If you’d like to break out of the same old routine, and produce some real results you need to try something new.
When talking about eLearning it has to be more than just dull screens of text... they has to be engaging, accurate, relevant, thoughtful, and obviously informative.
Here are 6 ideas to liven up your eLearning courses and make your learners excited to enroll and take them.
1. Develop personas to focus your eLearning:
If you haven’t developed personas yet, it’s about time. When you create a persona or “learner profile”, you create courses that are actually meant to be read by a human being. For the development team, the learner is now a real person with a face, personality, needs, and wants. Once you’ve developed this “profile”, develop your content according to their real context. Creating a meaningful training experience is much easier when you have a clear picture of your main target.
2. Test your courses first:
Test a prototype with sample learners and ask for their advice. They can provide great and valuable insight and feedback that you can use to improve the course. Just ask to three or four sample employees to use a prototype module that captures the essence of your real course.
3. Support ongoing learning:
Consider developing support material such as “job-aids,” and “quick reference cards,” or other reminders based on your course content, which learners can easily access while they are on the job and help them apply the recently learned knowledge at the point of need. You can also send out short follow up emails, reminding the learner of key points.
4. Get rid of bullet-point objective lists:
It’s time you try to give your course objectives a different approach by making them more creative, emotional and interesting. Some different ways you can do this:
- Use visuals instead bullets. Take the usual bullet list and create visuals for each of the points.
- Use questions instead of the typical learning objective form.
- Use scenarios that place the learning objectives in perspective.
5. Use ice-breakers:
Ice-breakers play a vital role in developing a sense of community in an online learning environment. They can even be made humorous by using a cartoon, photos, or jokes. It will help learners get into the right mood for the learning process. These is an effective tool to use becasue it contribute to a stress-free, learning-friendly environment. So don't forget to do this for your eLearning sessions to keep people engaged.
6. Create a catchy tagline for your eLearning courses:
Convincing your audience to enroll and stay in your eLearning course is the starting point of success. How will you do this? Create a tagline that expressess the essence of your eLearning course in a matter of seconds. Believe it or not it will actually help catch learners attention! There are 3 steps you must follow:
- Brainstorm important words o keywords.
- Put words together into a short 3-5 word phrase (focus on the benefits, be clear and positive).
- Test the tagline (choose your best taglines and ask your target audience to rate them).
Time to get creative!
