A lot of research actually goes into a well-designed eLearning course. And like it or not, instructional designers have to dig deep into the psychology of learners, specifically how they learn and what affects the learning process.

Anyone seeking to create meaningful and engaging eLearning courses can benefit by remembering what it is like to be on the other side. It is bad practice to subject learners to any training that you would not participate in yourself. It’s time you stop blaming the “boring” content and commit to stop tormenting the learners who are required to take your course! Our job as eLearning designers is to FASCINATE and DELIGHT the learner from beginning to end. In the excitement of launching a new course, it’s easy to overlook details. Therefore, it can be very useful to have a checklist for last-minute touches.

Learning has deep roots in our emotions. Plato knew this 2,000 years ago, but it is only recently that neuroscientists have discovered conclusive evidence to support this premise. Science all along knew that emotions are triggered after the brain processes the information it receives. (We knew this too, from experience.) Now a revolutionary study by Dr. Shlomo Wagner of the University of Haifa has proven that a person’s emotional state directly influences how his/her brain processes information. Emotions are either pleasant (positive) or unpleasant (negative). When a person experiences positive emotions, the person learns well. When the person experiences negative emotions, the learning is not so effective. According to Dr. Wagner, the brain responds differently to different emotions.

Unless you have a phenomenal photographic memory, chances are you struggle to remember things and wonder how you can make information stick better. The answer? PAY ATTENTION! When you pay attention, you are far more likely to retain that information. This also applies to the learners you design eLearning courses for. Effective eLearning course design starts with understanding the science of attention. Neglecting this important step makes the difference between learner’s remembering your content for a few minutes, hours, or a lifetime. Try some of these techniques for getting learners’ attention from the get-go:

Malcolm Gladwell, author of ‘Outliers’ says that to truly master something takes 10,000 hours of practice. That’s a long time. But while Gladwell is probably not too far off the mark, we’d add one small caveat: 10,000 hours of practicing the right way, with the right foundations. So we’ve put together the 10 commandments eLearning professionals must follow to see their courses be a success. Take these rules, incorporate them into your eLearning, and get busy mastering your craft.

Want to promote informal learning in your company? Need to keep track of online and offline training? Your main challenge when tracking a learning experience in your business is the lack of actionable data? Do you want to track each of your employees' progress at a detailed level, in real-time? Do your students access training content from multiple sources (from LMS to other third-party learning applications)? If you answered yes to one or some of these questions... Then you'll be interested to learn more about xAPI and LRS technologies in the corporate training environment. For learning and development leaders, getting acquainted with these concepts is key to implementing a training strategy that responds to the technological changes and new context we live in today.

If you have been in the eLearning industry for a while, you know that the platforms commonly used by companies to manage online courses are LMS (Learning Management System). However, in the last 5-10 years, the introduction of new technologies, such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence, mobile learning, microlearning, and social learning, has spurred the emergence of other technologies, which are certainly changing the eLearning landscape, for instance: Learning Record Stores (LRS). In this article, with the intention of informing organizational leaders about the new concepts, we will share a short explanation of the most significant specifications of each technology (LMS and LRS), their main differences, and why the LRS and the LMS are not opposite technologies, but tools that can be used in a complementary way to take corporate learning to the next level.

10 Seconds. About the time it takes to check your phone “real quick” is all the time you have to make a first impression. This goes for your eLearning course too. People who view your course may be looking to learn, but before they ever read any info you’ve written, they will judge it… and judge it quickly. Not only are first impressions fast in general but also with the ever-growing amount of information thrown at us online, you need make your impression fast and make it count.