We’ve discussed many of the tools you can utilize when designing courses in our three-part mini-series: The Best eLearning Tools for Education. In this series, we took a deep dive into three major programs that can help take your courses to the next level, including Articulate 360, CourseArc and LTI, and Captivate by Adobe.
Here at ryco.io, we utilize these programs amongst other powerful tools to help create genuinely entertaining and educational courses. As industry leaders, we’d like to provide some insight to those looking for help with course creation. That’s why, in this article, we’ll discuss 5 tips for designing eLearning courses.
Let’s get started.
eLearning Course Design Should Be Engaging
One of eLearning’s most distinct advantages is that it automatically includes a captive audience. When students log in to their course, they come prepared to learn. Additionally, there is the possibility that students are entirely tuned into their learning with limited distractions, which is hard to manage in a classroom learning environment.
Still, some challenges present themselves with the level of engagement of online learning. The attention of eLearning students can drop off quickly at the start of courses if the material is not engaging enough. And as an instructor, you can’t always control what type of distractions are occurring in the environment surrounding the student.
That being said, it’s essential to understand the value of creating eLearning courses that are truly engaging to students.
Instructional Design and eLearning
The goal of instructional design for eLearning is to impress your target audience immediately. Regardless of how subtle, having this wow factor will ensure that students are tuned in and more likely to retain the information shared throughout the course.
The more we begin relying on online learning for classroom or training settings, the more we need to understand the science behind their design so we can create genuinely captivating learning experiences for all levels of learners.
Since it’s not realistic to have a visual designer on every team designated to create eLearning courses, it is worth your time to take a moment to learn more about what makes content more valuable than others.
5 Tips for Designing eLearning Courses
Without formal training in technical applications or visual design, you can follow these five instructional design tips to help you create effective eLearning courses.
1. Make Sure Your Course Remains Consistent
One of the tell-tale signs of an eLearning course that a beginner has designed is the lack of consistency throughout. It’s common to find mismatched patterns or color themes in lessons created by individuals with minimal design or learning experience.
Although it is often an oversight, something as simple as changing themes can dramatically negatively impact learners. Students can lose focus as it can be challenging to adjust to changing themes every few slides.
Instead of letting a small detail like this slip through the cracks, ensure you are prioritizing consistency throughout your eLearning course. Avoiding inconsistent design elements. Sticking to a single color palette will help students learn the focal points of a course.
Consistency goes beyond the color palette. Keep in mind other design elements when creating your eLearning course as well, including things such as:
Backgrounds
Fonts
Color themes
Patterns
Overall, the eLearning course should be captivating without overwhelming the senses. To accomplish the goal of motivating learners to complete courses, consistency is vital.
2. Be Mindful of How You Use Color
Speaking of design elements, color is a feature that needs to be highlighted in a section of its own for instructional design tips. After all, in the visual design world, color is single-handedly the most important element because of its ability to evoke emotion and reaction from an audience.
Here are a few rules of thumb to live by when using color intelligently throughout your eLearning courses.
Don’t Use Too Many Different Colors
For starters, you want to keep the number of colors you are using in your palette to a maximum of three. It’s not a good idea to add too many colors, and keeping it simple helps prevent things from being overwhelming to consume.
Three is the perfect number when it comes to color in courses. You have just enough to keep things interesting while still maintaining simplicity with this number.
Stick to Light Backgrounds and Dark Texts
Keeping in line with making sure your course content is simple and easy on the eyes, stick to subdued and soft backgrounds with darker colors for text.
If you’re having a hard time choosing a color palette, you can easily look around online to find something that matches the feeling you are going for in your course.
3. Create Breaks in Your Content
Instead of focusing efforts on cramming all of the information about one topic in one slide, don’t be afraid to split it up. Dividing content up into multiple slides will help to uplift the eLearning course’s look and ensure better readability.
4. Design Templates That Are Distraction-Free
Since you don’t have the power to control the learning environment, you must do your best to design an eLearning course with minimal distractions. As much as possible, avoid unnecessary distractions in your design, and remember that it’s not all about decoration.
5. Select Images That Are Meaningful
Images should always serve as complementary design elements to help elicit emotional impact on your eLearning courses. Thankfully, you don’t have to be a professional designer; you just need to be able to find the right supporting images for your eLearning content.
Here are a few tips to follow when selecting images:
Avoid random images
Select images that evoke positive emotion
Opt for photographs over clip art images
Use a series of pictures versus bulleted lists
Final Thoughts
It can be challenging to maintain learners' engagement throughout an eLearning course. Thoughtful strategies in the instructional design must be implemented to increase learner engagement and success rates. Using these 5 tips for designing eLearning courses, ryco.io can prioritize making our materials the most effective form of education for both students and educators.
Comments