As of 2022, eLearning is bigger than ever and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 14.22% within the next five years. With the pandemic pushing education centres to move online and people searching for opportunities to learn new skills, it’s no surprise that eLearning has seen significant growth over the past few years. In this article, we will explore how to build a successful eLearning experience by following 5 simple steps. We’ll also throw in eLearning development tips & tricks into the mix so make sure to read until the end. Let’s begin.
Even pre-pandemic, Research and Markets predicted that the online education market could be as high as $350 Billion by 2025. Obviously, the pandemic has accelerated this to double the original projection. So if there was ever a right time to build a successful eLearning experience, the time is now.
Companies and organisations have taken notice and are taking sufficient steps to design and develop their own eLearning experiences. The challenge is this: it’s not just about investing in technology. They need to make sure that their eLearning platform is up-to-date and offers the best experience for their learners.
Table of Contents
Before You Start
When building an eLearning experience, there are a few things that you need to consider before you start eLearning development that will help contribute to its success.
- Demographic information: Identity-based audience profile (ethnicity, income, education, employment, etc)
- Technographic information: Audience profile based on ownership and usage of technology
- Accessibility: How capable are the learners to navigate through the courses?
- Learning formats: How appropriate are the learning formats for the learners’ styles of learning?
- Knowledge levels: How proficient are the learners?
- Retail: This model allows you to sell slots, passes, or entire courses individually, directly to end users.
- Subscription: This model allows you to provide access to a library of content or a series of events for a continuous recurring payment.
- Advertising: This model allows you to offer learning experiences for free in exchange for the behavioural data provided by learners which can be used by advertisers to launch ads all throughout your platform
- Sponsorships: This model allows you to offer learning experiences for free through funding of a sponsor or a set of sponsors. This also pertains to crowd-based sponsorships or crowdfunding.
- Licensing: This model allows you to authorise another body or franchise to use your content and platform on their own accord, through a licensing agreement.
…Read more about monetisation strategies here.
- Dashboards, Search Features, Admin Support, Course Pages, Material Libraries, LMS, Online Tutoring, MOOC, Video-based, and other eLearning solutions
- …Read more about key features of eLearning platforms here.
5 Must Dos: ELearning Experience Development
With all this in mind, let’s go through the steps you should take to build a successful eLearning experience.
Make the Course Interactive
No matter what age you are or what the topic may be, learning by reading through pages and pages of text is not going to instil enthusiasm or excitement in anyone.
Including a good amount of videos, images, audio, and even educational games is crucial to creating engagement opportunities for learners. Without interactivity, students will quickly become bored and uninterested.
Read our article on designing effective and engaging eLearning content in 4 ways to learn more about how to make your courses interactive.
Plan Your Course Content Effectively
Whilst online learning offers an accessible and engaging way to learn; it is essential to remember that information needs to be kept concise yet in-depth. Students aren’t able to ask constant questions as they can in class, so content needs to be relevant and effective. Here are some ways you can support in-depth learning remotely:
- Creating interactive orientation materials
- Adding a glossary of terminologies
- Developing an FAQ page
- Having a community forum for students to interact
- Embed curated multimedia content
- Allow students to take their own learning paths
- Adding additional links and materials to citations can also be helpful
- Create a support help line (i.e. support email or number)
- Offer badges and microcredentials for small wins
Have Regular Progress Assessments
Progress information is not only beneficial for the student but also for the business. Is your platform effective? Are students improving? Through regular assessments, analytics and reports, this information is easily accessible and advantageous for gauging student progression.
There are different ways to assess progress of learners:
- Formative assessment: Assessments that are used during instruction. The idea is to reveal gaps in learning while instructional interventions can still be done.
- Interim assessment: Assessments that are spread throughout key milestones inside the course to benchmark learners against a defined standard and predict how well they will finish
- Summative assessment: Assessments that aim to measure the overall learning of students at the end of the course. Note however, that this only commonly measures retained knowledge and not long-term practice.
- Universal screening: Assessments that only aim to profile learners in order to identify the best course of action or learning journey for them
- Diagnostic: Assessments that also aim to profile learners but in terms of preexisting knowledge and skills
- Progress monitoring: Assessments that are used to a measure long-term application, done by evaluating the learners’ progress toward a performance target
Read more about assessments in detail here.
Consider Scalability
As your business progresses and grows, your eLearning platform will too. This is something to consider before setting up your online learning platform. When designing your experience, it should be flexible and adaptable to change. An LMS allows businesses to quickly and easily adapt their training materials, updating and rescaling where necessary.
Create an Excellent User Experience
High dropout rates are one of the biggest problems for eLearning platforms. Building a user-friendly experience doesn’t just mean eye-catching graphics or exciting videos. Your system needs to be simple to navigate, bug-free and convenient for the learner. Both mobile and desktop versions should be equal in quality, ensuring accessibility and smooth usability. Successful platform development always involves trying different ideas, leaving room for new features and adjustments, and solving specific problems.
Summary
At the end of the day, it all boils down to learner experience. When developing an eLearning platform make sure to consider the needs of your audience and design solutions based on these. Design for a good experience first and find the right technology for the job. Technology follows intent– not the other way around.
There may be a ton more we left out. But feel free to talk to us at Strawberry Solutions if you have any more questions
We are Strawberry Solutions
We are Australia’s leading elearning developers. We can help your business develop innovative new learning experiences to inspire minds like never before.
Our team consists of a talented crew of graphic designers, instructional designers, animators, video editors, voiceover artists and eLearning developers who create sophisticated, multimedia SCORM output.
Once the content is created, we will export it as a SCORM package which can be uploaded to your LMS and delivered easily to your online students. Even if you change LMS in the future, your SCORM package can be uploaded into the new one, meaning you don’t have to create courses from scratch.
There’s a sweeter way to learn. Talk to us.