How to Develop an elearning Course: Your Step-by-step Guide- elearning course

How To Develop An eLearning Course: Your Step-by-step Guide

Creating an effective eLearning course requires an effective training strategy.  Regardless of the purpose of the course, it is essential to have the appropriate balance of information, knowledge tests, and interactive content.

Finding this balance requires including interactive learning materials within the training course, and in this article, we will give you a step-by-step guide and expert tips on how to develop and design an eLearning course.

What is an eLearning course?

An eLearning course is a course that consists of multiple interactive training chapters.  For instance, an eLearning course in Sales Excellence would have a combination of interactive modules that cover topics and chapters regarding “How to write an effective first reach-out email”, or “Planning your reach-out strategy”.  However, the key differentiation from a traditional training course is the level of interactivity and gamification that has been incorporated in the design and delivery of these topics.

What is an eLearning course?

Types of Interactive Online Training Chapters

Depending on the desired learning outcome of the eLearning course.  The interactive formats could be such as the following:

Interactive Assessment Tool

An interactive assessment tool is a short quiz that could consist of a minimum of two questions with multiple-choice answers. This is one measuring tool for a knowledge check that should be added after the learner completes each training chapter.

By conducting this scored knowledge check, you can gain the following benefits:

  • Monitor learner’s completion rate of the training course.
  • Identify learners’ performance with high or low passing scores.
  • Quality of content provided in the training course (Delivery, and design).
  • Level of knowledge retention.

Interactive Videos

Videos help to increase learners’ engagement rate especially to demonstrate topics that are difficult to present in a text format.  They are highly recommended to use for service or product demos, demonstration of corporate values, employee onboarding training, or even anti-harassment or compliance training topics and other difficult topics that require more than texts to ensure that the message has been communicated clearly to the learners.

Job-aids/Resources

This is an excellent way to increase the likelihood of learners referring back to the eLearning course when needed.  Job aids have informative content that would help the learner to use them at the time of application.  You can also include a download feature to provide offline access to the documents and for the learner to build their learning library of content that they think would require in the near or far future. 

Subject to the purpose and topic of the eLearning course, Job-aids could be in the format of:

  • Glossary
  • Checklists
  • Standard Operation Plan (SOP)
  • Manuals
  • Formulas .. etc

How to Design an eLearning Chapter: Step-by-step

When creating an eLearning course you require to follow the below steps to ensure achieving the highest level of training effectiveness for your learners:

4 effective steps to design your e-learning course

Step 1: Define your main objective, learning outcomes, and target audience

Before developing your eLearning course, you require to define the main learning objective you require to achieve.  Moreover, you should determine learning outcomes that address the change in knowledge, skills, behavior, or all.  Additionally, you need to understand your learners’ preference in receiving new information; for example, do they prefer to Read? or watch a Video? Or listen to an Audio?..etc. To tailor the tools accordingly.  Lastly, ensure that you identify the “Success Criteria” and how you are planning to measure success in each step of your proposed training content or tools that you are planning to use in delivery to help you improve in your next eLearning course design.

Step 2: Select the right learning content format

Post defining your main objective, learning outcomes, and target audience preference, you will have a better direction in selecting the right content format to use.  As some formats can work better in specific chapters than others. 

For example, in a chapter that focuses on “How to send out the first reach-out email” you can use pre-designed templates with editable content of an email draft followed by a checklist that includes the full reach-out process before and post-sending this email.  A subject-matter expert (SME) should always be part of the process from the beginning to provide you with all the required information.

Step 3: Develop your eLearning course template

Now that you have your main objective, learning outcomes, audience, and format decided, you should start your development.  Start utilizing an authoring tool that makes it easy for you to transform your learning content into an interactive format using pre-designed templates rather than creating a template from scratch.  You also need to make sure to use a variety of formats to increase learners’ engagement.

Step 4: Roll it out to your learners, monitor and track the learning progress

Once you are done developing your eLearning course.  In this step, it is crucial to monitor and track the learners learning progress.  This way, you can view how your learners are performing, and also optimize the eLearning course roll-out when required. 

How to develop an eLearning course using Lumofy?

An intuitive authoring tool is a must-have when you want to develop an eLearning course. Lumofy can provide you with a tool to make developing your training courses as easy as possible for you.  With an intuitive interface, pre-designed templates, and structures.

Developing eLearning courses couldn’t be any easier.  You can seamlessly include assessments, videos, resources, and job aids to increase the effectiveness of your training course.  

You would like to know more about how to do that with Lumofy? Book a Demo and let our experts walk you through it.

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