Best Practices for Creating Online Courses

There are many things to think about when creating eLearning. There’s no way that I can mention all of them in this post but I’d like to mention a few that come to the top of my mind.

Course Outline / Storyboarding

• Know the audience
• Find good SMEs
• Always create an outline of the course
• Storyboarding allows you to structure content flow
• Decide what knowledge/skills need to be taught first
• SMEs can take a glance at the flow and content
• Content creating will go more quickly (it’s faster than creating content and then starting over)

Text

• Learners scan, they don’t read
• Keep it simple
• Don’t introduce too much information at once (chunks)
• Use bullets/lists
• Avoid font color
• Use bold and italics sparingly
• Talk to learners or not (choose a style)
• Formal or informal verbiage

Example: Bad

These are challenging times for the financial services industry.

Increased competition, recent uncertainty in the markets, and increasing expectations are just a few of the challenges we face as we seek to strengthen relationships with our clients.

Example: Good

These are challenging times for the financial services industry.

As we seek to strengthen relationships with our clients, we face:

• Increased competition
• Market uncertainty
• Increased expectations

Consistency

• Font (Headers, body)
• Colors (text, images)
• Grammar (tense, spelling, etc.)
• Bullets
• Image placement
• Introduction pages, end of lesson, test launch, evaluation, etc.
• Interface and navigation
• Job Aids and reference material
• Formatting of list of steps
• Hyphenated words consistent (i.e. on-line vs. online)

Image Selection/Design

• Learners scan text and often look at images first
• Can learners understand your page by only looking at the image?
• Make them meaningful. (not gratuitous images)
• Explain the process visually
• Import the.png, jpg, gif into PowerPoint for best quality
• Can part of the text on the page be in the image?

Tests/Assessments

• Ensure that the questions are answered
• Decide an appropriate number of questions based on the needed score to pass
• Will you have a pool of questions?
• Should the questions be randomized?
• Submit after each question vs. submit all at once
• Quizzes vs. tests

Quality Review

• Always click through the finished course before and after the final upload to the LMS
• Have someone outside of your area click through the course
• Don’t test the course on the same computer that it was created on

I hope that the previous list helps get you thinking while designing online training.

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