3 eLearning Course Features To Pay Attention To
You have just spent some valuable time creating amazing eLearning content. Now, it’s finally time to deploy. Hold off just one moment. How you deploy your courses is just as important as how you create your content in the first place. Here are 3 important features you should evaluate before you deploy your eLearning courses.
1. How Your Data Gets Tracked
How do you know if your eLearning courses are effective at helping your learners? You need to track your data, and xAPI is the way to go.
There are several data points you should keep in mind when deploying your eLearning courses. Whichever tool you choose for deployment should at least support the following:
- Training fulfillment percentage
Of all the people who enter your course, how many actually complete it? This will help you figure out whether or not your learners feel engaged by your content. When this data point starts to dip, you know changes need to be made to improve your course. - Average and final course scores
Even if your learners feel engaged by the content and complete the training at a high rate, you also need to know if they are learning correctly. For example, if your training fulfillment percentage is high, but your scores are low, this means your learners are completing your training, but not retaining as much of the information as they should. This indicates that your update needs to be updated for clarification, perhaps. - Course participation percentage
This is different than fulfillment; in this case, you are checking how many people choose to participate in your course. If, for example, you are offering an optional training in your organization or offering a course to your email list, how many of them enroll? - Training satisfaction rates
Your authoring tool should let you implement a way to assess how satisfied the learners are with their experience. Even if they complete the course and have a high average score, it doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement
It’s also useful to know the following:
- At what stage do people struggle the most in your course?
- What lesson is responsible for the highest drop-off rate?
- How long, on average, do learners spend on each section of your course?
Many eLearning authoring tools will give you access to a large portion of these data points. But in many cases, you will need more flexible access to your data. xAPI to the rescue! Here is an example: Let’s say you are a content creator who wants to sell courses online. You need to provide courses to your students on your website for proper branding and ease of access, but you also need to access the analytics on the course’s usage. Always take a moment to consider exactly which data points you will need, as well as how you will need to access them before you deploy.
Check out this article on the many ways Koantic can deploy your courses.
2. Where You Need To Deploy
It’s important to choose an eLearning authoring tool that makes it easy to create content quickly and efficiently. However, it’s just as important to choose a tool that is flexible when it comes to deploying your content. The most user-friendly tool won’t be of any use if you cannot deploy your content where you need it the most. Let’s bring back the example of the content creator who sells courses. Many creators who sell courses want to provide a free sample course first to generate leads and funnel more buyers for their premium offer.
In this case, it’s crucial to have the course hosted on a website. This makes it easier to capture leads, retain more users for longer periods on the website, and grow brand awareness by keeping everything branded to the creator. Another use case would be for people who need to deploy on the Intranet, for example, Salesforce or Sharepoint. You may also want to deploy using a SCORM LMS wrapper, which enables you to simplify the deployment and have access to more tracking data.
For people developing eLearning content in an academic context, you may need to consider Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) support. If this is the case, your LMS absolutely needs to support LTI. That’s another consideration to take into account before you deploy. But what if you run a small business and don’t want to host your own content or manage a separate Learning Management System, for that matter? Make sure to verify if your authoring tool allows you to host content for you. Even better, if your tool comes fully loaded with a built-in LMS, you will only need to manage a single tool, which makes it much easier for small businesses.
3. Ease Of Deployment
This is the final and perhaps the most overlooked feature you should evaluate when deploying your eLearning course. If you have powerful data tracking abilities and flexible deployment solutions, but no easy way to deploy, then you have a problem. Let’s bring back the SCORM LMS wrapper example. Not only does using a SCORM wrapper give you access to more data points using xAPI, but it also simplifies the entire deployment process.
For instance, what happens if you need to make frequent updates to your content or edit a part of your course that is causing issues for your learners? Imagine having to redo the entire deployment process every time a small modification is needed. It’s simple when using Koantic with SCORM wrappers. You can simply load your course into your LMS, then publish any changes that you need to make to your course using the Koantic authoring solution. This allows you to avoid having to re-upload your entire course to your LMS every time you need to make a small edit.
Simplify Deployment Without Sacrificing Power
In order to have powerful data, flexible deployment options, and ease of use, you need a tool that can do it all. With Koantic, you can create, deploy, track, and even host your eLearning content in a single, fully-integrated solution—straight on the cloud. Plus, you can start for free!
