Conduct Needs Analysis

Conduct a needs analysis to understand what you wish to achieve through eLearning.  The analysis can range from simple interviews to in-depth data collection methods to educate end-users. Studying past pieces of training can help to identify and bridge gaps in skills or knowledge and make learning more relevant. Your needs analysis should help you address the following questions:

• What problems, challenges or gaps in skills or knowledge your eLearning seeks to overcome?
• What outcomes do you expect from eLearning?
• How will your enterprise meet its business goals?

Understand Your Audience

Remember there is no one-size-fits-all in eLearning. Writing a course in a foreign language to teach the language to a group of beginners may not be the best way to teach. While designing an eLearning course, keep in mind the target audience’s technical capabilities, existing knowledge and skills, and how they will use the new learning outcomes in real-time. By knowing your audience, you can create better eLearning content and ensure better learning outcomes.

Match Content to Your Audience

Once you know why and who you are training, you should then analyze your content to ensure it offers value to your audience. To analyze content, list the learning objectives and break them into separate modules. For each module, create a content map to include sharing of information through text, audio/videos and links; interactive elements; and assessment metrics to measure learning.

Create the Instructional Design Plan

The instructional design defines the way you design your content to engage your audience. There are several methods that the instructional designer can adopt: story-telling, situational learning, contextual learning, game-based learning, or a combination of any of these methods or more. The method to adopt should depend on the type of content to be taught – whether it is knowledge-sharing or mastering skills.

Create a Storyboard

The storyboard is a blueprint that will help you visualize how the text, pictures, and other static and interactive elements will look on a page. You may wish to gain approval of team leads and other stakeholders for their feedback and incorporate changes, if any, at this stage.

Choose the Right Technology and Resources for eLearning

Determine whether you have the technology and trained personnel available in-house to host and implement the eLearning courseware. The following questions can help you determine if you have the right technology to support the eLearning course:

• How many people will access the eLearning course at a time?
• Do you have the required bandwidth to host the course?
• What backup plan and security measures do you have in place?
• Do you need to install any applications to run the course?
• Do you have an in-house team to smoothly implement the course?
• Will the learners’ access the course on the company’s devices or their own?

These questions will help you plan your technology and personnel requirements. Plus, whether you wish to outsource some of these functions to an eLearning solutions provider that can function as an extension of your internal team.

Besides, if you don’t have in-house technology infrastructure or resources to develop your e-course, you can use a Learning Management System (LMS) to deliver, manage, track results and generate reports for online courses. These can be hosted in the cloud, remotely, or on local servers.

Build a Working Prototype

A working prototype gives you an insight into the look and feel, and the functionality of the course. It also helps to test the technical functionality. At this stage, eLearning designers can test multiple versions to narrow down on the best fit for the course.

Create and Fine-tune Your eLearning Course

After you have finalized the prototype, you can now design the course, and along the way, check to see that the objectives of the course are met. Seek feedback from your team and end-learners, and if everything is on board, go ahead and publish your eLearning course.