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.

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.

eLearning professionals need to raise the bar and reset their expectations if their learners are to consider courses worthwhile. The following ten points are things we have found successful eLearning professionals do differently. We hope they can help developers change their mindsets to create the best courses possible.

Despite the utility of multimedia in eLearning, images and even videos can only go so far: the core source of information remains text. Accordingly, a basic knowledge of typography is a must for any eLearning designer. Good typography enhances readability, encourages information processing, creates a visual hierarchy, and even engages readers' emotions. Here is a 7-step guide to making your course more effective—with typography in mind.

More and more companies today have invested or are starting to invest in an online learning program. Regardless of their size and type these companies realized that eLearning just makes good business sense.

The secret to eLearning success is not only setting goals, but setting the right goals. In order to achieve the required end results, understanding the difference between the different types of goals and when each is appropriate to use is very important. Clarifying goals since the beginning will impact your course content, the way it's structured and developed. Besides, if you don’t design with the right type of goals in mind, the eLearning module will be a waste of time and money, since the problem needs to be addressed from other perspectives.

Psychologists, eLearning professionals and other experts have always been interested in how we consume information online. Receiving and transmitting information are not new to us. But our entirely novel information environments are clearly shaping the way we search for and consume information. Today, "providing people with access to more information is not the problem. Rather, the problem is one of maximizing the allocation of human attention to information that will be useful.”

It's easy to predict the success rate of a course just be looking at its introduction. If it's boring, learners would either skip it refuse to read it. Nonetheless, they're already convinced that the course is less than impressive.