Every eLearning course is designed with the primary objective of engaging the learner for better understanding, and implementation of the skills in achieving their eLearning objectives and business goals.
To create a detailed and effective eLearning course, the course creator digs deeper into the subject to explain and elaborate on the topic in detail. Such scenarios are bound to bring along some of the common yet serious challenges for your eLearning course.
By identifying and understanding these challenges, it becomes possible and easier to mitigate them or eliminate them completely. Let us understand some of the common yet serious challenges that are mentioned below.
- Undefined Deadlines
Deeper you dwell on the eLearning topic, the longer the eLearning module/chapter becomes. This also becomes a challenge for the creator to curate the eLearning course within the defined timeline. Thus, it is important to involve all the stakeholder’s inputs and consider practical timelines at the planning stage itself so that it becomes possible to adhere to the decided timelines.
While considering and deciding on the timelines, one must keep in consideration the fixed resources you have in hand. Keeping some buffer time in planning will help in ensuring that the quality is not compromised and the end result is as desired not only by you but also does not fall short of the client’s expectations. Wherever possible, it is best to keep the client involved at every step of course creation.
- Learning Content
Irrelevant/generalized eLearning courses are non-engaging for a very obvious reason. The eLearning content should be created keeping the learning objective and practical knowledge that the learner can apply in their day-to-day work scenario.
Off-the-shelf courses are only taken up by the corporate learners to tick mark the compliance requirements. It is a good practice to give choice to the learner. The work-relevant topics or topics of individual interest keep the online learners engaged, thus increasing the success ratio of the online course. Hence, providing multiple options to choose the course of learner’s interest and choice is more meaningful.
- Learner’s Engagement
With the shift from classroom learning to hybrid learning to self-learning with the help of an effective LMS software, the most common yet the biggest challenge is and has always been keeping the online learners engaged. While the engagement largely depends on the interactivity of the learning management software, the course content plays an equally important part.
One must ensure to keep the content short, crisp, informative, and clutter-free. While navigating through, the learner must feel the ease of using the eLearning content with minimal navigation. With technological advancements, an effective LMS provides multiple options for keeping the learners engaged in the form of FAQs, quizzes, games, polls, etc. One does not need to be technologically skilled to manage an eLearning platform.
- Right eLearning Tool
With a plethora of options available, it becomes the toughest job to choose the perfect eLearning tool, especially when the word “perfect” means differently in different scenarios. Based on the eLearning course, one must segregate the features into different categories like “must-have”, and “good to have”.
Based on a few trials on the demo logins, check all the features and functions that the LMS provides you with. Perform a thorough comparison of these features, especially the ones that you intend to use. Shortlist the best-suited features for the eLearning course design.
Comparison based on support, pricing, and relevant features will also ease your job of choosing the right eLearning tools for your online course. With this kind of research and analysis, you are sure to find the most interactive features. A combination of the right eLearning tools and great eLearning content will lead to better engagement of the learner making your eLearning course a sure success.
- eLearning Course Structure
Once you have decided on the learning objectives and have created an outline of the course content that is well-aligned with business goals, it is important to ensure that the information is shared in a practical way with proper navigation.
Balancing the textual content with infographics, videos, games, etc in the right order will lead to continuity of the learning. However, overloading information in a cluttered manner will disengage the learner even if the course content has all the required information.
Similarly, the navigation should be simple and intuitive. Online learners spending too much time figuring out how to move to the next module will make him leave the course incomplete.
- Resources
To create an impactful and engaging eLearning program, the basic required resources are people, budget, and time. Unfortunately, every course is expected to complete with limited resources, time, and budget. Thus, planning the eLearning project carefully and accurately is very important. Compromising with limited resources may leave in a purge.
You may start the project with full enthusiasm and rigor keeping the team motivated. But by the time you reach the middle of the project, the team realizes that it is nearly impossible to complete the project with the given resources. Getting additional resources or a budget in the middle of the project becomes almost impossible.
Create a detailed budget at the beginning of the project keeping every aspect and associated budget into consideration. With limited resources and budget, the best option is to choose a flexible development tool that can help you create the eLearning project with minimum possible resources and budget. With the use of in-built features, you can save on time as well.
Conclusion
There are challenges in anything we do, and creating a successful and engaging eLearning course is no different. These challenges are very common and are faced every time you create a new eLearning course. To overcome these challenges, it is important, firstly, to be cognizant of the common challenges. Secondly, taking a common approach for the basics of the eLearning course creation methodology and tweaking it based on the learning objectives and business goals makes it different, successful, and engaging from other similar courses.