While many subject matter experts (SMEs) are willing to share their knowledge with their employees, only a few are experts in creating engaging e-learning courses.
That has called for a reason to identify e-learning best practices to enable SMEs to share their knowledge quickly and effectively with their target learners.
Below are some of the e-learning best practices that all subject matter experts should be aware of, to deliver effective e-learning courses.
State clearly your learning objective
It’s essential to think about your learning objective before starting to develop your e-learning course. Stating clearly your learning objective is the e-learning best practice that one needs to first put into consideration before other things.
You can do this by setting an achievable goal for your learning course. That helps you in defining more specific learning objectives and achieving a successful e-learning course.
However, to establish a smart and achievable goal, you need to research to know who your learners are, and what they want to know. Only then will you be able to figure out what exactly to teach them.
With several different e-learning courses, identifying the skills lacked by your learners is paramount to choose the best course that meets their needs.
Repetition enhances retention rate
One of the barriers often faced by L&D professionals is the employees’ retention ability. Research has it that employees tend to forget about 50% of what they learned in a shorter time.
So, that calls for a reason to make use of e-learning best practices to tackle this barrier. One way to boost learners’ retention ability is through e-learning course repetition.
Constant repetition of training helps to increase the rate at which a course gets retained in the human brain. Useful e-learning courses aren’t always judged by how lengthy the contents are, but rather by how short and repetitive it gets over time.
You can incorporate repetitive e-learning into your course by regularly asking questions that offer knowledge in a variety of ways.
Drip-feeding your content is right
Often, L&D professionals enable full access to all course content when learners enroll for their courses. Well, this is a good practice until learners start to maneuver their way through the course content and get confused in the process.
Full access to all course content at a time can get learners confused, which can be discouraging to them. Drip-feeding your content is an e-learning best practice that can help you combat the barrier and get your learners motivated to finish your course.
You can drip-feed your content by scheduling your course content delivery for modules. That enables learners to have access to new lesson content in a planned segment, instead of full access to course content.
The method of drip-feeding your content provides excellent structure and clarity to learners by helping them stay engaged and focused on the relevant content. The more engaging the content, the more motivated learners get to continue to the next segment of the course content.
Test learners’ knowledge with learning assessment
Testing learners’ knowledge of your course is an e-learning best practice to know the level of performance of your program. You can do this by incorporating quizzes and other forms of assessment into your learning course.
Depending on your target audience, assessment can get included before or after the session. The main objective of using learning assessment in your course is to measure your learners’ comprehension of your e-learning program.
User experience and user interface
Another e-learning best practice that you should consider is the user experience and user interface. The user interface is one of the most vital aspects of an e-learning course.
It’s how learners/users interact with the computer system to achieve a smooth flow, from one segment of a course to another. Good user experience is measured by the ease to navigate through particular course content, which is a factor of an excellent UI.
Therefore, it’s best to offer an excellent UI to ensure that learners get engaged and motivated to learn your course.
Great contents make-up an effective eLearning course
Generally, online learning focuses on enhancing learners’ skills towards a specific subject matter. With good content, learners tend to get engaged in your content, which helps them improve their skills.
To create good content, SMEs should make use of the right authoring tool to develop the content. That’ll save them the time to explain the material to instructional designers. Using great content in your course is an e-learning best practice to achieve a useful and engaging e-learning course.
