Anyone from any company size and industry can create great eLearning — I truly believe all teams inherently have the ability. All your ingredients are there, it’s just prepping and serving the correct way.

Start with solid production guidelines

You can plan out, develop and executive great eLearning when you have production guidelines in place. Some key elements include:

• Production team model: Set out roles for content experts, design and production team members.

• Module planning sequence: Learning objectives should be supported by a session plan and storyboard.

• Design elements: Ensure that design elements are called out so that they’re consistent with your organization’s brand.

• Quality assurance: Outline the required editing, testing requirements and develop a model for feedback collection.

• Resources: Identify extra resources for your learners in the event they need more information.

Sprinkle in some new perspective and collaborate

Seek collaboration from your peers and regularly seek feedback from your colleagues. It’s proven that collaboration pools talent, develops the skills of those around you and fast-tracks progress. Get a teammate to proofread your storyboard, or get a second opinion from another instructional designer or graphic designer.

Know your audience and trim the fat

Seasoned instructional designers are probably all too familiar about what their eLearning should contain, and just as important, what it should not contain. It’s very tempting to add all the bells and whistles, but by removing extra features and excessive information, your eLearning can offer a clear, simple experience for your learners. Or, if you have a lot of content to communicate, break it up by topic into micro-modules so that the information can be easily digestible for your learners.

Keep all your ingredients fresh

Use fresh ingredients that will engage your learners, such as the following:

• Gamification: Gamify your learning with a mascot, badges and more to incentivise your learners.

• Microlearning: Break up the content into small 5-10 minutes chunks or by topic so that learners can easily consume the information.

• Mobile compatibility: Ensure the content you’re creating is mobile-friendly so that your learners can access from any device. If you have a shoestring budget, I highly recommend H5P — a free, HTML5 open source rapid content authoring tool.

Aesthetics are everything

There are plenty of resources out there for those who may not have a design eye, or you can loop someone in from your team that may be able to help. Here are some helpful resources when it comes to design:

• 10 Top Graphic Design Tips for Beginners by eLearning Brothers

• 11 Extremely Helpful (And Free!) Online Graphic Design Courses

• [Video] Beginning Graphic Design: Fundamentals

Test before serving

It’s critical to perform thorough quality assurance check to ensure there aren’t any errors in your eLearning. After your content is developed and is ready for testing, I recommend three separate reviews before roll-out. You’ll be able to catch more things when you’re focused on a particular area versus trying to focus on multiple areas at once.

• Functionality Review: Do a test strictly on functionality.

• Proof/Grammar Review: Test strictly on the textual content, ensuring there are no spelling or grammatical errors.

• Outside Perspective: Have someone that hasn’t seen the content get an outside perspective. Maybe one page seemed to flow, but not to someone looking at it for the first time.

Get rid of your leftovers (a.k.a legacy content)

At one point, your legacy training was fresh. But now, it’s run its course and just hasn’t kept up with advancements in the corporate learning landscape. It’s important that those lengthy courses get broken down, become more responsive, and that the new training needs of your company are covered.

Got some legacy content in desperate need of evaluation? Webanywhere is offering a free one hour course evaluation and consult for a limited time. This is a no-obligation hour where one of our Instructional Designers will help you personally with the direction of your legacy content.

Jessica Arenz brings out the best of both worlds as an Instructional Designer and Marketing Executive at Webanywhere. She’s passionate about proper brand messaging and retail training and development. Throughout her career she has worked on eLearning for companies like Walmart, Sam’s Club, Kroger and Saks Fifth Avenue, to name a few. Jessica is one of many talented individuals on our team ready to collaborate with you on your next learning solution.

The post The Secret Formula to Great eLearning appeared first on Webanywhere.

Hello Lesli… Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge and experience in micro-learning.

Tell us a bit about yourself, your background and experience.

For the past 20 years, I have worked in academic and corporate educational arenas, beginning my first career as a secondary English teacher. A colleague introduced me to an LMS in 2003, and in 2008, I chose to leave the classroom and move into the realm of helping others learn how to use LMS for the learning needs of their organizations. Over successive career iterations in working with online learning, and particularly with Totara Learn, I have served as Internal Training Manager, site administrator, implementation specialist, and Totara mentor/trainer for various Totara partners. I am currently serving as a Senior Solutions Architect for Webanywhere, and one of my chief roles is to facilitate the design and actualization of learning environment improvements for our clients.

What is micro – learning to you and why is it significant …or not?

I think the trend for offering micro-learning arose out of the demands in the workplace to provide “just-in-time” learning opportunities and resources to employees who need them, oftentimes right there on the job when they need them. The challenge to provide meaningful (and let’s face it, useful) learning objects to a workforce with highly competitive demands for their time and attention is ever foremost in the minds of those who design virtual learning environments today, and we often meet that criteria only halfway. We manage to provide it in smaller chunks, but so many times we fail to offer it in more concise formats with clear, cohesive pathways back to practical applications on the job. In short, I think it is a significant and valuable trend, but only if it is implemented in the right way.

According to Bersin by Deloitte, a typical employee has 1% per week to spend on training and development, how can micro-learning support this?

Micro-learning is only effective if it incorporates a clear organization that is supported by clear objectives on the back end. If done correctly, it can provide the immediate, and sometimes crucial, skills proficiency reinforcement that employees need to have available to them as they are performing the task at hand.

Do you think advances in AI and mobile learning have led to improvements in micro-learning?

Mobile learning certainly has. If staff can access crucial information at the moment they need it, that underscores their learning by providing them with the chance to apply their learning directly to their task. In terms of AI, the ability for software to aggregate data on behaviors and to in turn direct users down certain paths according to those behaviors, well, at first that was an amazing thing. Still AI is not human, and I think the current algorithms and technology in use to guide us in the social network arenas, for instance, are far more prone to filter out actual useful and wanted information than not. In a learning arena, the consequences are far more dire: it amounts to selective education and an imperfectly informed workforce. So I guess you see I am a skeptic of AI, though I recognize its impact is ubiquitous and that we are often now adapting to AI as much as it is adapting to us in the various arenas where it is employed.

What are your experiences in micro-learning?  What type of training does it work well with or not?

I confess I have not completely climbed on the whole micro-learning bandwagon, but I have spent a fair amount of time begging my clients to reduce their one to three hour lecture videos (of the most riveting content EVER) down to shorter segments that can be watched and digested in a way that allows the person viewing the lecture to actually take time to reflect on the content.

In your opinion,  is micro-learning here to stay?

Well, call it what you like, but the need to provide far more concise and meaningful learning opportunities to those in the workplace when and where they need them, yes, that trend is here to stay.

Thank you for sharing your experiences with us

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