Take Your Online Course from Good to Great

If you don’t have an in-house content team or have a limited budget and outsource most of your work, creating a large amount of content for your online learning courses may be difficult. Additionally, learners face a plethora of nagging distractions while they’re attempting to stay engaged with course material. The more entertaining and engaging your course material is, the better results you’ll get from your training.

You must find a more effective way of holding the attention of employees during the training process. How is this accomplished without breaking the bank on finding a solution or purchasing a new eLearning course and learning management system?

This means that finding a way to level up your content creation is critical for your organization’s success. It’s actually much easier to do than you might have imagined. If you’ve been looking for resources about upgrading your content, you’re in the right place.

We have three important points to consider when you’re crafting your course material that can bump your modules up to the next level. The best part is that you won’t have to break the bank, hire an in-house creator, or even outsource.

Importance of Engaging Course Material

Maybe you don’t have the budget or the manpower to create this content on a large scale. However, using a few simple suggestions can make a good course become great. Use the following three tips to create material that entertains your team.

Use Videos and Graphics

When you’re putting your course together, it’s important that you don’t just rely on text. This might fly for certain types of learners, but most individuals do better at staying engaged when they have videos and illustrations.

For example, how can you show someone how to draw or paint a picture without showing them an actual video or series of step-by-step pictures of the process?

All the best eLearning portals use several different types of media to demonstrate to learners the important information they need to retain. This includes:

• Live-action videos
• Animated videos
• Photos, illustrations, and infographics
• Content that’s linked to sources outside of the course
• Static and animated graphics
• Audio content

Using this type of media to create your course doesn’t mean you need a big budget or talented content creator on your payroll. Don’t hold back on using a cell phone or microphone to craft your own course content.

You can download apps onto your phone to create professional-level videos using a few resources.

Multimedia allows you to present your most important material in multiple ways, and it keeps your employees entertained.

Be Sure to Include Interactive Offerings

Using interactive material allows all of your modules to flow together. If you really want your course to stand out, use interactive material that keeps your team members engaged and forces them to think on a higher level.

Branching is one way you can include this in your courses. This method allows your employees to choose their own fate during the learning process.

Courses that offer this type of material allow learners to gain real-life practice by presenting realistic scenarios. This can help them later on in making decisions in a real situation. For example, employees may need to take a course on first aid. Instead of being told or shown what to do, learners must watch an example video and choose the most appropriate courses of action to complete the scenario.

This is one of the most effective elements that content creators use to make engaging content that helps learners grasp certain material more efficiently. Other items like true or false questions, multiple-choice, and short answers can be mixed between various engaging content forms.

Throwing these questions in between the entertaining content and questions can help you gauge how much your employees are grasping the material overall.

Make Sure The Course Is Designed to Meet Your Goals

Building a good-looking course that has tons of graphics and interactive features is a giant leap toward making an effective product. However, the most effective online portals use these features more blatantly.

Don’t forget that content is still the number one element with most online platforms. The best courses take learners down a path through content that forces them to arrive at a specific outcome. Use the following tips to give your course a little extra nudge:

• Use one concept for each lesson. Otherwise, you run the risk of overwhelming your employees with information overload. Everything is learned much easier if you break the content up into bite-sized pieces. This process is also known as micro-learning and is currently one of the most effective eLearning strategies on the market. For example, micro-learning could take an hour-long course and break it down into four 15-minute offerings. This ensures that the course doesn’t drag out, boring your employees to death in the process.
• Make sure everything is sequenced to make it easy for learners to grasp the material. If you find that the group doesn’t know much about the topic, you should open it with an introductory course that includes the most basic information. Maybe it could outline the most commonly used terms regarding that specific topic. You could also include abbreviated terms.
• Everything should be structured to build upon the knowledge learned in the previous course. This flow is important because it promotes learning in the most efficient, straightforward, and natural way possible.

Taking your course to the next level often takes nothing more than a little bit of creativity and a minimal amount of time and money. Most of the changes outlined above are simple enough to make in a day or less and require no money at all.

Obviously, you can build on these and make them more extravagant if you do have a slightly larger budget, but there’s no reason to go over the top. Make your content dynamic and include high-quality graphics, and you’ll have the groundwork for a mind-blowing course experience for all of your team to enjoy!