“The instructional decisions we make will increase the probability that our students will learn”—Anonymous. How do you dress? For the occasion, of course. How do you choose your accessories? So they match the dress. You take care to turn out in a well-coordinated outfit. Then why shouldn't the eLearning courses you create show such harmony? The watchword here is alignment. The most effective eLearning courses are perfectly aligned, but most often this objective gets the miss when the course is being planned. At other times, eLearning designers are clueless about the concept, so they naturally do not realize their courses are all over the place but not going where they are supposed to head to.

It is true that we learn design principles from a bunch of theories. But too often, we eLearning designers make the mistake of relying on these theories to give us design ideas. They can provide ideas but only so much. You need to think beyond the theories and look around you to find inspiration and break free from the creativity rut. Last week we published the first part of the Creativity Series. Here we will continue giving you more design hacks.

How often have you spent hours staring at a blank screen in front of you trying to come up with an innovative eLearning design? Waiting for inspiration to strike is agonizing, and if ideas take too long to show up, you begin to wonder if your creative juices have dried up. Scary, isn't it? Admit it; we don't get to enjoy too much variety in the content for the courses we create. HR policies, health and safety guidelines, sales techniques, team management and leadership roles, and application and systems training—we seem to circle round and round these types of content, often for years. Our learners often belong to the same demographic group, which means they tend to have similar learning styles and preferences. It is not surprising that most of the time we fall back on tried-and-tested design strategies, either because we fear experimenting or we run short of ideas. We end up falling into a design rut. Beware! Do not let your creative juices dry up. Follow the tips below to cultivate and nurture a creative mind that is always brimming with ideas.

Remember the school days? They were not only about making new friends, sharing lunches, having crushes, and dreaming of making it to the basketball team. There were some trying times too. For some, the Algebra class was a nightmare while for others, History lessons brought out the tears. Yet, the demons are not inside the formulae, dates, or maps. How a subject is taught has a lot to do with how well we learn it. Not every one of us had a passion for Literature, but we all loved it when Mrs. Smith made us dress up and play the characters from the stories we had to read. Not of all of us have grown up to become chemists, but many would love to go back to Mr. Henry's laboratory to once more have fun mixing chemicals. The reason we see so many boring and passive eLearning is because it is just flat out easier for the designer. It is challenging to create learning that engages learners, that fires up their brain's synapses and makes content stick. But all you instructional designers out there, you have to take up this challenge; you owe this to your learners who have probably stayed back, rescheduled their meetings, or postponed tasks to take your course.

Happy New Year! It is that time of the year when we get busy making resolutions. It is a time of hope and new beginnings. We resolve to lose weight, manage our time better, become more productive, and turn over a new leaf. This year, let's resolve to become more empathetic eLearning designers. We can resolve to stop churning out cookie-cutter courses, and instead, create learning material that is truly inspiring. We can resolve to stop talking down to our learners, and instead, reach out and connect with them. We can resolve to stop being aloof, and instead, show more empathy. According to Theresa Wiseman, the four attributes of empathy are putting yourself in another person's shoes, understanding their feelings, accepting them non-judgmentally, and communicating with them to make them feel assured and cared for.

Persuasion is an art. Try too hard, and you might be branded as being aggressive. Be gentle, and your message will probably be brushed aside. At the end, the ultimate goal of persuasion is to get a person to change. Persuading someone to come round to your point of view is especially challenging in a virtual learning environment that lacks the intimacy of a face-to-face interaction. What is more, your learner has a choice to go or not go through your course. Thankfully, researchers have figured out how the learner's mind works and how to "persuade" it to fall in line with your content. Monroe's Motivated Sequence lists a proven process—Hook, Need, Solution, Visualization, and Action—to convert a reluctant learner into an enthusiastic participant who readily absorbs the learning and willingly agrees to change his behavior. In eLearning, "telling isn't teaching," and you cannot persuade if you just state the facts. Facts alone won’t significantly change the way people think, do, and feel. You have to carefully choose every element on the screen to do all the coaxing, cajoling, imploring, and pleading to engage and persuade your learners to do something new. Follow this no-fail process for creating eLearning that persuades and changes behaviors.

Bad Stock Photos Make for Bad eLearning How often have you gone to a website, looked at the photos, and said “Oh yeah, there are the happy clapping people, and there’s the arrow going into the target, and there’s the thermometer showing sales figures, and… yawn.” Probably more times than you could count. Does that really make you want to read the content? Does it do anything to enhance the information that’s there? Of course it doesn’t. And the same things that are beyond boring and beyond overdone on various websites are going to be equally as un-engaging if you use them on your eLearning course. The dilemma with stock photos is that cheesy-to-the-maximum, cliché, exaggerated, awkward and fake photos do not connect with an audience of learners. You have to make images speak to your learners. Images need to say the 1,000 words you actually want them to. The ideal case is that you take your own photos, but we know that not everyone has the budget, time or available resources, so if you must use stock photography, make sure it’s relevant, not hideously overused and think creatively about choosing and editing them in unique ways.

Well-design courses are worthless if they can't communicate content effectively to those learning. Truth is, effective communication is actually more challenging to apply especially in designing eLearning . Optimized eLearning design has the power to motivate students and drive performance. If you are serious about creating effective eLearning courses, it is essential that you follow all four of the following steps to get the right message across to your learners.