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Shifting from the traditional training methods to online training is one of the most beneficial things for any organization. It helps in reducing training costs and time, along with providing employees a rich learning experience.
One of the most revolutionary tools that facilitates online course creation and helps in delivering the courses is a Learning Management System(LMS). With modern cloud-based LMS like Adobe Captivate Prime, it is now effortless for L&D pros to create an engaging training experience for your employees.
However, it’s not always possible that L&D pros would be aware of the best ways to develop an online course. Those accustomed to providing offline solutions may face certain challenges while developing an online course.
Fortunately, you can make yourself aware of these challenges and mistakes beforehand to prevent yourself from making them. To help you out, we have compiled a list of the most common blunders made by first time course creators:
- Unclear learning objectives:
The most common mistake observed in most first time online course creators is lack of clarity. They have a wealth of knowledge that they want to pour into the course, but do not have clear goals and direction.
As a creator, it is important to be aware of your audience’s learning objectives and constantly question yourself whether the content aligns with those objectives. Failing to do so will make the course very vague and ineffective.
- Creating a snoozefest:
As a L&D pro, you may want to offer the learners as much knowledge as possible to ensure their growth. But making a course extremely lengthy can cause them to get bored and lose interest.
Keep your content crisp and focused on the topic at hand. Make sure to include only what is vital and eliminate everything else. Your objective should be to provide the best information that helps learners understand a concept in the shortest possible time.
- Not keeping in mind learner attention span:
The attention span of an average learner is very small, and you need to leverage this to your benefit. When L&D pros fail to understand this point and create huge modules, it often leads to courses left midway by the learners.
For maximum engagement, you need to keep the modules focused on only one topic at a time and keep them short. This will help employees pick a module between lunch break or commute to work and learn quickly.
- Not making it visual and interactive:
When your content is cluttered with just text, it can feel very heavy and difficult to complete. Explaining a concept based on just text is not very impactful and makes it difficult for learners to understand how to implement it in their everyday work life.
Learning with graphics is not just fun, but also easy to understand. The use of infographics, videos, animation with voice over captures the learner attention and keeps them engaged. Add examples and stories to help them understand real life implementation of a concept.
- Not fostering collaboration:
L&D pros often miss out on using the gamification features of a LMS. The game-like mechanics help in fostering healthy competition through elements like leaderboards, badges, reward points, etc and boost collaboration.
Employees learn so much better when they learn together. When they compete for a reward or to get to the top of the leaderboard, it pushes them to perform better in their learning assessments. This increases engagement with course content and leads to higher rate of course completion.
Conclusion:
Now that you have read about them, make sure to steer clear of these blunders. Before you create an online course, take time to understand your audience first.
