5 Things to Think About When Designing Bespoke E-Learning Content

E-Learning

Do you want to create e-learning content from a traditional face-to-face or paper based course? Here are 5 ways to improve your e-learning content - they’re worth keeping in mind when you’re about to commission a supplier to create your content.

  1. Keep each chunk of content to less than 10 minutes of learning time. Small sections of interactive content with end of section quizzes are the best way to keep learners interested in the content. Anything more than 10 minutes and the interactions become repetitive, learners lose interest and the training isn’t effective.

  2. Use video and audio sparingly. Video’s appealing because it seems like a more sophisticated way to deliver large amounts of content over the web and feels like it should be more interactive than reading plain text. The downsides are that good quality video is expensive, it can date very quickly (maintaining video based content can be expensive) and it is less engaging than well designed interactive content.

  3. Make it SCORM compatible. SCORM lets you track learner progress, allows learners to bookmark where they are in the content and makes your content compatible with a range of third party learning management systems. There’s an emerging new e-learning standard called Tin Can but SCORM 1.2 is the standard to go to if you want support third party learning management systems.

  4. Make it mobile friendly. It’s reasonable for learners to expect that e-learning content (and the learning management system) works well on mobile phones and tablets. There is a challenge though - a lot of interactive e-learning content (particularly content that uses animations) is Flash based and so doesn’t work on iPhones and iPads. The solution is to find a supplier who can build interactive content with HTML5.

  5. Take some lessons from gaming. Short quizzes, badges for different progress levels and leaderboards (harder to implement without a bespoke learning management system) all help to get the learner more engaged with the content. The language learning app Duolingo and the Khan Academy maths site are great examples of platforms that use ‘gamification’ to motivate learners.

The key is to find a good learning content designer who knows how to take your existing content and then adapt it for online. The end result should be content that has clear learning objectives, comes in manageable, interactive chunks and is easy to maintain moving forwards.


SkillsLogic builds affordable bespoke e-learning content that works across third party learning management systems.

Talk to us today and find out how we can help.


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Contact Us

SkillsLogic Ltd,
Cooper Buildings,
Sheffield Technology Park,
Arundel Street,
Sheffield,
S1 2NS

+44 (0)114 383 0093
info@skillslogic.com


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