eLearning

The days of packing your employees off for two weeks away from their families for boring, expensive, ineffective training sessions are thankfully nearing an end. eLearning, through Computer-Based Training (CBT) or Web-Based Training (WBT), has become an affordable and demonstrably superior alternative.

Much like websites, computer-based courses are only effective when properly architected. There is always a temptation to simply convert printed training materials into HTML or PDF format and let the students read the material off of their monitor. This mistake is often further compounded by having someone read the text aloud, technically fulfilling that elusive goal of making the course "multimedia". In other words, the only thing worse than having to read an entire course on a 72 D.P.I. monitor is having someone else try to distract you by reading that same text in your ear! Little wonder that the successful completion rate for such on-line courses hovers well under the 50% mark, considerably lower than that of a traditional, instructor-led course.

A properly designed eLearning course will be based on these principles:

  • Information should be presented as concisely as possible, but should allow the opportunity for deeper exploration of a subject at the student's discretion
  • Multimedia elements should not be obtrusive or annoying and, most importantly, should not be included just because "it seems like a cool thing to do"
  • Never read on-screen text aloud, unless you are offering it as a "close-captioning" alternative to meet Accessibility guidelines
  • Hypertext and "hyper-subject" navigation is extremely important--think of how effective a newspaper is in dissemininating a large volume of information every day, despite the fact that no one person wants to read every article and some users will want to read certain articles before others, i.e. they might want to view last night's hockey scores before reading the front page news
  • A popup glossary must be provided
  • Each section should begin by presenting the information to be covered, explain it thoroughly, then summarize and quiz the student on what was covered