template to ensure it’s using the theme, apply that test theme color. Everything on the slide should be bright yellow. Whatever isn’t, is not using a theme color. That makes it easy to fix issues on the slides.

The example above, when I apply the yellow test theme, all of the objects change except the purple circle because that’s not using a theme color.

Simple tip. Easy to do. And a big timesaver if you use theme colors, which you should.

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How do I create e-learning courses that are engaging and not boring?

This is the number one question I get from rapid e-learning developers. As I ask clarifying questions, I usually get something to this effect, “I don’t want click-and-read courses. Instead, I want to use more branching.”

To me this reveals some confusion about designing e-learning courses. In this post, we’ll explore if branches are really the magic solution to keep your learners engaged.

Linear Navigation vs. Branched Navigation

When people say “click-and-read,” what they usually mean is linear, back and forward navigation. This form of navigation is typical of a lot of e-learning. Unfortunately, what’s also typical of linear e-learning is screen after screen of bullet points. I think people (incorrectly) assume that linear navigation and bullet-point e-learning are one and the same. That is why people complain about “click-and-read” courses.

When they talk about “branches,” what they usually mean is a course with more interactive decision-making. The learner is presented with some choices and then gets feedback specific to those choices. There are usually less bullet point screens in this approach, primarily because of the use of different screen layouts to facilitate the buttons for branching.

Thus, it might appear that linear courses are boring and e-learning courses that use branches are engaging. However, whether you use a linear or branched navigation, it’s really the same experience to the user. The user clicks something then views some content. They really don’t know (or care) if they’ve been branched somewhere else or whether the next screen was just next in the sequence.

So the type of navigation alone does not make for an engaging course. If you want your courses to be engaging don’t think your main focus needs to be on choosing between linear and branched navigation.

Instead, focus more on creating content that’s relevant to the learner’s world. The next section will show you how.

Create E-Learning for the Real World

How a person learns is more complex than just sitting them in front of a computer screen and taking an e-learning course. E-learning is just part of the learning process.

People take a course and then they go back to their daily routine, which involves doing tasks and interacting with others. Whatever they learned in the course is augmented by these other activities. If you design your course with this in mind, you’ll create courses that are effective. Here are five methods to get you started.

1. Make the content relevant to the learner’s daily routine.

If you read this blog enough, you’ll see this theme over and over again. One of the most important parts of e-learning success is whether the content is relevant to the learner.

If it’s not relevant it will always be boring unless you find a way to entertain the learner. While it is nice to be entertained, in most cases that’s not the goal.

2. Ask questions to guide them through the content.

There are several ways to use questions. It could be as simple as using a question as the title heading for your screen. It’s not dynamic, but it’s clear and purposeful. In addition, it’s easy for the learner to determine whether the content is relevant or not.

Another approach is to restructure the content like a frequently asked question page. Many people like the simple nature of frequently asked questions. They’re clear and they provide answers. Here’s a simple demo on copyright questions that I made to show you how that might look.

You can also use questions to build some clever interactive branches. What’s nice with this approach is that you can guide experts one way and novices another.

3. Create a course that mimics real world interactions.

When I have a dilemma at work, I don’t run to the legal department and look up corporate policies. Instead, I make a decision to solve the problem (and hope that it’s correct).

However, it never fails that when I take a course on some company policy, I’m exposed to a bunch of nonsensical legal gibberish. Instead of bombarding me with a bunch of legalese and corporate-speak, why not build the e-learning course that puts me in real world situations and then force me to make decisions?

I’ll probably make good ones and bad ones (if the course is designed well) which then allows me to get feedback that reinforces the intent of the policy. This is an excellent way to teach me the course content and make it relevant.

4. Blend the e-learning course into activities with real people.

You can use e-learning in conjunction with team building or group activities. Have learners go through a course together rather than by themselves. The main point here is that you can add an extra dimension to the learning process by adding some human interaction. The e-learning course allows consistent delivery of content and enhances the learning through collaboration and discussion with others.

5. Don’t overbuild the course.

Let’s get real. Whether we want to admit or not, a lot of e-learning is a waste of time and the content will never be relevant to the learner. We just don’t want to tell anyone because we love our jobs.

In those cases where the e-learning course is not relevant but still needs to be built, keep it simple and help the learner get through the course as fast as possible. Don’t build a bunch of games and interactive elements. Give them the facts and let them move on.

As you can see, you’re not going to get rid of boring courses by creating branched navigation. Instead, you can do so by building courses that fit into the real lives of the learners. Create content that is relevant and then find a way to connect the course to real world activities.

