
Our blog provides the best practices, tips, and inspiration for corporate training, instructional design, eLearning and mLearning.
To visit the Spanish blog, click hereTom sits down to do his sales training online. He has been asked to complete three lessons each week adding up to 30 minutes of online training. Tom is dreading it, but he is delightfully surprised at how quickly he can navigate the page and how well the content has been paired with the graphics and features. He gets through 4.5 of the lessons and leaves the 5th lesson bookmarked for the next chance he gets. Mary has been trying to find the lesson that the Fraud Department has assigned her. She has barely gotten passed lesson one in the time she had expected to complete at least 3. Her screen has frozen a few times on the graphics, she has had to re-read some of the text-heavy slides, and isn’t sure if the lesson she is on is going to help her with the issues she is meant to address. Which of the two people mentioned above had a better UX Design experience with their eLearning course? Who is going to continue with their eLearning course?
That you have built the course is no guarantee that learners will flock to take it. Modern workers have better things to do than take courses that do not appeal to them. So what do you have to do to appeal to your learners? You have to excite them. You have to intrigue them. You have to provide solutions to their problems. And most importantly, you have to convince them that your content will change their life for the better. How? By knowing what your learners expect from you. By knowing your learners, so you can deliver exactly what they need. By having a deeper understanding of them you can approach them like a friend and guide them like a mentor to make them change their behavior and attitudes. Have conversations with them frequently. Hear about their needs, fears, goals, interests, and expectations and figure out the next steps from there. Each conversation will make you more effective at eLearning design. "The better we know our students, and the more they know and trust that we know them, the more invested they become in their learning" - TeachThought If you know your learners, it will be worth your time as you will be more capable of:
Benjamin Franklin once said “an investment in knowledge pays the best interest”, and we think Mr. Franklin got it spot on. Training isn't something that's 'nice' to have in your organization. It's an absolutely vital part of a company's long-term investment and growth strategy. This seems like a simple point, and it's something that nearly all companies, and L&D managers alike, will agree with. But do companies provide enough training? And what does current research say about the state of corporate training and eLearning? In this post, we look at ten key statistics, and what they mean for your company's future.
If your company has been involved in delivering in-house training to staff for a while now, or if you are a freelance trainer or instructional designer who has been developing and offering Instructor Lead Training (ILT) to clients over the years; chances are that you may be sitting on a wealth of existing training materials. With the new workforce circumstances, the evolution of eLearning, and modern learner new expectations, wouldn’t it be great to start moving some (or all) of that content into the online training arena? If you are interested in making that leap, here’s how you should proceed:
Today, the question is no longer if eLearning benefits your business; the real question is whether you can afford not to join the trend. Year after year, eLearning has proved to be more competent and cost-effective as compared to traditional training. Here are some statistics that show the power of online training: According to a Brandon-Hall Study, learning through e-learning typically requires 40% to 60% less employee time than learning the same material in a traditional classroom setting The Research Institute of America found that eLearning increases retention rates 25% to 60% (retention rates of face-to-face training are very low in comparison: 8% to 10%). 42% of companies say that eLearning has led to an increase in revenue. (The Ambient Insight 2012-2017 Worldwide Mobile Learning Market - Executive Report) Read all stats in this article.
Successful eLearning courses hook readers on the very first page. That’s because eLearning, in essence, is all about engaged learning. It’s multi-sensory in that it engages all senses through interactive texts, stunning graphics and compelling videos.
We remember the scenes and dialogs from some movies long after we have seen them. Some songs continue to haunt us even though we have not listened to them for ages. We can still recite rhymes and poems we learned when we were toddlers. Do you wonder why? Or if you are an instructional designer, have you wondered how you can create such sticky courses? How can you create courses that learners will remember easily and recall effortlessly long after they are back at their workplaces? It is challenging because forgetting is natural. Scientists carried out a test on some subjects who had to study textbooks, retain, and recall the information. The results were startling: after a day, the subjects remembered 54 percent of what they had learned and after 21 days, they remembered a paltry 18 percent. But are you surprised? When we were in school, most of us didn't remember what we learned in the earlier grade. As instructional designers, you have to create courses that are easy to remember and difficult to forget.
If you are a trainer, an HR manager, or an online course designer, you know it is now time to design and develop courses for mobile users. With high-end smartphones that stream at 4K speeds, increased battery life, and bigger screen sizes, you can expect mobile devices to eclipse desktop or laptop computer as the preferred medium to consume virtual content. Google Insights reported that on average, people use 2.5 connected devices per adult, and “mobile is now central to almost all kinds of internet activity.” You should create eLearning courses keeping in mind that your learners will take them on all kinds of devices, from the desktop computer with its chunky monitor to the mobile device with its palm-sized screen. Get ready to deliver. In this post, we will tell you how reading on the mobile screen feels different than reading from a larger laptop computer screen. We will also provide tons of tips to help you create a distraction-free mobile viewing experience that aids learning.
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