ELearning has come a long way since it first started appearing on our computer screens. The days of recording a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation and calling it elearning are thankfully few and far between.

Today, learners demand more out of their online courses, and if they aren’t up-to-par, they will go somewhere else to get the content.

Knowing this, there are a few thing things you should do to help ensure that your courses are both well put together and effective.

1. Create Clear Objectives – In the simplest of terms, this is essentially what you want your learners to take away from the course itself. These should be stated up-front, and throughout the content. The objectives should be course-wide, but also should pertain to each individual lesson.

2. Use Intelligent Quizzes – An intelligent quiz is one that actually requires the learner to reflect on the content. Too often elearning courses rely upon “true or false” only questions, which hardly are a challenge. Make sure you vary your question-types, and also make the questions challenging enough where the learner’s comprehension of the material is truly being measured.

3. Use Incentives and Rewards – By rewarding learners for demonstrating their understanding of the content, they will be motivated to take the course seriously. Rewards can be in the form of points, continuing education units, certificates, badges, and more.

Creating an effective online course is not a one-shot deal. You should always be looking for ways to tweak the content so that its impact is maximized for your target audience.

Try different quiz questions, use various combinations of rewards, and poll your users often to see if they are fully understanding the objectives (and if not, where the pain-point exist so that you can clarify further if necessary).

As time goes on, you will need less modifications to the delivery of the content and you can focus more on keeping the content relevant.