What You Should Consider While Designing An eLearning Course

eLearning has emerged as the saving grace for educators, businesses, and HR managers in a world hit by the pandemic, and people are being reduced to being home-dwellers for a long time. 

The benefits of a well-designed eLearning course can be reaped by business owners in keeping their workforce up-to-date with the latest iterations of industry skills through the right continuous online training. Similarly, students can continue with their education with the help of comprehensive eLearning courses designed by their educators, schools, and universities. 

eLearning has revolutionized how we approach education and learning outcomes in the last two years, even though it was present for us to leverage from it for a long time — but as they say, everything gets its due at the right time. The use of digital devices, powered by the internet, to learn and grow made our lives a little easier when uncertainties were adrift. 

Now, the question is, how to ensure that you are creating an effective, engaging, and interactive eLearning course for your target audience? What factors do you need to consider as you go about your eLearning endeavors? In this article, we will discuss five vital considerations before you start designing your perfect eLearning module. 

Never forget to thoroughly research your target audience

Gathering and compiling all the relevant information on your target audience must be the starting point of you designing your eLearning course. Targeted audience research is a must for you to identify their learning needs and expectations. To start with, collect data on their preferences, learning motivations, interests, preferred learning styles, and their respective backgrounds(social and economical).For instance, if designing a course for healthcare professionals, have in mind that it’s necessary for the course to be thorough and the students should receive a valid medical certification upon successful completion.

When you have collected your data, the next step is a systematic analysis of the recorded data. You need to group similarities and differences separately and figure out a way to marry them in a way that would be suitable for everyone. Right research helps you cater to every individual’s specific learning goals. 

Ascertain their knowledge

An extension of the target audience research is figuring out what is the level of knowledge that they possess. The idea is to have a clear understanding of where your target audience members stand in terms of their existing skillsets and overall knowledge on a given subject/topic. 

When you have a better idea of their knowledge levels — as in if they are beginners, moderately aware, or experts — you can design specific learning modules for each group to save their time and ensure effective and personalized learning.

Figure out the mode of dissemination of information

Having researched your target audience thoroughly, you must be ready with an outline of what courses you would create for each group out of your audience. Now is the time for you to figure out the mode of delivering your eLearning courses. Your research, therefore, must also include the preferred devices on which audience members would like to access their eLearning modules. 

Irrespective, ensure that your courses can run smoothly on all types of devices — from PCs, Laptops to smartphones and tablets. Thus, you must be reliant on responsive designs that adapt to all device types without glitches. Make use of an LMS like Articulate eLearning to ease your course designing process. 

Consider circumstantial factors

There are some underlying factors such as accessibility, quality, and costs of an eLearning course that need to be considered and dealt with as you design one. These circumstantial factors can make or break the success of a given course. 

Therefore. You must keep in mind that your course must be within the budget that you have allocated, can be easily accessed by the target audience, and doesn’t compromise on its quality in a bid to save extra costs. 

How will you evaluate outcomes

The final and one of the most crucial factors to be considered while designing an eLearning course is the method of evaluation of the learning outcomes. You must figure out the various ways in which you would go about evaluating the progress of learners and the success of your course. These may include weekly assessments, pop quizzes, practical projects, surveys to get learner feedback, etc. 

Conclusion

You must be proactive in taking into account all of the above considerations before you embark on the journey of designing an effective eLearning course for your target audience.