9 Tips for Creating Effective eLearning Courses

The transition from the classroom to eLearning can go smoothly – or it can be a complete disaster. Here’s a quick checklist for creating online courses.

1. It All Starts with High-Quality Content

Learners are coming to your course for a reason and you want to make sure that reason is met. The information you provide, including the course objectives and outcomes, needs to be clearly outlined, the material should be easy to understand and it should be organized in a logical fashion. Inserting interactive probes to reinforce learner knowledge throughout the lesson is also a great idea!

2. Create fool-proof navigation

Reinventing the wheel on a navbar is a waste of your time and energy and it can potentially confuse your learners to such an extent that they leave and never return. No matter how engaging the content or how innovative the design, if the course can’t be navigated easily, you’ll fail. Simple and intuitive navigation that allows users to find exactly the information they need will help them review confusing concepts and focus on the points most relevant to their immediate needs.

3. Maintain a Consistent Look and Feel

There’s nothing more frustrating to a learner than a bad interface. To avoid this, your eLearning course must maintain a consistent look and feel. This particularly applies to the placement of common navigating elements, feature sets and the overall lesson format. By maintaining a consistent design, you’ll ensure that your learner’s experience is effective and efficient and that your learner’s objectives are successfully met.

4. Make it Easy to Read

The first thing to think about when creating an online course is ensuring that the information can be easily read and understood. The learner’s eyes should be directed through a sequence of steps – this can be done by creating a logical hierarchy that facilitates information processing and reading. This includes logically sizing the headings and using frames or graphical organizers to separate elements. You should also design a layout that makes the text easy to read. This can be accomplished by narrowing the width of your text box or by breaking a long piece into multiple columns, similar to magazine or newspaper layouts. Font choice is also important – simple sans serif typefaces are usually best for titles whereas serif fonts are generally easier to read and work well for body type. Stylized fonts should be used sparingly. And by all means, please never, ever use comic sans.

5. Incorporate Contrasting Colors

Having the appropriate contrast between the background and the content is one of the most basic design principles and should never be overlooked. It’s important to remember that everyone’s monitor and color viewing settings can vary. The only way to be sure you’re maintaining the integrity of your course is by having a sufficient contrast between your background colors and the onscreen text. W3C recommends having a contrast ratio of at least 5:1 for proper readability. Say you’re developing a course for a company whose color palette is purple, green and blue, all of which are on the same side of the color wheel. As a designer, you might want to think about introducing another color from the warmer side of the spectrum and using varying degrees of intensity or lightness.

6. Use Effective Artwork

Look for engaging artwork that aligns with your message. Illustrations and photos (I generally try to avoid clipart) can appeal to your learners when applied correctly. Try to keep the images simple and size them in relation to the text on the screen. Be sure to strategically position your images to lead the learner’s eye around the screen. Any screenshots, diagrams, tables, graphs or image-based text elements should be large enough to be easily read. A final note on artwork – be sure to compress large art files to smaller file sizes which will reduce learner load times and is especially beneficial for mobile learning applications.

7. Smart spacing

Huge amounts of text is going to confuse, overwhelm and ultimately frustrate your learners. Instead, spread out the elements. White space is just as important as the content and should be used to effectively balance the elements on your stage. If you have a lot of content to display on a particular topic, consider breaking the content up over several screens or using click-to-reveal or accordion-style interactives to maximize the impact of your content.

8. Eliminate Distractions

In order for your learners to focus on learning, you need to get rid of the clutter. Any elements of your course that do not support the content or the learning objectives hinder the desired outcome. It’s critical to eliminate any distractions that might drive learners away from performing the desired action. Make sure every element on the screen is relevant to the content in some way, or it will be confusing and detract from the desired lesson outcomes.

9. Last but Not Least, Harmonize your Course!

Harmonize your course – What the heck does that mean?!? When it comes to design, less is often more so don’t go overboard. Include plenty of white space, limit your color palette, use a limited font set, provide simple navigation and use media as needed. Don’t go overboard with animation. In eLearning there can be “too much of a good thing.” Too many flashy elements will distract learners, reduce reading comprehension and increase the amount of time it takes for your course to load. Keep things simple and straightforward and you’ll be sure to succeed!