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.

Fairy tales do a better job of teaching kids the values of honesty and hard work than all the dressing-down you may administer or the sermons you deliver. Kids learn from examples. Adults are no different. They feel inspired by the stories of struggle, hardship, courage, and triumph of our real-life heroes and feel motivated to emulate them. Have you seen a soccer coach teaching in a classroom or someone learning to drive a car by reading how-to manuals? No. Some tasks are learned best with hands-on training. Scenario-based eLearning (SBL) courses combine the magical appeal and relevance of stories with the realism of hands-on training within a virtual environment. Virtual scenarios let learners gather professional expertise and experience within a much shorter duration than what they would have obtained from just working at their real jobs. What is more, scenario-based learning lets them learn through a trial-and-error process that is as effective as getting an on-job training but without having to face the consequences or bear the costs of a wrong decision. Scenario-based learning is well-suited to teach or help the learner hone skills that involve decision-making. Scenarios are often used to teach soft skills like communicating with customers to sell various offerings or resolve complaints. Sometimes learners need to learn, practice, and perfect skills like emergency preparedness and reaction, so they are not caught unaware when a crisis actually arises. SBL is the best instructional strategy to achieve this end. In this post we will take over a simple and proven model to guide your planning of a scenario for your eLearning course.

Creating an eLearning course is a creative process. As an instructional designer, you need to be come up with designs and ideas that wow your audience. But in trying to be innovative, we often end up creating courses that wow us but fail to inspire the audience. We feel elated at having used a novel technology but fail to impress the learners. We think we have got across a message effectively but the learners leave our course feeling unfulfilled and without solutions to their problems. There is obviously a gap somewhere! Yes, the gap is in the thinking processes. We, as instructional designers, tend to think differently than the learners. But you want to create a course that not only impresses the learners but also helps them solve their problems. You want to create a course that convinces the learners to change their thoughts and behavioral patterns. You want to create a course that is memorable and enlightening. To create a course that sticks and connects with your audience, you have to step into their shoes, delve into their minds, and deliver what they need.

I was at LinkedIn when I came across this post by Paul W., Managing Director at Wright Solutions: “People hate compliance training, they don’t remember it and they don’t take it seriously!” What do you think? I have to agree with Paul! Is this the students' fault? No! It's our fault! Most compliance eLearning courses can be sooo boring, the topics presented are just “common-sense” or too repetitive, and learners only take the course because they “have to” – not because they are expected to learn anything useful. eLearning professionals know this, but why is that we keep immersing learners in hours of regulatory torpor? Why can we develop courses that engage our audience in the same way their favorite book or TV series traps them? I think the book The Age of Slide Stuffing has the answer: “We’ve forgotten to tell stories; we’ve learnt to stuff slides”. In this age of lightning-fast communication and varied media, we are bombarded with messages from all quarters. How many of these stick with us? How many move us? You have to admit that although many messages pack in oodles of wow factor, courtesy of technology, not many inspire you. That's because they fail to connect with you emotionally. As an instructional designer, you should care. After all, you want your courses to help your audience. The solution? Weave storytelling into your compliance eLearning courses to make them resonate with your audience's hearts. Yes, stories can enrich and make memorable even dull, drab, and complex technical subject matter. Teaching through stories and metaphors is the best way to hook your time-crunched adult audience and keep them engaged till the end.

The year is about to end, and people around seem to have gone into a nostalgic mood. Websites are fondly remembering what took place in the year gone by—trends that ruled the ramp, blockbusters that broke box-office records, and men, women, and events that made an impact. Year-end seems to be the ideal time for reflection and recapitulation. So why don't we? As eLearning professionals, we learned many important lessons in 2014. Let's take stock of these:

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.