Five common issues with many e-learning courses
E-learning can making a huge impact in people’s lives. The best e-learning will be an enjoyable and transformative experience for the learner.
However, many people shudder when they think of taking an online course. Why is this? In this article, I’ll look at some common reasons that e-learning often doesn’t live up to its potential.
Insufficient learning activity and problem-solving practice
The best e-learning courses will be an engaging experience for the learner. However, what one instructional designer classes as “engaging” may be different to another.
Many e-learning courses include the following elements in the hope of being interactive and engaging:
“Click to reveal” information.
Recalling facts from previous slides.
A quiz to complete the e-learning activity.
These activities seem useful, so what’s the issue?
Asking the learner to recall facts they’ve just seen, either during the e-learning module or in a final quiz, is not useful. It’s just testing their short term memory.
Clicking to reveal information just demonstrates the learner can use a mouse or touchscreen – nothing else. Presenting information in this way can break up text, but it shouldn’t be confused for high quality instructional design.
Additionally, many e-learning courses features questions with obvious answers - these questions could be easily answered by someone with no background knowledge in the subject being covered at all. High quality and tempting incorrect alternatives are critical for well-crafted multiple choice questions.
Overwhelming amount of information
Many instructional designers take information from somewhere else, for example a PowerPoint presentation, a manual, a handout or a textbook, and “dump” it into an e-learning course. An information dump course like this is very common, but unsurprisingly it almost always results in boring e-learning that is irrelevant to the learner.
If there’s too much information presented in the course, it’s impossible for learners to fully absorb it. They’ll get burned out trying to digest the course, especially if the course also suffers from a lack of interactivity, as discussed above.
The role of the instructional designer is to look at all the information available, and decide what’s going to be really useful to the learner in their job. It’s counterproductive to try to cram every last piece of knowledge into a course. Instead, focussing on key concepts and presenting these in short, easy to understand modules will be much more attractive to the learner.
Poor attention to visual design
E-learning is a highly visual medium, so its appearance is important. Unfortunately, many e-learning courses are not visually attractive. They often don’t respect the key graphic design principles:
Consistency: Fonts and colours must be consistent across the e-learning module. Clean, modern fonts and carefully chosen colours can make a big difference to the visual appeal.
Alignment: All elements must be carefully arranged to ensure it is aesthetically pleasing.
Contrast: Text should be easily readable, and use a clear hierarchy of header and body text styles to display importance of points.
Imagery also needs to be consistent. Too little imagery can be boring, but it’s important to only include pictures that are relevant to the course content. It’s best to choose an image style (e.g. photos, illustrations, vector graphics) and stick with it through the course.
E-learning courses take too much time to complete
Some e-learning courses are a slog to get through. Learners are often busy and don’t have the time and attention span to sit through overly long courses. In addition to not including unnecessary content, it’s important to break up the course into short, focused modules organised into themes.
The other advantage of organising content like this is that these modules can be used on their own in different contexts, if required.
Poor navigation
Course navigation needs to feel effortless for the learners. Many e-learning courses have confusing navigation which hinders the learning experience. Others lock down content, requiring the learners to read everything or complete everything before moving on. This is usually counterproductive, as we are essentially telling adults we don’t trust them to learn for themselves. Locking navigation also means the learner can’t review content easily later.
So what should good e-learning do?
The critical first step for an instructional designer is to ensure they fully understand their learners. My first step in course design is to ask what the learners need to do in their jobs. The next question is – why aren’t they doing it? If after asking these questions I find that an e-learning course could help address the issue, I next define learning objectives for the course.
The next step is to build realistic practice activities as part of the course. Just telling learners what to do isn’t enough, they need to practice doing it!
I’ll discuss how I build realistic activities and scenarios in later articles.