Planning Your Elearning Course: Tips for Success

Designing Digitally

04/17/2019

Working in the corporate field can be demanding since you have to meet sharp deadlines in order to accomplish the firm’s objectives. This is where effective training is vital. It helps the workers manage their time efficiently and not feel overwhelmed by responsibilities. Instead of doing the training physically in a classroom, you can create an elearning course to give the workers more flexibility.

Planning for an elearning course is not easy and requires that you follow a series of steps in order for it to be successful. Before you get started, you need to bear in mind that this project requires patience, determination, and a well-stipulated plan that will see you through your journey.

Here are 8 tips to help ensure you plan an effective eLearning course.

1. Identify the problems that need solutions

Every business that has been running for a while should know its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. As a business owner, you’ll always want to work on the weaknesses first because they tend to slow you down. Planning for elearning courses will help you and your staff identify the areas that need to be polished over time.

2. Know what you want to accomplish with the course

Making a list of what you want your employees to learn at the end of the elearning course is a smart way to ensure that you have your deliverables in place. This will help you direct the entire company in the right direction. Planning elearning courses requires thorough organization.

This means that you need to have a step-by-step approach. A good example is that of an IT marketing course that is designed to first teach about search engine optimization, how to carry it out, and how to reevaluate. This means that when planning for your elearning courses, you will need to comply with the business strategy needs of the company if you want it to be successful.

3. Use a Storyboard

The main idea of the course is to teach and engage; therefore, using storyboards is a great tool to use to plan your strategy. The storyboard will help sequence the learning program, display major takeaways, and provide a visual overview of the course.

4. Involve the Learners

If you want your employees to be more receptive to the new elearning training module, you have to involve them in the initial design of the course. Let them give you ideas on how to make the course more interactive and interesting.

Elearning course planning can be made more efficient by giving out surveys or carrying out focus groups before the official enrollment. Getting feedback from the audience will help the facilitators to come up with a time-flexible schedule that will touch on all the crucial areas.

5. Identify your Requirements

Your course is not going to be successful all on its own. There are certain resources that complement the learning process so as to make it more engaging and interesting.

During elearning course planning, you have to identify what you’ll need to achieve a meaningful program. Here are some useful requirements that can help facilitate a fruitful learning experience:

  • Assets needed to be uploaded to the learning platform such as images, offline notes, logos, and video files.
  • Hardware and software equipment needed to be purchased and installed.
  • Useful personnel to be hired to help deliver different parts of the project.

6. Include a review process

Just as mentioned earlier, elearning course plans can be complicated because they may involve several processes that can be confusing. This is why you need to have a review process that’ll let you and others involved in the project identify areas that you have overlooked.

Therefore, before the completion of the program, you need to make sure that you have other people carry out a review of the process, even if the company doesn’t necessarily need an official review procedure. A review will help you get the best possible feedback and identify areas of improvement.

7. Pinpoint the purpose of learning

Unfortunately, many of us tend to forget that learning isn’t always just about acquiring knowledge. The main goal of learning about a certain subject or concept is to apply it in real-life situations.

8. Visualization

A goal and ambition without a vision may result in futile efforts. This is the same with elearning courses. Having a visual of the course is simply like setting up a roadmap that will take you to your destination. It will give you peace of mind because you’ll be able to know the team behind the project, the time needed, the financial budget, and the corporate needs that have to be met.

Conclusion

Elearning course plans can give you greater flexibility when training your employees. It is also cost-effective since you don’t have to hire a professional trainer to teach your employees. Before you launch the course, make sure that you have followed the above steps to increase chances of success.

Designing Digitally has been creating eLearning courses to improve learning outcomes for over a decade. We understand that unique need of each business and work with you to address your company goals and needs. If you need assistance with your eLearning course development, contact our team today to learn how we can help.