Creating an online learning site is easy and fast. However, ensuring that the site is useful in completing its set purpose is quite challenging. Creating the right type of learning environment that will ensure successful training for all of your potential learners may take a while. As a developer, you need to ensure that your commitment and content quality you provide meets the different needs of your students.
To help you out, here are several elements you should put into consideration for an effective online learning program.
1. Quality content or material
Many online learning programs have no instructors on-site to provide explanations to all questions a student might have. Therefore, to create the ideal content for your learners, you need to be a professional and an expert in that specific subject. Take time and develop content after doing thorough research on the subject.
You might be asking why this is such an essential element. Well, learners tend to be curious and require facts with every claim you make on your course length. Also, learners take in information in varying ways; some may require more time with more examples before a specific point sinks into their minds. Your content material should provide students what they need to be successful after completing your course.
Authenticity may create a unique learning site that is very effective. All you need is to ensure you mix the different learning materials in the right manner. On your course material, elaborate using graphics, videos, and even images on various subjects. Add some bias-free humor into your content with examples that continuously offer more information on the topic at hand, among others.
2. Functional and Easy to navigate Website and Content
E-learning platforms should not only provide the learning material a student requires but also be easy to navigate. They should give the students space and time to concentrate on what the course work entails rather than have system delays, interruptions, and other technical issues. To ensure your learning platform is effective:
- Use an excellent eLearning website development platform such as a social learner to develop a user-friendly learning website.
- Add quality visuals to your explanations. Studies indicate that students retain approximately 89% of content that includes visuals rather than text only.
- Add audios to provide further explanations to your graphics or texts on your course.
- Make sure that graphics or images alignment is next to each other for better information match and retention.
- Even with the increase in visual pages or pictures, ensure you do not add too many as they might be distracting the learner. Keep them brief and to the point.
3. Clear and Concise Objectives
Provide a target or set objectives for each course that a student has to complete throughout the course. Learning is not easy, and without proper guidelines, learners would not know where to start and, thus, lose interest in the program. Therefore, it is crucial to have clear and concise objectives inclusive of a simple guideline on how to accomplish each one of them.
The objectives should match the course outline of the target audience, i.e., workers in a specific company such as hotels and others in the mining industry will have different purposes. Also, if your target audience is adults, learning objectives will differ significantly when the viewers are children. Objectives design aims at stimulating and creating the need to learn and achieve the set goals for each target audience.
4. Quality Assessments and Feedback
Learning systems have a grading system and an instructor that provides the students with feedback on their progress when in class. Most of the online learning systems have none of these, and therefore, there is a need to make up for it to ensure productive and successful learning.
To provide quality assessments:
Provide online quizzes and tests for all the material a student learns throughout the course. The estimates should have different criteria that not only engage the learner but also ensures that the student thinks to come up with the right answer/provide a proper solution. Besides, the assessment should provide the student a second chance to redo a question if they were wrong the first time. It offers an opportunity for the student to test his limits.
Your online learning should provide students with essential progress results in their education through the course. The program can track student performance on different subjects, learning platform use, communication with other peers on the platform if the feature is available, among others. The progress reports provide the opportunity to examine and understand the weak areas a student requires to improve.
5. Reward Successful Learning
Assessment and feedback provide a chance for a student to receive a reward for improvements in their studies, good performance levels, or even unique discoveries they share and the site. Therefore, it is essential to develop a reward system that provides students with the motivation necessary to continue learning.
Rewards may include essential certificates indicating their performance on the subjects. Career advancement support necessary for the working class you take in as potential students. Recognition for compliance or excellent work or being a master in a specific area is also a way of rewarding good performances. Besides, it motivates others to learn as they already know what they are currently investing in and their goals.
The site should provide the necessary resources to students improving the learning process for rewards to be effective. Providing the objectives of the study offers a guideline on the expected outcome at the end of the course. Continuous assessments ensure students track their performances and progress while continuing with their learning. Finally, with a reward awaiting the completion, students can set their minds at ease. They can have their strategies on how to achieve their expectations and those of the course.
Conclusion
The largest population in the world today has access to a mobile phone and the internet in general. It is vital to ensure that your online learning incorporates all of the above elements. Thus, you develop an efficient learning website that will make it easy and effective for students to achieve their goals. You gain the satisfaction of a successful course that delivers well-learned students and drives sustainability for business oriented online learning.
About The Author
