In today’s fast-changing environment and fast-paced lifestyle, technology has continually enabled us to keep up. It made our daily activities faster and more efficient; trade and commerce more fluid; and communication easier despite distance, among other things. However, technology’s greatest impact is on knowledge and information sharing, that with just a single click, the Internet can provide you with the data you are looking for. You need to share important documents to someone a hundred miles away in an instant? There’s e-mail. Sending over huge files? Not a problem with Airdrop, or WeTransfer, or Shareit.

As eLearning designers, we must all deal with dull, insipid content that brings out the yawns, both in you and the learners. And then there are those complex, technical topics that leave you and the learners overwhelmed. These are the topics you dread to tackle and your learners, loathe to go through. Yet, the onus is on you to create swashbuckling courses out of such dreary content. You must not only make learners sit through a course with such dull or complex content but also ensure they leave the training room wiser, more knowledgeable, and armed with a new skill.

Author Ken Poirot once wrote: “Wise people understand the need to consult experts; only fools are confident they know everything.” As wise Instructional Designers, it behooves you to accept the fact that you will not always know everything about the topic that you are about to design and develop a course for. As a result, you’ll likely need to consult Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on specific topics. While these experts may not be aware of the pedagogical pre-requisites of successful learning content, their inputs can be invaluable in providing you with the actual content for your eLearning courses. However, meetings with SMEs need to be planned and conducted with a defined strategy to meet specific objectives.

To many, the entrepreneurial lifestyle is unendingly alluring. Boasting authority, prestige, and nearly limitless potential, successful entrepreneurs seem to have it all. Yet, before you can decide to become an entrepreneur, you should have an idea of the type of business you will build and manage. Fortunately, we have an awesome business idea for you already: eLearning. Thanks to the convenience and effectiveness of online courses, the eLearning industry has exploded in popularity in recent years. More people than ever are looking to better themselves through online training, so entrepreneurs in this field will find an ever-growing audience of excited and engaged consumers. However, before you jump into eLearning with both feet, you should learn a bit more about the past, present, and future of the industry.

Elearning design is one those jobs that allow working from home. If you have a wifi connection, you’re pretty much good to go. Also, working from home can be an amazing experience that really does allow you to get more done for yourself and your clients or employers. Studies have shown that you can be even more productive working from home. Harvard Business Review’s study on productivity in telecommuting situations reported a more than 13% increase in productivity when workers switched to homeworking. That being said, there are still some mistakes, and pitfalls telecommuting eLearning designers can fall into. To help them make the most of their time from home, we’ve compiled the best advice on what you’ll need to get started working from home along with insider advice on getting stuff done and staying sane (based on our own experience).

An online search for design tools for eLearning will produce more results than you can shake a digital stick at. And while it’s great to have variety, this level of choice can be overwhelming and possibly expensive depending on the tools you try out. To make things easier on eLearning designers, we’ve compiled a list of some of our favorite free and low-cost tools that are worth keeping in your virtual toolbox. Read on for over two dozen tools to make your eLearning courses better, faster and more engaging:

Anyone who has been even remotely associated with eLearning over the past decade or so, will definitely have noticed the pace of change the industry has undergone – specifically over the last 5 years or so. From strides made in instructional design methodologies, such as Agile; to richer content integration in eLearning modules, such as video-on-demand and virtual reality, the industry has evolved at a tremendous pace. Let’s take a look at three of the biggest changes in eLearning, and understand how we can successfully adapt to provide eLearners a richer learning experience.

When you are developing an eLearning course, you don’t typically think about persuading your audience. But, persuasion is not only for marketing and sales professionals, it can also be used in eLearning design! Facts and concepts alone won’t significantly change the way your learners think, do, and feel. The trick is to get to know and apply the most effective persuasive strategies to move your audience’s intention into a desired behavior change or action. You have to carefully choose every element on the screen to do all the coaxing, cajoling, imploring, and pleading to engage and persuade your learners to do something new.