Recently, we found some powerful words by Carrie Cousins which made us think on how they apply to eLearning: "Design for readability or don’t bother using text at all. If you want your content to be effective, it must be readable." As a learning professional, your responsibility is not just to deliver eLearning content to your students – it’s to make sure that it’s engaging and readable. What that means, is that you’re going to have to learn about design, especially typography. At its essence, eLearning is mostly about reading, and if what you’re offering is visually confusing or hard to read, your then your material simply fails to deliver. And since readability is an essential aspect of comprehension, it's necessary to consider the ease with which students can read the text.

INTRODUCTION: You may be an eLearning professional, but the subject matter expert or the SME actually flags off your course by providing the all-important content for you and your team to sculpt on. The SME may be a software programmer or a marketing analyst in your company, a professor, doctor, or a best-selling author who has penned books of encyclopedic proportions on the course matter. Whoever may be the SME, it is likely he is not your cubicle mate. You will probably get just a few opportunities to glean relevant content from him. So take the smart route to make the most of an SME interview. Here we will review the key steps you can take before and during, the interview to maximize its effectiveness.

Understanding how the mind processes information and stores it is vital to educators, instructional designers and eLearning professionals. Simply stated, if you don’t know how the mind works, you have no way of knowing how to design material that will ensure success for your students. Information processing theory is a subject that has been studied, discussed and debated so much that a lot of the information available conflicts. However, there are a few basic principles that are generally agreed upon. So, how do people learn? Essentially, it works in four main stages, and five thought control processes. The four stages are motivation, comprehension, practice and application. The thought control processes are attention, encoding, rehearsal, retrieval and metacognition. When you’re creating instructional materials, you need to keep the stages and thought control processes in mind in order to best facilitate learning.

Well-design courses are worthless if they can't communicate content effectively to those learning. Truth is, effective communication is actually more challenging to apply especially in designing eLearning . Optimized eLearning design has the power to motivate students and drive performance. If you are serious about creating effective eLearning courses, it is essential that you follow all four of the following steps to get the right message across to your learners.

When you began to plan your course, you probably never thought of one aspect of eLearning design: the effects of white space. In fact, it’s one of the most overlooked elements in the screen layout of a course. It’s actually a very important component of design. Effective eLearning designs are made by appropiate use of white space, and plenty of it. What Exactly is White Space? It’s sometimes called negative or blank space too. That’s space that appears between elements in any composition. Most of us refer to it as a part of the page or screen that remains blank. It’s space that appears between figures, type or columns. In short, white space is area intentionally left untouched. Its inclusion as part of an effective eLearning design can turn a screen into something very interesting or sophisticated, or both. White space reminds us that simple screen designs can be highly effective and that it’s unnecessary to cram a screen with text and graphics to get a message across.

Every learner wants to believe that their teacher is an expert who can give them knowledge they did not know. Realistically, that isn’t enough to keep the learner on task. The world today is full of stimuli that get our attention. Our brains want that same kind of stimulation in a learning setting. This is even truer in eLearning environments. Therefore, eLearning professionals have to find different ways of attracting the eLearner’s attention by varying content delivery, asking challenging questions, giving them new things to think about, and so many other things. Our brains, including the brains of eLearners, are constantly in search of stimulation to catch our focus. They are designed to crave the unexpected. It is that stimulation that will win over the brain’s attention, and if that stimulation isn’t provided, something else off-task will provide it. If there is no stimuli, either from the eLearning content or other outside environmental factors, the learner turns within—and day dreams occur.

No matter how good you content is, there are a few factors that can totally kill your eLearning courses. If you are looking to create an effective eLearning design, it is essential to eliminate the following four issues.

Motivation in eLearning can best be described with a U-shaped curve: novelty and enthusiasm produce high drive at the beginning, but it drops off sharply thereafter, only increasing when the end of the course is in sight. It is up to you to boost and maintain your students' motivation throughout the course, so that they will get the most out of it. Unless they have the motivation to focus and sit through the entire course, they learn nothing at all. Though every student responds differently, here are some fundamental guidelines you can use to keep your learners motivation levels high from that first splash to the finish line.