SHIFT's eLearning Blog

Our blog provides the best practices, tips, and inspiration for corporate training, instructional design, eLearning and mLearning.

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    The Biggest Fears and Nightmares of eLearning Designers

    Yes, our jobs as designers are not easy. Don’t get us wrong; we love the challenges that each new project brings. We love to exercise our gray cells to think up novel solutions, and we pride ourselves on surpassing our clients’ expectations every time. But we still get a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach when we have to face our worst fears and nightmares, which are the following:

    Makeover Mania: Here’s How to Revamp Your Old eLearning Courses

    How do you liven up a dull room? You hang a painting or go in for a fresh paint job. How do you wear a staid-looking dress and not look like a plain Jane? You accessorize it with a colorful scarf, a designer clutch, or a pair of killer heels. How do you revamp your old eLearning courses so that your learners are not bored to death? You can follow the tips below.

    A 5-Step Guide To Creating Compelling Infographics of Your Own

    Attractive, compelling, easily consumable —People have come to love Infographics. They simplify data and makes consuming them easier. They are exciting! And they jazz up your eLearning course like few other elements can!

    Color Psychology: Use Cool Colors to Set Just the Right Mood for Learning

    It's no secret that colors have an enormous influence over our perceptions of daily life—consciously and subconsciously. For example, warm tones stimulate and energize our senses, while cool hues bring in freshness and calmness. This means that we as eLearning designers need to make sure we understand what it takes to make good color choices. A little color psychology may be the secret sauce to produce soothing and productive moods in your learners. In this post, we will briefly discuss how you can use cool colors to your advantage when designing your eLearning courses.

    Color Psychology: Use Warm Hues to Energize Your eLearning

    You might have often noticed how a pop of color can instantly uplift your mood. But have you ever spared a thought about how it can change the course that you are currently designing? If you are not aware yet, the color that you use in your courses can have a tremendous impact on the mood of the learner and how they ultimately absorb the information. Now you may ask how colors can impact an eLearning course. Well, 70 percent of the information that people capture in their minds is through visual clues. And this is primarily the reason why colors can have a deep impact on your learners. There are several ways in which colors can change the entire outcome of your course. Certain colors reduce the stress level while others challenge your grey cells through visual stimulation or pattern seeking. Visual stimulation encourages visual thinking and reduces impassiveness. Give a thoughtful consideration before choosing a color palette for your course. When colors are chosen correctly, you can influence how learners decipher what they see.

    Bring Your eLearning Designs to Life with Simple Shapes and Icons

    Captivating and engaging. These are the two visual design goals of every eLearning designer. Captivating visuals direct attention and focus on the content, engage the learner’s curiosity to discover more about the topic, and hence simplify communication of ideas. They make your content memorable. This post highlights three simple ways you can leverage your existing images, icons and shapes, as well as creating new ones to boost your course design. Happy designing!

    DIY Graphic Design Tips to Give Your eLearning a Visual Refresh

    It’s no secret that people do a great deal of learning through what they see. Because of this, eLearning professionals have the double duty of not only creating informative courses, but ones that are visually engaging with graphics that add to the learning process. The good news is, with the variety of handy and often free or low cost tutorials, tips and tools to be found online, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist when it comes to design. In this article we’ll look at easy ways to use basic design skills in order to create new graphics or enhance existing ones. There’s no need to spend money on expensive graphics or give up control to a freelancer when you can create graphics on your own.

    Max Out Your eLearning Design Toolkit with These +40 Freebies

    There are few things more frustrating than finding an awesome, free online design tool then not being able to find it again. As an eLearning course designer you likely have experienced this problem along with the increasing demands put on you to not only write a course but also to design graphic elements. Because of this, it is more important than ever to have your arsenal of design tools organized and ready so you can work efficiently without working harder. Over the years we have bump into different tools, sites and free resources that have been very helpful to us, so we’ve collected them and we are sharing them with you!

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