When creating a course that will be in multiple languages you must plan upfront for the “room” that each language will need. Here is a great chart that gives some guidelines for text expansion/contraction.

(Thanks Globalization Group!)

Colors have different meanings across the world. Here is a great charts that helps us know what various colors mean in different cultures.
(Thanks Globalization Group!)

All too often we forget that eLearning can also have audio. Not just narration but also sound effects that emphasize and support the text/images/animations.

I met Sound80 for the first time the other day at a conference. They provided a great paper on “Best Practices in eLearning Audio“.

1. Keep it in focus
2. Sometimes silence really is golden
3. Make it real
4. Not all recordings are created equal
5. A picture is worth 1000 words.
6. Author!
7. Moving beyond narration
8. Money, Money, Money, MONEY!
9. Effective effects
10. Work with the best

Thanks to Sound80 for the information!

The other day I was on an airplane and watched the person next to me “read” a magazine. He basically flipped quickly through the pages and stopped occasionally on a pretty picture and usually started flipping again. At one point he stopped and seemed to read a bit.

When we create eLearning we should remember that people don’t read…they scan!  We all do it. We quickly scan a page to see if there is any information that interests us. Then if that passes our “interest” test we might actually read a sentence and possibly the entire paragraph. Do we develop our eLearning with this in mind? Do we think that people will read all of our text? (Here’s the secret…they won’t.)

Our training must look good and capture the attention of our “shallow” learners. If we do that they may start to pay attention and read.

Here some things to think about when making your eLearning look good:
1. Color – Choose colors that work together. Your marketing department may have some swatches you can use. Focus on branding.
2. Skin – Make your course skin look fresh and up-to-date.
3. Pictures – Create images that tell a story. They could even replace some of your text. Don’t just use image placeholders.
4. Less text – Users aren’t reading it anyway so thin out the text.
5. Consistency – Make everything look like it belongs together. (Standards)
5. Interactions – Break up your content and make it engaging.
6. Fonts – They can add some style to your course just don’t go crazy.

Additional Resources:
Articulate (Tom) did an article on why looks matter.
e Learning Templates that look great and are branded.
Fresh Articulate Skins.

1. Interactions
There are many times when you have various concepts or “chunks” of information on a page. You could break it into multiple pages or divide it into sections. For example use tabs and dividers so that the user only sees small parts at a time. Here are some tabs and dividers.

You could also use some type of simple flash memory cards or drag and drop.

2. Scenarios
If you have a lot of information to share you could package it into a scenario. This is a good way to make it “real”. It also helps the user understand how it relates to them and why they should pay attention. Scenarios don’t need to be complex. They nay just be a simple setup page and a question or two.

Here are some scenario examples:
”The company has recently opened 3 new offices and a launched a new website. What products might help this company process customers’ payments?”
“You see a customer at the counter complaining about their cold food. The customer is visibly angry. As a manager what should you do?”

Here is a simple eLearning scenario template.

3. Case Studies
There are times when your scenario needs to be more in-depth. I like to use case studies when a scenario is too simple. A case study would be more intense and could include background information, bios on persons involved, current setup/date/time, multiple phases/steps, twists along the way, and decision points. Case studies take some time to create but can be very engaging.

4. Quizzes
Knowledge checks can keep a learner’s attention. You could even do quizzes before the course content is presented. This might be a good way to help the learner start thinking about the content and to give them a preview of what’s to come. Theses quizzes could be combined to create the final test. Here are some fun quiz templates and games.

5. Hands-On Demos
Many people learn by actually trying out the system (hands-on approach). Online training is a great way to give learners a way to try out a system without being live. You can recreate a series of steps in a software transaction and package it as a simulation. Learners could have three options:

• Sit back and watch a demonstration of how the software works.
• Be prompted where to click and how to navigate the software.
• Be tested to see if they can use the software without any help.

It is basically the “Tell them, Show Them, Let Them Do It” approach. Simulations are a great way to let learners practice in a safe environment.

6. Learning Games
Is there a way to make your course fun and still educational? There are many types of game ideas from word puzzles, Jeopardy, and Millionaire to more complex, immersive games.

There are tons of ways to create interactive content. Most of the time it just takes a little extra thought.

Related articles:
Check out this past article on brainstorming.
Awesome eLearning Do’s and Don’ts.

Do eLearning courses have necessary evils? I believe that they do…it’s TEXT. When we think of the worst online course that we’ve ever seen it was probably a “page-turner”. So there was a lot of text and that was it.

