When evaluating your eLearning, you gauge the success of your efforts on how well those efforts contribute to the growth and success of your company. Effective eLearning will bring about a return on the investment you made. Too often, though, companies embark on eLearning without ever seeing any real return on the investment.
Therefore, we've created this Seven Step Plan to Effective eLearning and whether you use it to create your first strategy, or you use it as a way of analysing the different stages of your existing strategy, we hope that you will agree that these seven steps lead the essential road to success.
This post can serve as your essential guide to success. Follow the strategies successful companies use to avoid the most common eLearning missteps.
1. Set realistic goals
Consider what you really want to achieve through eLearning. Educators call this backward design. You begin by determining the essential skills learners need and design learning targets and activities based on those goals. Embarking on eLearning efforts without understanding your end goal sets you up for failure.
2. Understand your learner
When you know your learners, their needs and their concerns, you make your eLearning learner driven, which creates successful learning environments. Learners who feel their needs aren't being met rarely invest themselves in the process and your investment fails from the outset. Get to know your learners and what they need and expect from the eLearning experience.
3. Create engaging and quality content.
This flows naturally from setting realistic goals and understanding your learner. The insights you learn from these two steps will form the basis for your content and help you strategize how to engage learners in your eLearning courses. You can never go wrong by investing in learners and their needs.
4. Develop a clear communication plan.
Nothing frustrates learners more than a lack of communication during the learning process. Develop a plan of what you will communicate to your learners and when you will do it. Base these communications on your end goal and deliver the messages in ways your learners want to receive them. Also develop a strategy for responding to learner inquiries including who will respond and how.
5. Solicit learner feedback.
Effective eLearning goes through a constant process of reflection and revision based on various data points including learner feedback. Your learners can provide valuable insight into the success of eLearning by telling you what they learned, how they have implemented what they learned and the results of those efforts. Use your learners to discover those successes as proof of the ROI of eLearning.
6. Remain flexible.
The benefit of eLearning is precisely its flexibility but too often companies lose sight of that key asset. It's important for effective eLearning to react to changing circumstances. When it comes to eLearning, there is no "one size fits all" or edicts etched in stone. Retain the key advantage of eLearning by remaining open and flexible.
7. Measure your eLearning programs.
Another key benefit of eLearning is the ability to track exactly what a learner does in a course. You can measure enrollment, the pace learners move through a course, course completion and scores. This data will then inform the effectiveness of the course. Companies can use the information to make changes to content, assess learning goals or determine the impact a course had.
Are you ready? Your company can definitely reap the benefits of eLearning if it implements effective eLearning programs. Thus, follow these basic steps and see a greater return on your eLearning investments!
