4 Tips On Creating Top Quality Custom eLearning Courses
Everybody loves to have something that was made especially for them, keeping in mind their needs, their preferences and their interests. The same holds true for custom eLearning courses. Custom eLearning courses offer personalized learning, which does not only allow the learner to better engage with the course but grants them the reins to their own learning, to be directed as they choose. An efficient custom eLearning program will allow the learner a lot of choices, including the choice of setting goals, selecting interests, picking a schedule as well as choosing a learning style they are most comfortable with. Such an experience will be unique and relevant to the learner, and thus, provide maximum learning and retention.
Custom eLearning courses are especially helpful when applied in corporate training. Usually, organizations create a general eLearning course or program, and deliver to all of their employees, expecting to get results. I don’t know where to start listing things that are wrong with this approach. Why would anyone be interested in completing a program or course which they don’t even find relevant to their skills, job role, learning style or career goals? This is when employee learning comes to a halt. A custom eLearning course will engage and motivate employees to achieve personal development and career goals, as it is built around the same aspects.
But, how do you go about creating such a custom eLearning course? Let me list some best practices when designing such a course:
1. Know What Drives Your Employees
Every employee has both personal as well as professional goals. This is what drives them to learn or work hard. There are short-term goals, like getting better at a certain skill, and then there are long-term goals, like being promoted to management. Understanding these goals can help create effective custom eLearning courses. Get employees to define these goals themselves, and then ensure that the eLearning given to them focuses on getting them closer to their short-term and long-term goals.
2. Let Employees Trace Their Own Learning Paths
Offer employees content relevant to them, as mentioned in the point above, but provide choices within that content as well. This allows employees to skip what they already know, and focus like a laser on the skills they want to develop. Creating learning paths within eLearning programs for employees requires experienced Instructional Designers, as well as a powerful LMS, but it is worth every effort and expense. It’s a matter of developing your workforce after all.
3. Understand Employees’ Learning Styles
Every employee has different learning styles. Some learn better through visual imagery, i.e. images, videos, some through voices and sounds i.e. audio, while some prefer the old school approach, i.e. text and lectures. Younger workforce or Millennials have a lesser timespan, gets bored easily and need to be kept constantly engaged through interactivities, achievements, badges and game-like progressions in the course. The person or team developing the custom eLearning courses must be aware of individual learning styles, and learners should have a choice of selecting what type of content they are most comfortable with and choose a learning style best suited to their preferences.
4. Make Your Courses Accessible Anywhere, Anytime
We live in the era of the smartphone. The average modern person spends a lot of time on their smartphones, and they are quite comfortable with it. By building responsive eLearning courses, which can be accessed through learners’ smartphones, you offer them the ultimate freedom and control. They can access their eLearning courses anytime, anywhere. What’s better, it also makes the courses learner-paced and on-the-go. Creating responsive eLearning courses is easy with HTML5, and a powerful LMS will make it easy to meet the scheduling needs of the employees.
Customized experiences are, even presently, very popular, and soon they’ll be the only thing anyone would want and expect. Naturally, employees would expect to have customized training for themselves too. Instead of jumping on the bandwagon later on when you don’t have a choice, be a pioneer by offering your employees a custom corporate eLearning program.
