8 Ways to Improve Your Online Course
Add instructional material options. When enhancing an online course, you don’t necessarily have to replace instructional materials (or other course elements) unless they’re outdated or incorrect. Instead, you can add options.
Students should understand what content they will learn, what skills they will develop, and what attitudes, values, and feelings may change as a result of taking the course. Including such information will help you develop some well considered course objectives, if you have not already done so.
Course writers can also use the enhancement period to increase engagement through the use of interactives or multimedia pieces. Each lesson could have additional multimedia (beyond the video intro) and/or an interactive element that makes it stand out.
Motivate your students. Motivation is a key to effective learning, and perhaps the single most important contributor to motivation is the course’s perceived relevance. Thus, it is important to discuss the course’s utility, value, and applicability from the outset.
Corporate training support can come in one of two forms: direct support and “moment of need” support. Direct support pertains one-on-one chats, instant messaging, and emails that address a concern or answer a question that the leaner may have.
An online training database is beneficial for EVERY member of your corporate audience. Those who are struggling can use the material to catch up with their colleagues, while those who are excelling can learn more about a topic that interests them.
You don’t have to give your online training course a complete overhaul to make it a success. In most cases, it’s just a matter of assessing your current interactive corporate eLearning strategy to determine its weaknesses, and then making small changes to create a truly effective online training program.
However, there are also those that fly under the radar during the corporate eLearning design and development process. While they may not be as obvious, they can have a negative impact on our online training strategy. In this article, you’ll discover 7 ways to improve your next online training course that you may not have even considered.
Some eLearning course screens look like a jumble of ideas and concepts because the course designer mistakenly presumes fancy design leads to more effective eLearning. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Each screen in a course should convey one idea, and one idea only.
Learning is an active pursuit. Ineffective eLearning courses let the learner sit passively, almost encouraging the learner to check out. Provide a learning experience that promotes openness, thought and discussion. Some ways to engage learners actively include: 1 Active buttons in the course to poll learners on their understanding; 2 Student discussion in blogs or communities; 3 Or email to extend the learning past the course parameters.
Learning targets explicitly state what a learner should know or be able to do by the end of a course and how learners can demonstrate their learning. Setting a target and a goal achieves two critical goals. First, learners will know why the course is important and how it will help them in the future. Secondly, targets help keep course content focused.
Course designers don't need a degree in graphic design to follow some basic design principles, especially those principles with proven track records at creating more effective eLearning. Using the 10 basic design elements including an attention to white space, consistency and reducing on-screen clutter can make a world of difference in a course. A few tweaks based on these principles will instantly improve the visual impact of your course.
Course introduction. A good start ensures an anticipated ending. Learners must comprehend the aspects they are going to learn and the prerequisite skill required to complete the course efficiently. A proper course introduction can ensure that only the competent learners are enrolled in a particular course.
Learning is tremendously affected by the architecture of the courses. One must comprehend the ways to organize different topics in a comprehensible structure. The course structure must keep a continuous flow of the information being imparted. You cannot just jump from one topic to another in any random order.
Cross-platform responsiveness. Contemporary learners do not depend on computers and laptops to browse the eLearning sites. They utilize their smartphones to access almost everything on the internet. Online courses not designed to fit on the smaller screens can lose a huge traction that comes through the smartphones.
Moreover, with 300% lesser time, you can create microlearning courses more speedily. In fact, microlearning can boost the course engagement by over 50% more than what you have been getting already. To utilize eLearning at its best, make use of micromodules and avoid creating huge topics in a single segment.
eLearning is much more than PPTs and texts. A qualified online course consists as many aspects like texts, images, videos, animations, and audio narrations. To ensure the proper utilization of each of the characteristics, make sure to use an eLearning authoring tool that offers at least the following abilities:
Trainers get a major comprehension of their teaching efficacy when students ask questions. Unlike physical classrooms, students cannot ask questions on the go. However, some of the best eLearning platforms offer alternatives to conduct two-way communication between the two parties.
While MIT offers free online courses and certifies the learners, corporate organizations utilize online teaching to train their employees spread across the globe. Contrastingly, platforms similar to Udemy have adopted eLearning as a business, and are offering quality courses to the learners.
