The choice of your online course delivery method is as vital as the process of developing it. And as an eLearning instructional designer and developer, you must know about the most popular online course delivery methods. When you have a basic idea of all the common techniques used for transmitting an online lesson, you'll be in a better position to choose the best one for your courses! So, if you are a new instructional designer, you must be wondering about the best ways to deliver your online learning program. If yes, then this article is just what you need! Today, we are going to walk you through the six best online course delivery methods out there. 1. Online Course Delivery Through Videos Videos remain the most popular and engaging method of online course delivery. According to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research, one minute of video content equals almost 1.8 million written words. Sounds surprising, right? But, yes, that's true! Moreover, the human brain … [Read more...] about 6 Ways to Deliver Your Online Course
The ELearning Course Designer’s Blog
10 Things to Consider Before Your eLearning Course Goes Live
Too often, eLearning course developers are so focused on going live with their courses, that they neglect doing a meticulous check of the course before launching. And, even when they do conduct quality checks, it’s often focused on a single dimension - technical aspects of grammar and punctuation – though these are also critical. The result: Either the course is pulled out of circulation partway through rollout; or an embarrassing stream of updates, amendments, and revisions ensue. This usually impacts learner confidence in the course and undermines sponsor/client trust in the course developer’s abilities. Going live through multiple views Doing a final pre-go-live sanity check is the best way to avoid such unfortunate course outcomes. Most eLearning developers instinctively think of “quality assurance” as being a list of questions to ask, and a few boxes to tick. However, to do such a check effectively, course developers must view the course through various lenses. Having … [Read more...] about 10 Things to Consider Before Your eLearning Course Goes Live
How to Accurately Estimate eLearning Development Time And Course Length
"How long will it take to develop this eLearning course module? What will be its exact length?" These are the two major questions that the eLearning course designers and managers often struggle to answer correctly. As an instructional designer, it is of prime importance that you correctly estimate the length of your course and the amount of time required to develop it. After all, these are the two elements that play a huge role in deciding the costs and other project plans of the eLearning module. Sorting out the course content, the graphics, and the audio/visual elements you will be incorporating in your eLearning deliverable is still easy. But estimating how much time you'll require to get all of this done can be a fairly challenging task. And to help you out, I've created this article that will walk you through the best way of estimating the effort and time required for developing an eLearning course. So, let's get going! 1. Select a Benchmark Before you start … [Read more...] about How to Accurately Estimate eLearning Development Time And Course Length
Top 6 Techniques To Retain Learners’ Attention
As an instructional designer, capturing and retaining the learner’s attention is one of the most important goal. Sometimes, even the most exciting subjects can seem boring to learners if the content is irrelevant, does not provide value, or features some poorly crafted course descriptions. What’s worse? If learners do not interact with the content, there is a high chance that they will space out. So, what can you do? As a course designer, you have to develop new, fun, and creative ways to keep your learners from looking elsewhere. This article walks you through some of the best techniques to gain your learners’ attention. Let us get started! 1. Begin the class/course with a challenge, fiction, or throw some facts! What’s better than attention-grabbing facts to begin the class with and engage your learners right at the onset? Share some intriguing facts and fiction with your learners, or even better, create a challenge that stimulates their thinking. Learners often tend … [Read more...] about Top 6 Techniques To Retain Learners’ Attention
Ten Rules for Writing Effective Test Questions
As an instructional designer, you’ll frequently have the task of assessing whether your courses have met their instructional objectives. Typically, trainers consider several parameters to judge the outcome of a course – course completion, engagement, interaction with fellow learners, assignment quality and timeliness, etc. However, a learners’ performance on tests is often an important benchmark for determining course effectiveness. How trainers and course designers develop those test questions is, therefore, critical. Testing a Broad Spectrum of Intellectual Accomplishments The key to writing effective test questions is in developing them so they assess a broad spectrum of intellectual understanding of the course content. It is important to test all six levels of that understanding, as espoused by Bloom’s Taxonomy: Knowledge Comprehension Application Analysis Synthesis, and Evaluation …with knowledge being the lowest level of understanding, and evaluation … [Read more...] about Ten Rules for Writing Effective Test Questions
How to Deal With Too Much Content and Avoid Information Overload
Having more content than you know what to do with is a common problem. It's actually more common than having too little, with course creators beginning the process with years of research, SME input, and ideas on what their mega-course will look like. Here are 5 things you can do if you have TOO MUCH content! #1 Keep focused on your learner What skills or knowledge are essential for their improvement? The content being added should always pass the "need to know vs. nice to know" test. If you're having trouble narrowing down what fits into each of these buckets, revisit the learning objectives and measure each chunk of content against that objective. Is it essential in helping the learner achieve the stated learning objective? If it's not, cut it from the course (but hold onto it and I'll tell you what to do with it later). #2 Deliver it like a bullet Just as you can have too many content ideas and topics, you can be too wordy on delivering them to your learner. Master the method … [Read more...] about How to Deal With Too Much Content and Avoid Information Overload