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When someone first starts to build an e-learning course, one of the first things I recommend is determining the colors they’ll use. And from there, create a template and assign the theme colors.

The benefits to theme colors is that they allow consistent use of colors throughout the course; and if one needs to change, it can be changed once, and that change is applied wherever the color is used.

The next recommendation is to determine how to use theme colors. This is often confusing because, you get six theme colors and five derivatives per color. However, there’s no rhyme or reason in terms of how they should be used. They’re just six boxes that can be filled with colors. You can use those boxes anyway you like.

But that’s not how you should use them.

I recommend that you define a theme color structure and then use them consistently. This way, every time you build a course the theme colors are set up the same and you can easily swap them out when needed.

How to Set Up Theme Colors

Here are a few ideas that may work:

• You get six theme colors. But you don’t really need to use all six.
• Define how you do want to use the colors, whether it’s six or four or two.

• Use theme colors consistently in all templates you create.
• Courses usually have a main color and an accent color. If you only used two colors, you’d have twelve to use because of the iterations. That may be all you need.
• Most courses have some positive and negative feedback color, usually green and red. Use two of the theme colors for positive and negative feedback.

Here is one way you could define your theme colors:

• Accent 1: base color. Usually this is your core brand color.
• Accent 2: accent color. Most brands have an accent color. If you don’t have one, you can use a color theme site to create one. I typically will select a complementary color of the base color.
• Accent 3: open. Why create a color you don’t need?
• Accent 4: open.
• Accent 5: positive color. Green pulled from the base color’s palette. Use this for quiz feedback or icons to show a good decision.
• Accent 6: negative color. Red pulled from the base color’s palette. Use this for quiz feedback or icons to show a wrong decision.

For the two open colors, I may look through my organization’s web site and marketing collateral and see if there are other secondary colors used that I could add to the palette. Most of the times, two colors are all I need.

If every course is built with consistent use of theme colors, they can be swapped in seconds. This is a critical part of building and re-using interactions and templates. It’s a little more work upfront (which should be done anyway). But in the long-term it offers some time-saving benefits.

Do you have a strategy when using theme colors?

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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.

In a recent post we looked at boring course content. I am not convinced that there is any boring content. I do think there are bored people.

Today we’ll look at how to deal with the bored people when building e-learning courses.

E-Learning Courses Should Be Relevant and Meaningful

There’s a lot to learn about instructional design with all the theories and models. But when it comes down to it, the key ingredient is that the course has meaning to the person who takes it. If you read this blog enough, you’ll see that repeatedly.

One of the challenges to this is that many courses have little to do with the learner or their needs. A lot of compliance and annual training falls into that category. The goal isn’t learning per se. Instead, it’s to track exposure. In that setting, it’s difficult to cater courses to relevant activities because the content tends to be general and not specific to function. And the goal is an end-of-year completion report.

Assuming you do have control over the course structure, framing the content in a meaningful way is important. 

I always say, “Throw them in the pool.” 

Put the learners in the place where they need to know and use the course content. Don’t focus on the information, focus on the desired action. And then build a course around those activities where they can both learn by doing and demonstrate their understanding.

Skip the Course and Focus on Leading Questions

Do we really need a “course” to teach? Why not frame the content around relevant questions and then present the answers (hopefully desired actions) to them?

You could create a traditional FAQ type structure of questions with answers. It forces you to frame the content into a more meaningful context and not just focus on presenting information.

Another way to deal with a question and answer structure is to build simple scenarios. No need to overbuild the course. They don’t need to be big elaborate media creations. They can be simple questions with a few real-world choices that lead to answers. 

Keep the Learning Where the Learning Happens

A great e-learning course may take a few hours for the learner to complete. But a work week is at least forty hours. And depending on the task, proficiency requires more than a couple of hours of practice. Probably at least a couple of weeks. 

Where is most of the learning going to happen? In your e-learning course? Or will it happen in their daily interactions with real people, making real decisions?

A good e-learning course is just part of the training solution. Blend the online activity with real-world activities. I like to use the online course to ensure consistent and timely delivery of the core content. And then create training activities in the real world. 

An easy thing is to create a list of tasks that require proficiency. Then determine how they practice them and get feedback. I like to use learning journals and peer coaches. Regardless of how you do it, the learning happens mostly outside of the online course, thus it’s good to consider that when building the learning experience.

Remember, the course is a means to an end. The goal isn’t to take a course. The goal is that the course enables some practical learning which produces some measurable results.

Events

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.