Did you know that eLearning has the potential to improve student retention rates from 25% to 60%? These staggering numbers are enough to prove how vital it has become for organizations to move their educational and training operations to eLearning platforms.
With that said, eLearning content development isn’t a walk in the park per se. There are several considerations and best practices that aim to make the process simpler and the results better.
This blog aims to provide insight into the best practices you can employ to maximize the output from your eLearning content development process.
10 Best Practices To Improve eLearning Content Development Process
By incorporating these ten simple practices in your eLearning content development process, you can create training and education modules that deliver the desired outcomes.
1. Market Research
eLearning aims to equip your workforce or learners with the latest, updated knowledge to get an edge in the industry. For this purpose, you must thoroughly research the market and industry trends to provide content that is niche-relevant and insightful.
A thorough market research would allow you to strategize your content development by giving you information on aspects like:
- Customer segments
- Revenue streams
- Costing
- Channels
- Customer expectations
- Partnership opportunities
And much more. Analyze what your competitors are doing, the eLearning companies you can partner with, what services you can avail of, etc.
2. Audience Study
Understanding the market alone may seem enough; however, knowing your target audience is just as important to ensure good penetration of your eLearning modules.
Creating the target audience profile ideal for your business niche would help your content reach more people through relevance.
A thorough audience research would give you critical information about who is consuming your eLearning content:
- The average age or age group of the learners in the industry
- Learning preferences
- Whether or not the age group is familiar with digital tools
- The average educational qualifications of the target audience
3. Translate Organization Goals Into Training Modules
One of the best ways a training or learning curriculum can be most effective is by ensuring that the training objective is aligned with organizational goals.
For example, if your organization aims to establish an inclusive work culture, the eLearning content should focus on positivity, cultural diversity, and tolerance.
You can leverage the popular A-I-D method to achieve this alignment:
- A – Analyse the needs of your business.
- I – Identify the pain points.
- D – Define the training objective according to pain points and needs.
4. Ensure Accessibility
Not all your learners would be familiar with using a digital interface. Additionally, you would need to ensure that for the learners who are differently abled or physically challenged, there are provisions in place to help them learn.
Aim to develop the eLearning content with the following things in mind:
- The colors used should not be triggering or limiting.
- There should be text-to-speech capabilities for those who find reading difficult.
- There should be interactive learning modules to aid understanding of tougher concepts
5. Enrich the Content
Today, the concept of enriched learning has become extremely popular among learners. eBooks that are interactive and contain media (video clips and audio) are received and consumed better than the standard, text-based material.
While developing your content, aim to introduce visual media that assist learner understanding. You can consider gamification, animations, quizzes, audio recaps of a chapter, video-based tutorials, etc., to enrich the content in your eLearning modules.
6. Make the Content Relatable
You can improve the engagement level of your eLearning course by making them more relatable for the target audience. For example, a marketing eLearning module could contain popular, real-world instances the learners can immediately relate to.
Such analogies help the learners retain the learnings better and may even come in handy when they are able to recall the lessons in time of need.
7. Augment Retention
The human memory refreshes itself every morning. This causes the “unnecessary” bits of information to be erased or forgotten.
To ensure that your learners are able to better retain the lessons learned during the course, the eLearning modules should be equipped with suitable repetitive course reviews that help the learners recap their understanding.
You can do this by including flashcards or quizzes throughout the eLearning course. For better impact, you can also introduce notifications that summarize key learnings.
8. Allow Course Pacing
Did you know that 58% of employees prefer self-paced eLearning courses? Especially in a corporate or professional setup, timing a course and forcing the learners to sit through it reduces engagement and course effectiveness.
Learners should be able to pace the course according to their understanding capacity and availability. They should be able to revisit the bits they didn’t understand well or take an assessment at a later time.
Ensure that your eLearning content allows these functionalities.
9. Provision for Assessments
Measuring the outcome in hard numbers is what will ultimately determine how successful your eLearning content was. You can introduce two functions in the eLearning course to help you measure success later:
- Allow a pre-course assessment to help establish a baseline for each learner. This will tell you what the learner already knew before starting a course.
- Introduce assessments at the end of each module or chapter and a final assessment to help you understand course progress and performance.
10. Deliver a Good UX
eLearning is digital, and everything digital leaves an impression with respect to user experience. A dull eLearning module that doesn’t offer engagement opportunities may ultimately underperform at its goals.
Ensure that your eLearning content development process keeps a good user experience in mind.
Wrapping Up
In 1995, only 4% of organizations used eLearning. Today, the number has increased to 90%.
eLearning has made itself a staple in every corporate and academic setup – whether formal or informal. If your organization aims to capitalize on the skills and potential of its human resources, eLearning content development should be a top priority.
To achieve that, you can leverage Hurix’s digital eLearning platform to develop engaging, interactive courses for your learners. Employ the best practices listed above to make an effective and impactful eLearning module using the digital publishing tools by Hurix.
