The e-learning world is constantly evolving, bringing new challenges (and opportunities) with it. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most common challenges that may arise when creating your first e-learning course – and show you exactly what to do to overcome them.
In recent years, e-learning has quickly become one of the most effective ways to onboard, train, and upskill employees in the workplace. It’s more cost-effective, allows organizations to train larger groups of employees, and even has a lower environmental impact. But for all its benefits, e-learning content creation doesn’t come without its challenges. Especially if it’s your first time creating an e-learning course, there are some common roadblocks that will naturally arise in the process.
Below, we’ll take a look at the most common challenges that come up when creating e-learning content and provide simple solutions to each one:
Setting clear learning objectives is the first step to ensure that the e-learning content creation process goes smoothly. The learning objectives are what provide direction to create training modules and learning assessments. They are also useful to set expectations for the learners before they begin the course. If your learning objectives are unclear, it’s more difficult to track the effectiveness of the e-learning course you created. Additionally, without clear learning objectives your organization won’t be able to assess how the training contributes to the business’s overall plans.
Solution: Set learning objectives from the beginning
Clear learning objectives ensure that everyone agrees on what the e-learning course should achieve. When setting learning objectives, make sure the topic of the content is closely aligned with the business goals of the organization. Additionally, learning objectives should be actionable and tell the learners what they will be able to do with the new knowledge (and not just want they will know or understand). If you need help outlining your learning objectives, use our free Learning Objectives Tool to get started.
Time is a precious commodity – in life and in business as well. If you don’t use the right tools and processes, developing e-learning content can quickly become a time-consuming task. There are many steps involved: identifying the learning needs, creating the learning content, transforming the content into an e-learning course or resource, setting up assessments, testing the course… the list goes on. For organizations, it’s important to ensure that the time (and money) they’re investing in corporate training is optimized for maximum ROI.
Solution: Choose an easy-to-use authoring tool
One of the easiest ways to start saving time in your e-learning content creation process is to find a simple and intuitive authoring tool. But with so many options out there, how do you find the best e-learning content creation tools? With our zero-learning curve tool, Easygenerator enables anyone, from e-learning professionals to subject-matter experts, to quickly create and share interactive e-learning content. But don’t just take our word for it. Find how APU created engaging e-learning courses more efficiently with Easygenerator.
Choosing which topic(s) to focus on with your e-learning course can be one of the most important challenges to overcome. Once you have identified your organization’s learning needs, it won’t be difficult to come up with a long list of topics that you’ll want to cover with your e-learning content. Additionally, if you’re collaborating with others on the content creation process, they’ll likely want to see their ideas included as well. However, an e-learning course that is overloaded with information won’t be effective. Learners tend to shut down when faced with too much new information. Plus, longer training modules are less likely to be completed as learners will lose interest.
Solution: Create microlearning courses
The first thing you need to do is to identify what information is most relevant to your learners. You can do this by running a thorough training needs analysis in your organization. This helps ensure that you’re not training employees on information they already know (which can lead to lower engagement). Once the relevant topics are identified, adopt a microlearning approach to create short and topic-specific e-learning content. Learn more about how to create effective microlearning courses.
At Easygenerator, we believe in empowering every person in the business to share their expert knowledge. How do we do it? By designing a zero-learning curve e-learning content creation software that any employee can use to create their e-learning content. Choose from a pre-made template, edit with the easy drag-and-drop tool, and collaborate with co-authors without leaving the platform. It really is that easy!