“First there is emotion; after that comes cognition,” said Frank Thissen, a Multimedia Didactics and Intercultural Communication professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Stuttgart, Germany.

Everyone learns a little bit differently. Some people excel with visual information while others have to hear or write something down for learning to stick. Just like each person has a learning style, groups have learning styles as well, especially adult learners.

Portable devices are changing the way we read or consume content. That's a fact. And the novel of it is that people tend to read more on screen than on paper. Many of us, however, are still not comfortable with our changing reading behavior. As eLearning professionals and educators, it's our job to deal with these facts—not ignore or downplay them. If we really want people to pay attention to our eLearning content, it's not the reader who has to change. It's us, the authors.

The challenges eLearning professionals face daily are many and varied, and in many ways do not differ too much from the challenges any teacher may face when contemplating how best to hold the students’ attention.

“All the training in the world does not mean a thing, unless there is true transfer!”

Getting a learner’s attention is a holy grail among instructional designers and learning professionals. Attention, after all, is key to controlling the amount of time necessary to maintain information in “working memory.” In short, attention directs the outcome of learning.

It’s easy to create eLearning content. But to create an eLearning course that resonates with your learners? That’s not easy. It’s a difficult job for eLearning professionals to master but it’s worth it. Why? Because it’s the only kind of content that keeps people reading, from start to finish. It’s the only kind that elevates your learning program from ordinary to monumental.

eLearning and social media are not so different at all. Attention, after all, is the currency of social media—Facebook especially.