If news of an upcoming eLearning course is being greeted by groans from your learners, you may be guilty of some of the seven deadly sins of eLearning design. Read on for more information on how these sins can negatively impact best eLearning design and what to do instead.
1: Treating your eLearning course like an eBook
So many problems emerge when eLearning courses are treated like PowerPoints, PDFs, or other text-heavy methods of delivering content. Of course, we want to make sure that we include all the information our learners need. But the dreaded wall of text that learners scroll their way through is not the way to do this.
What to do instead
- Think about ways to deliver content that moves away from the linear, text-heavy format that makes people dread eLearning courses.
- Keep your learners engaged with video, audio, gamification, and other creative ways of delivering content.
- If content is being delivered as text on screen, break it up into manageable chunks to make it more digestible. Think carefully about the information design of each screen.
2: Wasting learners’ time
The average learner is able to devote less than 1% of their work week to learning (Bersin, 2014). It’s important that 1% counts! The quickest way to frustrate learners is to waste their time with poor design, difficult navigation or content that is not clearly relevant to their needs.
What to do instead
- Make it as easy as possible for learners to get what they need from your eLearning course. Allow them to do so at a pace that suits them. That means not burying the core content behind slide after slide of background or introductory text, and allowing learners to navigate easily and jump back and forth as needed.
- Work with your SME to identify information is essential to achieve the learning outcomes. Distinguish between ‘nice to haves’ ‘need to haves’.
- Take time to consider every piece of information, activity, interaction, quiz and scenario. For every piece of content you keep, ask yourself ‘Will this help the learner achieve the learning outcome?’
3: Focusing on style over substance (or substance over style)
An eLearning course that only considers content and learning theories may fail to engage your learners. Good visual and multimedia design will pull the learner in and keep them engaged, while also aiding understanding and retention of learning. But prioritising visual design over instructional design can result in over-designed, flashy courses that make it difficult for learners to extract the information they need, develop the skills required or apply their learning to their work practice. A balance is needed between good instructional design, visual design and multimedia design.
What to do instead
Visual design and user experience (UX) design is an essential element in eLearning development, but the goal should be to enhance the learning experience and usability and to aid with learner motivation.
- Focus on UX design principles to create an enjoyable, easy to use and well-designed learning experience.
- Use information design principles to break up large blocks of content with images and other media.
- Use colour and typography in a way that is visually pleasing and engaging but that is also accessible to all learners, including those with visual impairments or who use assistive technology.
4: Not designing with inclusivity in mind
The fourth sin of eLearning design is creating courses that are not inclusive. Inclusivity is the practice of ensuring all feel accepted and welcomed and none are disadvantaged or excluded. Inclusivity is not just a case of making sure basic accessibility requirements are met. Inclusive design means more people are likely to engage with your eLearning course, so it’s worth considering how to reach as wide a range of learners as possible.
What to do instead
There are two major considerations with inclusivity; accessibility and representation.
Accessibility
Accessibility means making sure that your eLearning course is usable (accessible) by everyone and offers the same high quality learning experience to all.
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- Take into account things like your learners’ range of abilities, disabilities, and neurodiversity. Often, an adaption will serve more than one group of learners. Closed captions, for example, will benefit people who are deaf or hard of hearing but can also help non-native English speakers. They also can help people working in noisy environments and learners who choose not to listen to the audio.
Representation
Representation is another key concern when designing for inclusivity. Watch out for the ‘like-me’ bias, our tendency to assume our own culture and experience is universal. Your eLearning course should speak to everyone, even if they don’t look, think, act exactly like you, your SMEs, or your stakeholders.
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- Represent a wide range of ethnicities, cultures, genders and sexual orientations in the media and terms used in your course.
- Avoid specific phrases or cultural references that are only specific to your own culture.
- Follow best practices for gender-inclusive language and for inclusive language for all minority communities.
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5: Lack of interaction
One of the major benefits of eLearning is that it can offer learners the opportunity to engage with the content in a very interactive way. So creating an eLearning course with minimal interaction is really wasting the potential of eLearning.
What to do instead
When we talk about interaction, we usually categorise eLearning into four levels:
- Level one is the most passive level, where content is primarily delivered through text and static images, and interactions is usually limited to things like basic true/false quizzes.
- Level two starts to include things like audio, video and animation, and a wider range of clickable interactions.
- Level three gets much more engaging, with things like branched scenarios and gamification.
- Level four is highly interactive, often involving fully immersive gamified elements, and 3D simulations and objects.
Most eLearning platforms and development tools offer the ability to incorporate varying levels of interactivity and while not every eLearning course needs to be at level four, it’s important to keep learners engaged and motivated. Increasing the level of interactivity stops learners from being passive recipients of information and pushes them to engage with the content and work through their course in a much more active way.
6: Not prioritising transfer of learning
The eLearning industry is now worth billions, with companies spending more and more every year on digital learning. But what is the goal of this spending? Companies expect to be able to see and measure return on investment, so our next sin is designing a course without considering how this learning will translate into improved employee performance.
What to do instead
You can increase the likelihood of learning being successfully transferred by focusing on relatability and relevance.
Relatability
Learning is more likely to result in behavioural change if learners can relate what they’re learning back to their own lives. Include real world examples within your course and give learners opportunities to apply learning through the use of scenarios, case studies and knowledge checks.
Relevance
Learners’ perception of the relevance of what they’re learning is strongly tied to motivation and successful transfer of learning. While it could be seen as more cost effective to create larger and more general eLearning courses, that money is wasted if individual learners do not see the majority of the content as being relevant to them. It’s worth considering creating smaller, bite-sized modules that can be tailored to the needs of specific groups of learners.
7: Being seduced by the next shiny new thing
We’ve all seen them; the endless lists of what’s new in eLearning or top ten trends in eLearning that we have to know about. eLearning is an exciting and evolving field. It’s easy to get dazzled by the next new trend, whether that’s a new eLearning tool or new approaches like personalisation or micro-learning. But jumping on the next new trend without looking at how it works for your specific context can lessen the effectiveness of what you’re trying to achieve. That’s why our seventh sin is being seduced by shiny new things.
What to do instead
Jumping from trend to trend or implementing something new without a plan for measuring its effectiveness can turn your L&D department into more of an experimentation area. Resources are going in, but we can’t be sure if anything of value is coming out!
Before implementing any new eLearning initiative, ask yourself a few questions:
- What problem are we trying to solve and what is the best way to achieve this?
- What resources are required/available to produce measurable results?
- What are the criteria for success? What change in performance or attitude do we expect to see?
- How will we measure return on investment?
It’s easy to fall into bad habits with eLearning design, but reflecting during the process, learning from past experiences and keeping your focus on why you’re creating a course, who you’re creating it for and how you’re going to measure its success will help put you on the right path.
The Learning Rooms offers a comprehensive Instructional Design for eLearning course that will take you through the whole eLearning development process from beginning to end so you can create beautiful and engaging courses that delight your learners. Or if you’re looking for an experienced team to partner with your organisation, we develop, build and deliver custom learning solutions that deliver key skills through active engagement and experiential learning.
References
Bersin, J. (2014). Meet the modern learner. [Infographic] Bersin by Deloitte. https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/HumanCapital/gx-cons-hc-learning-solutions-placemat.pdf
