Customize Your eLearning Experience: 6 Tips for the eLearning Experts
As an organization, your job is to capitalize on employee growth.
However, not many organizations are aware of it.
A Monster poll reports that 80% of employees feel their current employers do not offer them growth opportunities.
This dissatisfaction drives employees to switch jobs frequently. As a result, many organizations lose their top talents.
To retain employees, organizations must contribute to employee growth.
When employees experience growth, it naturally translates into their ability to keep pace with industry developments.
This has a favorable effect on your organizational efficiency and productivity and helps you retain top talents.
One way to provide growth opportunities to employees is to help them learn. Employees require ongoing training to keep up with the endless stream of technologies and changing market demands.
Constant learning and development unlocks higher potential for employees and polishes their skills to keep them viable candidates in the talent pool.
Continual corporate training is a win-win for both your business and the workforce.
Incorporating eLearning in your corporate training is a great way to level up learning at your organization.
eLearning is learning supported by electronic devices. Using personal devices, employees can learn anywhere at their own pace.
The best part is you can customize eLearning to give employees the in-demand skills they need to keep up with today and prepare for the future.
If you are thinking of creating your eLearning courses, here are some practical tips to help you make the eLearning experience as lean as possible.
1. Create SMART Objectives
When trying to improve performance, maximize productivity, and contribute to employee growth, the place to start is by setting SMART objectives.
Objectives serve as a direction to keep learning on the course and in sync with an overarching business goal.
SMART objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
With SMART objectives, you stay focused, eliminate ambiguity, set expectations, and motivate employees.
So, when designing a course, start with the end in mind. In other words, what results do you expect from learning?
The best way to approach this is by creating SMART learning objectives. As Ralph Taylor (1966) tells us, we can define learning objectives clearly if we know what kind of behavior we expect learners to acquire by the end of learning.
Since learners are at the heart of learning, the objectives should be learner-focused. You can do an enterprise-wide survey to learn about your employees and create objectives to align with their needs.
By taking the time to consider your learners, you can ensure your course is not just laden with information but caters to different learning styles and interests.
2. Invest in Quality
While eLearning is a practical tool, what matters more is the content.
You should not settle on inadequate resources or minimum quality for your custom eLearning development when preparing content.
You must create quality content to make the experience meaningful and learning engaging.
After all, the last thing you want is the content to be long-winded, boring, and a repository of PDF documents, PowerPoint slides, links, etc.
Therefore, it is important to strip away everything that reduces content quality so that the employees that take up the course stay till the end.
For example, Dolby.io provides tools that can solve poor audio quality issues.
It can eliminate background noise, enhance speech intelligibility, and deliver immersive streaming solutions. With Dolby.io, you can refine your eLearning course and offer enhanced media content that invites employees to experience it.
3. Address Learner's Emotions
You might find it hard to engage employees in eLearning as much as you expect.
In a corporate setting, it's not uncommon to see employees desperately waiting for online training sessions to end so they can get back to work and finish it.
This happens when, no matter how beautiful the design is, the course is not effective enough.
One possible reason is that the course material lacks elements to appeal to learners or address their emotions.
Triggering emotions is extremely important in learning because it helps drive attention, which, in turn, increases engagement, stirs motivation, and improves knowledge retention.
Emotionally-driven eLearning approach stirs positive emotions in learners to engage them in learning.
You can evoke emotions by using more affirmative language in examples, stories, and scenarios you add in lessons to make eLearning a personal affair' for learners.
Another popular technique to inspire emotions is to tell stories. But, storytelling works only when it directly relates to learners' personal or professional experiences.
Thus, you should always keep language, examples, stories, and scenarios relevant to employee experiences.
4. Keep it Seriously, Short
You know that famous saying, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”
The same goes for your eLearning course material: conciseness is the soul of learning content.
It makes content focused, relevant, and engaging.
If you want your course content to be digestible and not loaded with extraneous, break down its complexity into bite-sized lessons. Plus, eliminate unnecessary details to keep it to the point.
5. Give and Ask for Feedback
To create a positive eLearning experience, do not underestimate the power of feedback.
For learners who want to experience great learning, feedback is extremely useful. It informs them about their performance level and gives them confidence in their progress.
So, ensure you create a feedback mechanism to provide immediate and accurate feedback. This way, they will know their performance and how far they meet expectations.
Conversely, to get feedback on employee satisfaction with eLearning, conduct assessments.
You must constantly assess employee performance to improve the course and experience.
6. Freedom to Navigate
Your employees can easily get stressed trying to figure out how to navigate through a complicated eLearning system.
It can be tempting to create a custom eLearning solution and give it a custom look. But, you must keep the design straightforward, clearly structured, and intuitive regardless of the eLearning navigation style you choose.
This way, learners can focus on course content rather than spend energy on system navigation.
By keeping navigation patterns similar and letting learners navigate swiftly from one tab to another, you can create a consistent design and save learners from being lost.
Final Thoughts
With eLearning, it is a lot easier and more interesting to learn.
Employees, as by the nature of their jobs, have jam-packed schedules. You need bite-sized, engaging content to hook them to deliver training content.
That's what eLearning offers.
eLearning can easily fit into employee schedules, allowing them to listen to a bite-sized lesson any time and quickly grasp a concept.
To get a custom eLearning solution, you can hire eLearning developers and build a customized solution that perfectly ties in with your SMART objectives.
Custom eLearning development lets you choose your preferred platform to build your eLearning solution.