You remember how words make you feel, not the words themselves. Maybe that doesn’t sound right to you but think of the first time you met your significant other. Do you remember what you said? What your significant other said? Probably not, but you do likely remember, in detail, how it made you feel. Now, consider what you could do if you could harness the power of that emotion and apply it to helping your eLearning audience remember and connect with facts. Facts may be more consistently accurate, but emotions are what our brains filter our experiences through and what we can recall most readily. Taking your audience’s emotions into consideration is especially helpful when dealing with subject matter that is dry but important. For example, with corporate training, you might need to write up a section on which documents need to be filed for a new employee. Things don’t get much drier than talking about filing papers, but think of the massive headache new employees might have if their tax information isn’t filed and their paycheck is held up because of it. Telling your learners about the human side of what they’re learning and how it affects real people can make the difference between someone remembering long enough to apply the knowledge and someone just remembering for the length of the course.

How would you like it if vegetables at the supermarket were stocked with meat or milk? You wouldn’t find the produce in the first place. There’s a reason why the Table of Contents is placed within the first few pages of every book. There’s a reason why the streetlights are not tucked away amidst a maze of store signs. The reason is usability or how easy or difficult it is to find your way through a user interface. And judging by how difficult it is to find houses in certain streets or make your way through software, it seems that it is easy to goof up UX design. Bad usability can inhibit your learners from learning what they need from a course. So, to avoid this, here are 3 tips you can use to create killer eLearning designs:

Pretty much anyone can present information, but an honestly good eLearning course designer knows how to make that information stick with learners even when that audience isn’t interested. Because that’s the nature of an eLearning course: sometimes your audience is enthralled with the subject and sometimes they’re just being pushed to learn because of a job or class. It should be your goal to make content memorable no matter your audience’s interest level. One of the best ways to do this is to incorporate engaging and unique characters in your courses. A learner might not remember every piece of content you present to them, but they will remember an aqua aardvark appropriately named ADDIE. While that might be too cartoonish or “out there” for many courses, I think you can see the point of how using a character gives your audience something to visualize and hold onto in the sea of new information they are being immersed in.

Embrace the race or get left in the dust. While the world of e-learning design might not seem as fast paced or ever-changing as other environments, it is still a business, and there are changes in motion that designers need to be aware of to to stay relevant in the field. In the same way, that education has begun to leave the classroom and is now accessible from mobile devices, technology is still evolving to make the new learning arena better, faster and more widely accessible. Companies now have options they never did before for providing training. Being aware of these changes means keeping your courses relevant for students and keeping your design skills in demand.

Developing an eLearning storyboard is one thing, but turning it into a practical guide for anyone involved in the eLearning project is of utmost importance. In this article, I will give you 7 tips & tricks you can use to design outstanding eLearning storyboards.

What an architectural plan is for civil engineers, an eLearning storyboard is for eLearning developers. Exactly as the architect conceptualizes the building, and provides a plan to be used by civil engineers and constructors, in the same manner, the Instructional Designer conceptualizes the eLearning course deliverable and writes down every single detail of it, providing a complete guide in terms of content, audio, visuals, and interactive elements to be included, so that all members involved in the eLearning project can be on the same page throughout the eLearning course development process. In this article, I’ll provide you with a practical guide on how to start working with eLearning Storyboards.

It can be challenging to find images for your eLearning courses that are stunning, high-resolution and most importantly, free. With the availability of current resources, it’s no longer necessary to use clip art or the type of generic (or cliché) images that make training look dated. Whether you lack the skill or simply the time to create the images for your eLearning courses, we have compiled a list, of what we consider the best free stock photos on the Internet right now. Each of the following websites contains free high-resolution images that can be used for personal and commercial use. We encourage your to visit and bookmark any (or all) of these sites today!

There are endless blog posts that can help you understand the actual status and the future of workplace learning and eLearning, but sometimes too much information can be overwhelming. Which is why we compiled this list of 2015 posts you absolutely must read before this year ends.