You may pack your courses with tons of relevant content and awesome visuals, but if they don’t make a dent in the learner’s mind, they have failed in their purpose. It's time to STOP spending long hours working on courses that learners forget the moment they complete the course. You pour much love and sweat into the course creation. Your courses need to acknowledge the habits and tendencies of how people learn, so the experience becomes relevant, lasting, and useful to the learner.

Tom sits down to do his sales training online. He has been asked to complete three lessons each week adding up to 30 minutes of online training. Tom is dreading it, but he is delightfully surprised at how quickly he can navigate the page and how well the content has been paired with the graphics and features. He gets through 4.5 of the lessons and leaves the 5th lesson bookmarked for the next chance he gets. Mary has been trying to find the lesson that the Fraud Department has assigned her. She has barely gotten passed lesson one in the time she had expected to complete at least 3. Her screen has frozen a few times on the graphics, she has had to re-read some of the text-heavy slides, and isn’t sure if the lesson she is on is going to help her with the issues she is meant to address. Which of the two people mentioned above had a better user experience with their eLearning course? Who is going to continue with their eLearning course?

Do you know how effective is your compliance online training? Is the program well-integrated into the company? Are employees completing the courses on time? Are they really learning the safety parameters or regulatory laws you are teaching? You won't have the answer to this if you aren't leveraging the power of Learning Analytics. Having the right data is key to understanding if your compliance online training is making an impact. Simply tracking completion rates and passing grades is not enough. Monitoring deep-level insights like engagement, behavior, and struggles are also important to analyze to make well-informed business decisions and provide actionable insights to your team. You can set the X passing score for successful completion, but in compliance and safety issues, if employees aren't really learning the information it could represent a huge cost in the long run. So, leveraging online platforms and learning analytics becomes essential for companies to supports students throughout their journey. For instance, if an employee does not get a question right, they can be redirected to revisit a specific module and come back to take the test.

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.

Whether you’re fresh out of school or a seasoned commander of an eLearning design team, you need to make sure your design habits are helping you thrive. In fact, one of the worst traps you can fall into as a designer is allowing consistency to turn into complacency, which is more likely for an experienced professional. To combat this, all of us have to practice looking for inspiration in new places and drawing from the other creative types, trends, and events around us. You also need to look back at your own projects. Do you hate what you did a year ago? Yes? Good! If you look at your past work and think it’s as good or better than your current stuff, that’s when you need to worry because the only way to stay at the top of your field is to be in constant competition with yourself. To get in the habit of increasing your skills while keeping good design theory in practice, we have some tips for staying inspired:

Understanding the target audience is one of the cardinal rules of effective eLearning development. Knowing your learners helps you to shape your message in a way that's most likely to resonate with them. Also, having a thorough knowledge of your audience before you prepare your course, will help you to choose the appropriate informational material, figure out the most effective instructional strategy, design an audience-sensitive message, select the right media to transmit the message, and create a learning environment where learners feel supported.

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:

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.