Here’s the secret that nobody wants to admit…online learners don’t read, they scan! Let’s admit it, most of our users are scanning our pages and seeing what stands out. If they are just scanning our text then we need to figure out how to help them understand our content.

So if text is a necessary evil, how do we keep it under control?

Make it Easy to Digest – Smaller Chunks
No learner wants to read a bunch of text on the screen and we can only remember a certain amount at a time. So, take your text and cut it into chunks. Many popular websites do this as well. Take a look at CNN and notice that every sentence is a new paragraph. This allows users to quickly scan the story. Maybe our courses should be written in that style? Or maybe something similar?

At times designers want to have less pages in a course. I really don’t pay attention to how many pages I have. I’d rather error on the side of having too many simple, clean pages than having pages with too much text.

Say NO to Jargon
Many times we work with SMEs to get our training content. They may be using words that a new employee won’t understand. It’s our job to break-down the jargon and write to the learner.

Cut, Cut, Cut…
Rewrite your text and then cut some and rewrite it again. There are many times when we use too many words. Can we convey the same meaning in 5 words instead of 15?

This reminds me of a LinkedIn discussion where people has to tell a story in 6 words. I know that a course will have more than 6 words but it shows how much information can truly be portrayed in very few words.

Use Bullets
Learners can easily scan a list. It helps them quickly breakdown the concepts.

(Before) 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.

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

• Increased competition
• Market uncertainty
• Increased expectations

Easy on the Bold, Italics, and Color
Using various text formatting can be very powerful. However if you overuse these formats they become useless.

The use of various text formatting should be explained in your internal style guide. When/what do you bold? When is colored text used? Can text be italicized?

As you format your text you can drastically help the user to understand what is important, what they should pay attention to, and how to interact with the course. Again, if it’s used too much the learner stops “seeing” it.

Talk to the Learner
I prefer to keep the text conversational. If we really want to connect with learners then formal text won’t work. As you write the course pretend like you’re are explaining it to a colleague.

When I see, “the user would then access the xxxxx screen” in a course it feels very distant. Just say, “You then access the xxxx screen”. eLearning is a one-to-one interaction.

Use Images
A picture if worth a 1000 words. Use images instead of text.

Conclusion
Is it possible to do online training with NO TEXT? Check out the videos at Common Craft. (I think that the answer is yes but probably not for every topic.)

Overall we just need to be more careful with our text. We could all spend a bit more time and come up with something that is more effective.

The phrase “Less is more” come to mind.

There are 2 ways to look at this problem:

1. The learner should be responsible and find ways to motivate themselves to complete the training.
2. Course designers should create courses that are more engaging and relevant.

How can this be accomplished? I like the ideas that Shelley shared in “Motivate Yourself to Learn through Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction“.

She mentions the ARCS model as a way to help learners be motivated:

• Attention
• Relevance
• Confidence
• Satisfaction

In the end we all need to be better training designers and training participants. Online training must have a motivated learner and motivating content.

Should our eLearning participants take notes?

Yes! Shelley Gable (“How Can Note Taking Help You with Online Learning?“) has a great article on this topic. She focuses on how taking notes can help a learner remember more. She also covers some note taking methods and what should be included in your notes.

Well, we might not be possible to meet all of the expectations above but we can try. There has been a major shift in Learning over the past decades. Companies have gone from 100% formal classroom training to more of a blended approach.

How do we make the learning available so that the learners can “swim in the pool of learning”? What part does formal learning have in the equation? How can we as training professionals make learning more quickly assimilated? How can we create faster?

Josh Little with Bloomfire has some great ideas, “Collaborative Learning: For the People, By the People”.

Shelley discusses that learners tend to remember the content presented first and last better than everything in the middle. (She refers to the Primacy and Recency Effects.) Now, when I first read the post it seemed like common sense. We just don’t have enough short-term capacity to remember all of it. However the point of the post is more around, “Since this is how the mind works, how are we changing the way we create training?”

Primacy and Recency Effect - Wikipedia

Do you strategically place content in your course based on if it’s closer to the beginning or ending? Maybe we should think about it a bit more.

What if the course starts with a bullet list of learning objects? What if the course ends with a text page that says, “In this module you learned…”? Do these play to the strengths of the Primacy or Recency Effects?

Here are a few ideas to “space out” training so that it’s more effective. (Kineo)

I guess we need to add this idea to our “design flow” to make sure we don’t forget to consider while designing courses in the future.