When it comes to eLearning, less is more. It means that learners sometimes don’t get higher learning outcomes with a huge amount of information. On the contrary, they look for “smarter” learning content that enables them to gain more knowledge but spend less time. Therefore, what should creators do to keep the “smart” element in eLearning content creation? Here are 4 criteria for great eLearning content.
Be Relevant and Helpful to Learners
The first and most important element to create good eLearning content is being relevant and helpful. Here are the advantages of having related and useful content.
1. Providing helpful knowledge for learners
Nobody wants to take a course that doesn’t provide any additional value for their knowledge. Undeniably, when learners come to your course, they are looking for helpful information. So, as a creator, it’s appreciated to give the most supportive content as you can for them.
2. Delivering relevant information to learners
- First and foremost, good learning content should be relevant to learners’ occupation and direction. In particular, most of them try to find a course which can improve and support their job. Hence, they won’t waste their time learning something that does not relate to what they are doing.
- Secondly, it’s crucial to create content that resonates with your learners’ interests. For example, a doctor whose primary focus is surgery may actively seek out courses related to medical care and patient training, as their main goal is to enhance treatment effectiveness. By curating eLearning content that aligns with their aspirations and curiosities, you can make it easier for learners to engage with the material.
- Thirdly, content for eLearning should cover audience problems. In detail, when learners come to your eLearning course, they are mostly seeking a solution for their issues. Thus, if learners find your course as good medicine to cure their disease, they are more likely to take it!
Here is an example of how content is relevant to the learners’ concerns. This video was created with the initial purpose of making medical care knowledge more easy to understand. From that, the doctor could show it to the patients for better training. In detail, the visual-audio content has supported a lot in explaining the symptoms of heart failure.
Read more:
» The application of animations in medical education
Tips to know if you are teaching the essentials?
Carefully answer the following questions:
- Does your eLearning content provide useful information that helps solve learners’ problems?
- Does your course provide the knowledge/ experience learners need?
- Does your content clearly and simply solve the learners’ problem/ misunderstanding?
- Is your content as overwhelming as a mountain of information?
- Are there any parts of content that you can cut off?
- Can your learners apply what they’ve learned? Give them an idea of how they could do that.
- Could you find anywhere else that has the same content as your course?
Easy to Access, Understand, and Learn
When people come to the course, they have little or no idea about what you are going to teach. Practically, learners want to spend time studying what they didn’t know before. Thus, they expect to gain more knowledge after taking your course most comfortably and effectively.
Why should your eLearning content be easy to access and take away?
Understandably, learners want to avoid challenges and complexity. After all, everyone prefers a straightforward experience. Since learners are often new to the concepts and information presented in your lessons, complicated directions can lead to confusion. Therefore, it’s essential to create easy-to-digest eLearning content that they can easily follow.
Moreover, first impressions are crucial. Imagine opening a course filled with intricate math equations and complex explanations for the first time. The likely response? Turning it off immediately. Similarly, learners will react negatively to content that feels overly difficult or convoluted. Thus, presenting your material in a user-friendly manner can significantly enhance engagement.
By ensuring your content is accessible and straightforward, learners will be more inclined to explore your course further. They will find themselves eager to gain insights without realizing the underlying complexities. This approach is often achieved through effective content curation in eLearning, where the most relevant and digestible materials are selected and presented in a way that facilitates understanding. Once learners are engaged with your content, their learning journey becomes uninterrupted and enjoyable.
Engaging
Engaging is one of the most important elements in eLearning content creation. To explain, this ingredient can add more powerful flavors to your disk. Specifically, engaging content will let your learners happily enjoy your course because it helps:
1. Capture learners’ attention
According to Wyzowl, the human attention span is 12 seconds, which is longer than goldfish only 3 seconds. Due to this short span, people rarely pay much attention to something unimportant and uninteresting. So, your content should be catchy enough to take learners’ attention and make them feel worthy of their effort.
2. Decrease the difficulty and the boringness of the content
In some professional subjects, complex theories and intricate examples can overwhelm learners. This is where engaging eLearning content makes a real difference, reducing the stress associated with difficult concepts. Leveraging elearning design services that integrate dynamic elements and visual aids can help make challenging content more accessible and enjoyable.
For example, UNSW Sydney (The University of New South Wales), one of Australia’s leading research and teaching universities, has come up with engaging eLearning content for their civil engineering program. With the support of visual aids, they explain various processes that occur in the formation of metamorphic rock. They transfer difficult theories in the book into some simple visualizations with explanations in animated videos. As a result, learners can easily get the idea and understand the content.
3. Motivate learners to learn
Undeniably, we all keep doing what we are interested in. So do learners. Once your learners find your course interesting, there could be a motive to boost them to learn more. It’s when your course enhances learners’ attitudes toward learning. Of course, you will be the happiest to see learners enthusiastically catch up with your course.
Be Realistic about the Amount of One Intake of Information
Right from the first lesson, you should prove to the student why they’re right when choosing to follow your course, and that it’d be best to remain so till the end of the course. In other words, try to “hook” your prospective students first. Then, list various stages, as well as a specific plan to develop one module for each stage, that should be taken to engage the student throughout the course constantly.
1. Informing the amount of information intake for learners
It’s better to tell learners how much information and what they will take after each lesson. HubSpot is one of the examples. In particular, they break a long lesson of around two hours or more into multiple short videos. In addition, they also label and put description information in their lesson. And, the time shows up in each video. For this reason, learners can see the amount of information they intake in each lesson.
For a more tailored approach to developing engaging, well-structured courses, consider exploring eLearning design services for innovative solutions and ideas.
Check out the Top 8 Best eLearning Design Services Companies in 2024 to find the right fit for creating impactful, structured eLearning content.
2. Allowing learners to decide their learning paths
Creators should let learners actively pick what they want to learn, their priority, and learn when they want to learn. You can’t force learners to focus on long hours. Or else, you will make them exhausted and decrease the effectiveness of the lesson. Furthermore, your course should have more options for learners to pick depending on their preference. Instead of learning from beginning to end, they can freely decide to learn a topic that they like.
3. The latest cheat sheet: The recipe for a skyrocket content course!
Tips on eLearning content creation to develop courses that every learner wants to be engaged in!
(To take your free infographic away, click here)
Conclusion
To sum up, content creation is one of the most important works in building an eLearning course. To make a successful course, your content should include 4 criteria which are provided and listed above. After this article, we hope that you will be able to create and evaluate great eLearning content for your course.
Read Further:
- How to write learning objectives for online learning courses effectively
- 5 educational animation examples for online courses
- Combine talking-head videos and animated videos for better learning outcomes
Sean Bui, the founder and creative director of F.Learning Studio, is a respected leader in the e-learning and multimedia production industry. With over 10 years of experience, he has dedicated his career to helping organizations create engaging and impactful learning experiences.
Under his leadership, F.Learning Studio has grown into a trusted partner for organizations in the education, healthcare, and corporate training sectors, producing over 2,000 minutes of educational animation.
