eLearning has taken the world by storm as a rapidly rising number of businesses and educational institutes unlock the power of online learning. The benefits of eLearning have made it a hot trend in today’s society. There’s no doubt it brings great results, reduces material costs, and opens your business to a world of possibilities that were once limited by the constraints of geography.
As the development of eLearning courses started to take off, many businesses and even educational institutes were wary to jump on the bandwagon. The idea was that developing these eLearning courses was not only stressful, it was time-consuming. The great news is that outsourcing web development to design eLearning course allows you to create a powerful and effective experience for your audience. And, outsourced development of these courses is inexpensive, time efficient, and more effective than doing it yourself.
The Benefits of eLearning Courses
eLearning courses have many advantages for both businesses and learners. The popularity of the eLearning industry comes from the ability for eLearning courses to easily assist your learnings to achieve their goals and objectives. But, the benefits go far beyond this. On both business level and student level, eLearning can:
- Deliver great results
- Decrease material costs
- Improve performance
- Increase productivity
- Expand the reach by crossing the boundaries of geographical restrictions
- Deliver ongoing access to resources
- Provide real-time access and support
- Provide additional learning and teaching solutions like online conferences and interactive webinars
eLearning is not only a more productive way to teach and learn, it is informative, practical, and professional. When you create an eLearning tool that is effective and resourceful, your students and employees are bound to be as excited about learning as you are about teaching them what they need to know. Even the least technologically savvy person can deliver a great course with the right web design and development team. When you invest in resources like this, you show your audience that you value your business and are invested in their educational future and continued success.
Creating an Effective eLearning Design
Some of the most important elements of effective eLearning design standards are:
- Accessibility
- Responsive web design
- Engaging graphics and multimedia
- Optimized load time and visibility
- Ease of navigation
- Working hyperlinks
- Shortcut keys
- Quality content
Your eLearning course should be created with an interactive eLearning design. While your course needs to be practical and professional, it also needs to be engaging and keep your viewers’ attention. One of the main benefits of working with a web development team is access to a UX designer who can provide eLearning design ideas that will blow your audience away.
Best Practices in eLearning Course Design
According to the eLearning Industry, eLearning course navigation and usability are particularly important because of the absence of person-to-person contact you see in a traditional classroom. The eLearning Industry outlines the most important eLearning course design usability heuristics to help remove the barriers of effective course design. Effective design in eLearning includes:
- Your system’s ability to provide the right feedback to your learners in a reasonable amount of time.
- The ability to speak the users’ language and deliver information in a reasonable and logical way. Remember, your eLearning course should deliver the same experience that a traditional classroom used to offer to students. Your viewers need to understand the materials you are presenting and be able to manage their course materials effectively.
- User control is important as students need to have the freedom to go back and forth between screens even after submitting answers. In some cases, the wrong button might be clicked or students realize they chose the wrong answer.
- All of your courses should be consistent and able to follow the standards of online learning. This means pages and layouts should remain consistent throughout the course to avoid distractions.
- Error prevention is also important in design. Since important information is collected when students or personnel sign up for your course, your system should be able to pick up if any important information has been left out.
- The system should be adaptable to both experienced and inexperienced users. Flexibility and efficiency of use should allow the system to speed up to meet the knowledge of experienced users while also catering to those new to eLearning.
- Effective design should always work to avoid distracting learners. Minimalist designs and relevant content are the best practices when creating eLearning courses. This allows learners to stick to the curriculum and avoid losing their train of thought.
- Support help, tutorials, manuals, and guides should always be available to your users. Although one of the major benefits of eLearning is a reduction in cost and less “material” for the users, it is still important to have all the resources a learner needs if they face a problem. All support help should be direct and to the point. It should also be easy to find, properly categorized, and searchable.
Deliver the Most Effective Course Experience to Your Learners
The goal of any online learner is to get the most out of their time and successfully complete a course with the proper documentation to apply to their resume. You already understand the importance of effective design, quality user experience, and an interactive user interface. The best approach to deliver a professional eLearning course is to hire a UI designer who is skilled in this type of project.
Before you hire a designer, talk to them about their instructional design certificate and their experience with this type of work. While local and in-house development costs can be expensive, an outsourced web designer salary is very affordable and opens you to a much larger talent pool worldwide. This allows you to have a quality product created for your students and employees while you focus on the important parts of your job that require your involvement.
When you work with a skilled designer and developer, saving time and money will not be the only benefit for your business. You will create an effective eLearning course that is informative, practical, and professional. And, you will not only help your learners meet their learning goals and objectives, you will help them rise to a new learning potential they never imagined was possible.
