A Complete Guide to Your eLearning Course Designing and Development

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In today’s digital era where everything is going online, learning and training are no exception. Having numerous e-learning courses available, you must also be yearning to create one for your customers. But you’re in a quandary and don’t have any clue on how to dive into this business. Then, let’s get started.

Being said that, designing eLearning courses is usually tricky if you don’t know where to start. When it comes to designing, there are a lot of tools to use, things to implement, parameters to consider and aspects that can impact the success or failure of your program.

But, can you guarantee an incredible and matchless eLearning program for your learners? Designing and developing an e-learning course is a major project that requires intense involvement and has to be handled meticulously leveraging the standard protocols of project management. This indeed brings you aspired results and satisfaction.

So, moving further here is the right place to start from scratch to the final output. Find here a list of simple but effective steps that help you deliver the best of eLearning projects.

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The Steps of Exceptional eLearning Course Design:

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 Research

Before commencing on any eTraining course, research always plays a pivotal role. Research your target audience or the industry to which you want to address. This turns out to be effective when designing the course as you have the clarity to whom you are addressing. In a way researching and analyzing your target audience, it becomes easier to frame the e-course accordingly understanding their needs, interests, backgrounds, lifestyles, and motivations.

The more you learn about them, the better you are able to structure the training that meets the individual learner’s specific requirements. Take a glance at a few major things that you need to invest your research in for more effective training material.

1.Consider Their Level of Knowledge

Everybody can’t be on the same note; some learners may be beginners, while others may not be. Therefore, it is crucial for you to understand this aspect and keeping it in mind the varying levels of your learner’s knowledge, design your e-learning course to make it efficient. For learners having prior knowledge, you can provide them an option to skip through the basics of the eLearning course.

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2.Tech Savvy Skills

Not just limited to their knowledge level, check whether your audience is tech-savvy or not. Suppose they are not well acquainted with technology, at your best, you can create a special extra training session to access your course.

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3.Mode of Accessing Training

Though many learners want to access the course through mobile sets, there are still those learners who prefer to learn via PCs. Therefore, before developing your e-learning course it is important that you research your preferred mode of accessing training.

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 Course Design

Adding up to the research, now let’s move down to course design. Figuring out the learner’s needs, have you ever thought about the core of your eLearning course design? If you haven’t, then it’s time to bulge up. With regards to the course, find out what are the pre-course competencies that your audience needs to know or learn about.

In a way, if there are any skill gaps that your audience has, which need to be addressed before commencing on your course, it would be fruitful if you try to fulfill that too.

Based on all these, create the course blueprint, divide it into varied sections and present it to the learners. Develop a Detailed Course Document that outlays learning themes, interactions, activities and navigation logic.

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 Topics Presented in Interactive Format

It is easier to understand and grasp the concept when learners are provided with training in a highly interactive environment. Thus, highlight the content that needs to be reinforced in an interactive way.

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 Create a Prototype

Usually, instructional designers make sloppy mistakes while developing eTraining courses by ignoring prototypes. so, waiting for none, create a quick prototype leveraging the graphic tools, which immensely resembles a final course. Well, it should include the following things:

 Hire talent to play characters
 Create a mini script
 Shoot photographs and record audio
 Induce some music, produce graphics, animations, side effects, and others.

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 Conduct A Flagship Test

Test your course with a small number of learners. Invite them to your test prototype. Record their feedback and apply the necessary changes in the prototype.

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 Scriptwriting/Course Writing

Integrating the feedback, writing on sticking notes, labeling and numbering them, and creating interactive scripts build on the course and segregate into modules with the *

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 Infuse Media

With IoT and AI seeping into the educational world too, it is no wonder that eLearning courses definitely have more to explore. Designing your eCourse that will entice and keep your customers engaged, you need to look beyond the available tools. Not just limited to content, produce interactive videos, go for live streaming, and create graphics, use photographs, record talent voices, and induce music to make the course lively.

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 Build Courseware

In your course authoring tool, assemble the media in the form of mp3, jpg, WMV, etc. With courseware creation, you can bring in a huge impact on your training course and the way your learners use it, so give it additional importance.

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 Test Course

In the course of developing and designing your online training program, you should never neglect one important factor that is testing your course.

Review your course, send it to subject matter experts for feedback, share with a close group of learners or testers.

Moreover, review it for the quality of the material provided, whether it is adhering to its scope and objectives, quality of media, any grammar or typo mistakes in study material, and software errors, bugs or any glitches. And make required corrections based on the customer feedback.

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 Personalize the Learning Management System

To run the course smoothly for your learner, it is important that you customize the learning management system. You can create this functionality based on the request made by your customers, i.e. rather they want the course web based or in the form of DVDs.

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 Course Manual

Providing a course manual, customers will be able to comprehend what are the major concepts covered in the course and what are the topics they are going to learn in each session.

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 Final Testing

Creating an incredible eLearning course design involves a lot of efforts, edits, trial and error, and some more testing. After making the required changes based on customer’s feedback, make the final changes as well as corrections and go for final testing.

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 Launching Your Online Training Program

Once all goes well, it is time to launch your e-learning course to your learners. Provide your customers with all the details and check on their response.

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 Promote the Course

Once your eLearning course is implemented, it is time to advertise it. Find any errors or bugs that are there or not, resolve them and integrate the corrections into the development of the eLearning course. With gradual improvements, your eLearning course tends to be successful.

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 Measure ROI and Evaluate the Course

It is a waste to invest in designing an online training program if you neglect the results it brings for your business. Analyze the records, data, and metrics to gauge the effectiveness of your e-learning course through LMA and analyze to figure out ROI. Looking at the feedback and considering the issues, create an advanced version of this course.

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So, Now You Are All Set to Start with Your eLearning Course Design!

The above simple to follow steps not only apply to generic e-learning course design needs but also goes for custom eLearning program development. Needless to say, designing an online course is just more than following the steps. It includes passion, knowledge, and dedication to offering customers the ability to hone their skills and boost their productivity.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ankit Patel is an end-to-end Project & Marketing Manager at XongoLab Technologies LLP and PeppyOcean. Having written for innumerable technology and eLearning website, he has delivered high levels of quality content and helped many readers get answers to their queries. He loves to write about the latest industry trends so that the readers always remain up to date.

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