As an eLearning designer, you are expected to create courses that are quirky and engaging besides being informative. Normally, this wouldn't be a tall order for a creative individual like you. But what bugs you is that inspiration doesn't strike you on all days. What is even more nerve-wracking is that you are expected to create wow courses from dull and drab content—systems application training, HR policies, health and safety measures, and the like. These are critical knowledge, and you have to ensure the learners remain hooked to your course. If your creative muse is not around, here are some tips to help you find inspiration.

What is the first thing that attracts a learner to your course? In most cases, it is a photo or a graphic. No points for guessing it right!

Remember those whodunits or the comic books from your school days that you stayed up late to finish? Or those old movies that stirred you so much that you still can't stifle a sob or resist a chuckle when you think about them? Was that an autobiography, a piece of news item, or a meeting that inspired you to ditch a bad habit or take up a cause for life? We all have memories of such stories that touched our hearts and changed our lives. Don't you wish your eLearning courses would touch people's lives in the same way? Blame it on tight deadlines, stringent budgets, boring (read: technical) content, or dictatorial managers, but most amongst us have created ho-hum courses that have managed to put many learners to sleep. We ourselves cringe when we remember these courses! So how can you create eLearning courses that wow learners even when the constraints remain in place? How do you create courses that change minds? Here are four proven ways:

Knowledge vs Experience You may be a wizard with numbers, but what good is your knowledge if you cannot number-crunch your way through the mortgage documents? What good is any knowledge if you cannot apply it to solve novel problems that the training courses didn't teach you about? Courses developed in the traditional manner only worry more about filling heads with knowledge. They are loaded with definitions and concepts and are probably accompanied by a list of scenarios or situations where these can be applied. The learners are expected to learn these by heart. But do business crises always turn out the way management books portray them? Can the chef never run out of ingredients when he is about to cook? Can you expect the opposing team to play the same way in every game? Do sales people deal with the same types of customers every day? NO! Your learners are expected to "perform" at the workplace after they have taken your course, NOT blurt out facts or theories that they have memorized. This image from Buffer's Blog makes the point clear: As you can see in the image, knowledge is only useful if learners can make connections between what they know. Without experience, there will never be true knowledge.

If you had not been living under the rock (read: away from the Internet), you know infographics are everywhere. They are on websites. They show up on whitepapers. They are in the ads. They are splashed all over newspapers. But of course, there are plenty of good reasons why content creators use infographics. These stunners are also excellent learning tool. Most human beings are visual learners. As eLearning designers, you too should tap into the immense instructional potential of infographics. But before you blindly jump on the infographics bandwagon and splatter your course with these visuals, make sure that you stock up on information about how they work and when to use them. Badly-designed infographics or placing them out of context can increase the cognitive load of a course. So here's the lowdown on infographics.

“The instructional decisions we make will increase the probability that our students will learn”—Anonymous. How do you dress? For the occasion, of course. How do you choose your accessories? So they match the dress. You take care to turn out in a well-coordinated outfit. Then why shouldn't the eLearning courses you create show such harmony? The watchword here is alignment. The most effective eLearning courses are perfectly aligned, but most often this objective gets the miss when the course is being planned. At other times, eLearning designers are clueless about the concept, so they naturally do not realize their courses are all over the place but not going where they are supposed to head to.

You have a Moleskin for your to-do lists. Or maybe you prefer an app. You probably get all (or most of) the items ticked off in the list. But what about the ones that you shouldn't be doing? It is as important not to do the wrong things—the ones that sap your energy needlessly or the time-wasters—as it is to do the right things. That is why, productivity champs ask you to take the Start/Stop/Continue road. You know what to do; start doing them. Figure out what you are doing right; continue with it. But most importantly, STOP doing what is not serving you any purpose. Here's a do-not-do list to help every eLearning professional become more productive:

As a learner, did you ever face a situation when you felt that a course had nothing new to offer and the same information was presented in an obvious manner like every other time you have taken an eLearning? That was a common situation for me as well... as an eLearning designer. Every time I sat to design a course or training material, I was stuck with the same old style guide that the client has provided me and do not get enough scope to experiment. One fine day I decided to take a plunge and move forward. Visual design can affect a host of things in learning. It especially helps to concretize the learning for a more clear and memorable experience. Therefore, we, eLearning designers, must carefully observe current trends that will keep our courses from feeling lifeless. And believe it or not, 2015 is believed to be the year when these visual trends will be seen looming large over the industry and bringing about a change (for better) in the way eLearning is perceived across the globe.