You’re two songs into your favorite playlist with a perfectly chilled Red Bull at your desk and no meetings all day. You’re ready to knock out your next e-Learning course, right?
Not so fast. Hit pause, move your hand away from the mouse and take a minute to make sure you’re not wrecking your course with these e-Learning mistakes. Too many mistakes, and you damage the effectiveness of the course—as well as your credibility as a developer.
- Badly converted PowerPoint presentation
- Your name is attached to this project, so it better be good, right? Don’t succumb to the temptation to upload your PowerPoint presentation and call it a day. You know your authoring tool can do so much more than that. Add some interactivity, some quizzes, some video—go crazy! Just not too crazy, you know? See point number 4.
- Not customizing an off-the-shelf course
- Sure, you could buy a generic course on making cold calls, warehouse safety or sexual harassment. The course would probably cover all the key points, but would it be relevant and engaging to your coworkers? Suppose you are trying to train workers in China. If you present them with an off-the-shelf course created by a company in New England, for example, they’re probably not going to be able to connect with the characters or any location specific references used. Check out this list of localization resources if you find yourself needing to customize a course for learners across the globe.
- Confusing navigation
- If you want to avoid excessive clicking and annoyed learners, you better make your course easy to navigate! Try using the Smart Art tool in Microsoft Office to create a quick flow chart that helps you visualize which topics are connected and how to order your course.
- Bad content
- Content is king—treat it like royalty and let it shine in your e-Learning course! Don’t overload slides with too much text or complicated information. If you have a lot of content that you MUST fit into one course, try using bullets and graphs to convey all the information. In addition, be sure to proofread your course for grammatical errors or typos. Check out these proofreading tips for more info.
- Remember, content refers to your graphics and multimedia too, not just the words on each slide. Use professional audio voiceovers and video tutorials whenever your budget allows and avoid cheesy clip art graphics. Take a look at this helpful post by the ELearning Brothers on decreasing file size without losing image quality.
- The wrong authoring tool
- Not all authoring tools are created equal. It’s up to you to choose the best one for the job. Do you need to publish to HTML5? Do you want to work on your desktop or in the cloud? Are you struggling to ensure your course is 508 compliant? Are you looking for extreme flexibility when creating assessments with actions and variables? These are important questions to ask. Be sure to check out our e-Learning authoring tools here: Create. Whatever your needs are, we have a solution that will help you out!
Now, turn that playlist back on and get working—you are officially ready to create awesome online training courses.
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