The potentials and limitations of our brain shape the way we learn. Professionals, from psychologists to neuroscientists, have started to integrate brain research into online learning.

Do you know how effective is your compliance online training? Is the program well-integrated into the company? Are employees completing the courses on time? Are they really learning the safety parameters or regulatory laws you are teaching? You won't have the answer to this if you aren't leveraging the power of Learning Analytics. Having the right data is key to understanding if your compliance online training is making an impact. Simply tracking completion rates and passing grades is not enough. Monitoring deep-level insights like engagement, behavior, and struggles are also important to analyze to make well-informed business decisions and provide actionable insights to your team. You can set the X passing score for successful completion, but in compliance and safety issues, if employees aren't really learning the information it could represent a huge cost in the long run. So, leveraging online platforms and learning analytics becomes essential for companies to supports students throughout their journey. For instance, if an employee does not get a question right, they can be redirected to revisit a specific module and come back to take the test.

A lot of research actually goes into a well-designed eLearning course. And like it or not, instructional designers have to dig deep into the psychology of learners, specifically how they learn and what affects the learning process.

Anyone seeking to create meaningful and engaging eLearning courses can benefit by remembering what it is like to be on the other side. It is bad practice to subject learners to any training that you would not participate in yourself. It’s time you stop blaming the “boring” content and commit to stop tormenting the learners who are required to take your course! Our job as eLearning designers is to FASCINATE and DELIGHT the learner from beginning to end. In the excitement of launching a new course, it’s easy to overlook details. Therefore, it can be very useful to have a checklist for last-minute touches.

Okay, so your eLearning course is all wrapped up and ready to go – but what do you do now? Do you feel a strange sense of inertia? Like you should be doing something? You’re right. If you are creating eLearning programs at your company, this post is for you! There are five essential things to do after you’ve done with the development phase. Here they are:

Learning has deep roots in our emotions. Plato knew this 2,000 years ago, but it is only recently that neuroscientists have discovered conclusive evidence to support this premise. Science all along knew that emotions are triggered after the brain processes the information it receives. (We knew this too, from experience.) Now a revolutionary study by Dr. Shlomo Wagner of the University of Haifa has proven that a person’s emotional state directly influences how his/her brain processes information. Emotions are either pleasant (positive) or unpleasant (negative). When a person experiences positive emotions, the person learns well. When the person experiences negative emotions, the learning is not so effective. According to Dr. Wagner, the brain responds differently to different emotions.

Unless you have a phenomenal photographic memory, chances are you struggle to remember things and wonder how you can make information stick better. The answer? PAY ATTENTION! When you pay attention, you are far more likely to retain that information. This also applies to the learners you design eLearning courses for. Effective eLearning course design starts with understanding the science of attention. Neglecting this important step makes the difference between learner’s remembering your content for a few minutes, hours, or a lifetime. Try some of these techniques for getting learners’ attention from the get-go:

Even more than other types of education, eLearning must struggle to attract learners' attention: the Internet is full of distractions, and adult learners are both busier and free to indulge in distractions. Helping students to pay attention is a primary concern of training professionals, so here are some optimal methods to win the attention game.