When enhancing an online course, you don’t necessarily have to replace instructional materials (or other course elements) unless they’re outdated or incorrect. Instead, you can add options . For example, if you’ve written an article on a topic you’re asking your students to read, consider creating a video based on that topic and adding it as an equivalent option. Doing so is one way of incorporating Universal Design for Learning principles into your course. Adding variety to your instructional materials helps students leverage their preferred type of learning, meaning you increase the chance that you’re meeting all students’ needs.
Course enhancement is a tremendous opportunity to add value to your course. Whether you use one of the suggestions above or find advice elsewhere, remember to use the data available to you—student satisfaction data, instructors’ anecdotal data, or your own observations—to make informed decisions that will create a better learning experience for your students. The most well-intentioned enhancements can fall short if they’re not in direct service to your course’s needs, so it’s important to take time not only to incorporate the ideas above, but to do so in a way that supports your course’s unique needs.
It may also be worth discussing your rubrics with your departmental colleagues to see if you’re expecting the same things from your students on common assignment types, such as discussion board responses. Consider leveraging your LMS’s features, such as the ability to upload rubric templates so that others can benefit from the work you put into designing your rubric. Using rubrics will also serve to create a sense of common expectations within your program.
Course design is fundamentally a process of continual improvement. After an institution has initially developed and taught a course at least once, it should go back into development for updates, enhancements, and sometimes corrections. After all, once an institution has offered a course, it can collect a wealth of information on ...
Textbook-free courses have grown increasingly popular in recent years because of their ability to lower course costs for students and add flexibility to a course writer’s curriculum. The course enhancement period can be a good time to include them in an online course.
These types of resources are aimed at providing students with optional course elements that might help them meet the course’s learning objectives. Practice activities can be a great way of helping students prepare for an assessment or gauge their understanding of progress toward a particular objective, while supplemental resources can provide students with related information or present previously covered information in a new way. If you employ either of these in your course, however, do so carefully, and make sure that students know that they’re optional course elements (as opposed to required readings or activities).
Students should understand what content they will learn, what skills they will develop, and what attitudes, values, and feelings may change as a result of taking the course. Including such information will help you develop some well considered course objectives, if you have not already done so.
Your course syllabi are an important teaching legacy. They often provide the only permanent record of your teaching philosophy, commitment to teaching, and pedagogical innovations. If you keep old copies of your course syllabi and read several years’ worth at one sitting, you can easily see how you have developed as a teacher.
In addition to informing your students, a good syllabus provides a record of your course for colleagues who may teach it later. It can also aid departmental and institutional curriculum planning, and assist outside agencies in assessing your program’s goals and effectiveness.
The tone of your syllabus can indicate how approachable you are, and students often form an immediate impression of whether they will like you— and your course—from reading the syllabus. Needless to say, it is better if the impression is positive.
Good syllabi fulfill specific purposes, possess essential components, and answer crucial questions. However, few syllabi perform all these functions equally well. My advice is this: try to write syllabi that are as brief and focused as possible, but that communicate the nature of your course to students in a clear and understandable manner. The better your students understand the purposes and procedures of your course, the more likely they are to enter enthusiastically into the learning partnership you offer them.
The very process of writing a well-constructed syllabus forces you to crystallize, articulate, organize, and communicate your thoughts about a course. This thought and writing produces what Gabbanesch (1992) calls the enriched syllabus, which compels you to publicly reveal your previously well concealed assumptions.
This brings up the need for prompt distribution of syllabi. They should be available on the first day of class, not a week or a month into the semester.
You can complement theory with competitions, role-plays, tests, or interactive games related to the program. Presenting the training process as a game helps employees compete with greater motivation, leading to increased retention and absorption of learning material.
Research suggests that between 15 and 30 minutes is the optimal time for a learning session, either face-to-face or e-learning; if that period is exceeded, the student begins to lose concentration and productivity decreases.
It’s no wonder that it’s a strong trend, with companies moving to video solutions to save cost and increase flexibility. Smart training companies are starting to use technology to their advantage however. The advantages can help differentiate your service and allow you to meet a larger range of your customer’s needs: