E-learning
| 5 minutes reading

5 Steps to Creating Successful Online Learning

By Cursum

Are you a beginner or experienced online learning creator? No matter how long you’ve been creating online courses, there’s always ways to improve your online learning.

In this blog post, we’ll take you through five steps that’ll help you ensure the success of the digital learning in your online academy.

Focus on fewer learning objectives

We can’t stress this enough: It’s important that you maintain focus. As tempting as it is to share as much knowledge at once as possible with your course participants, it’s a big no go. When it comes to online learning, this tactic can end up doing your students or employees a disservice.

If your learning program contains too much and too different knowledge, there’s greater risk of low knowledge retention.

Instead, try focusing on what the learning goal of your program is. Once you’ve identified the overall intent or purpose of your learning session through a goal statement, you can move on to describing what the participants will actually learn through your course. This is called a learning objective, and it’ll help form a more clear learning path for your course participants. When the learning process is clear, the course participants will automatically end up with a more clear learning outcome.

Optimize your online learning for modern times

Digital learning comes in many forms. For the best learning experience, you can mix text, video, images, quizzes, or other interactive elements as you see fit. Just consider which learning formats will best support your set learning goal. And make sure to break up your learning modules into smaller chunks so that your course participants don’t loose interest. This concept is known as microlearning, which help ensure that your learning content doesn’t become too heavy.

The chance that all your course participants will complete and profit from a heavy text collection of 15 pages is quite low. But if you instead shorten the text and pair it with images, video, or quiz elements, the chance is higher.

Are you familiar with the modern buzzword “gamification”? Although it may sound smart and fancy, there’s a good reason to incorporate it into your online learning. Gamification, in all its simplicity, is about adding game elements to your learning. It’s an effective tool for your online learning, as it makes your learning program interactive and more exciting for course participants. Contrary to pure text-based learning, gamification can help maintain users’ interest.

Gamification

Combine theory with practice

There’s a reason driving training consists of both theory classes and practical training. You can make sure your students obtain a good, theoretical understanding of a subject, but if they’re not allowed to test their newly acquired knowledge in practice, that knowledge is quickly forgotten.

Therefore, try mixing your online learning with purposeful, real-life activities. This can be in the form of peer training, which supports what your course participants have learned through your online academy. But you can also use practical exercises combining theoretical knowledge with real-life tasks. As this links your online learning to concrete situations that your course participants can relate to, the chances of a higher knowledge retention increases.

Make your online learning user-friendly

You may have your learning content under control, but what about the packaging? When it comes to online learning materials, the presentation has a big impact on our willingness to learn.

So, give thought to how you can optimize user-friendliness and help create an easy and good learning experience for your online learning course participants. A good idea is to ensure that your online learning is mobile friendly. This is especially useful for those who wish to learn on the go.

If it’s quick and easy to access and exit your learning, you moreover increase the possibility that learners will choose your digital platform over your competitors’.

Collect feedback and leverage it for better online learning

One of the major advantages of online learning versus traditional, physical learning is how easy it is to collect data on your course participants. Use your learning platform to collect feedback from your users through questionnaires. Or view automatically collected user data such as login attempts or time spent on a course or quiz directly in your learning platforms dashboard.

Data is key when you want to optimize your digital learning. User data makes it easier for you to see which elements of your online learning work, and which parts of your learning program you should take a second look at.

When evaluating your online learning program, it’s a good idea to thoroughly consider what questions to ask your course participants. Of course, it’s always relevant to know whether your participants learned something using your learning platform. But it’s also important to collect in-depth answers that you can use to optimize the individual elements of your learning program. So, make sure to ask elaborative questions of the learners learning outcome. Was the learning objective, for example, that participants after the course would be able to solve a specific task? In that case, it’s important to figure out whether the participant has succeeded in completing the task. If not, you risk your online learning isn’t useful.

Ready to level up your online learning?

Good advice will go a long way. However, it’s important that your learning platform is able to support those digital learning recommendations. Finally, you therefore need to dedicate some time to choose the right LMS that suits your needs.

First of all, consider whether the LMS has a user-friendly interface that’s also mobile-friendly. It should be an easy and pleasant experience for your course participants to engage in your online learning program. But also remember to go into more technical and feature-related aspects of the LMS you’re considering. For example, would it be useful for you that the LMS supports gamification? Gamification is, of course, one of the newest and most modern formats in digital learning. But it does make your online courses more engaging. So, carefully consider what kind of online learning you want to offer through your learning platform.