Top 10 E-learning Mistakes

Nick Shackleton-Jones’ summary of the top 10 mistakes people make in designing e-learning solutions:

1. Overlooking the implementation

It is perfectly possible to create a mediocre course and achieve 100% completion, or a fantastic course and achieve 5% completion rates. It’s all in the implementation.

2. Building courses

Instead of courses, build a kit of flexible resources that can be recombined as required e.g. interviews, conceptual animations, scenarios, drama, best-practice case-studies. They may be used in advance of an event, as part of a comms or awareness-raising exercise, in classroom sessions, or by line managers in discussion with their teams.

3. Dumping information

Our job is not merely to summarise information, but to construct experiences which make it clear why anyone should care enough to invest their precious time in learning. Think ‘Story-Scenario-Simulation’.

4. Ignoring the audience

Understand the particular organisational sub-culture, what calls them to learn, what challenges they face, what they like and who they respect.

5. Not making use of informal learning

It is not enough merely to try to create and control an informal learning space: most attempts at social media for learning fail through insufficient consideration of content-generation-strategies. Here, again learning professionals used to more formal roles have an invaluable part to play in creating an informal experience.

6. Failure to challenge

Learners want us to provide them with situations in which it is safe to fail. Learning happens as a result of failing at these challenges, and not because we say ‘FAIL!’ but because we demonstrate the consequences of decisions that the learner takes and provide additional feedback.

7. Not considering the emotional landscape

90% of courses open with something moderately entertaining (e.g. a video) then flat-line for the remaining 30 minutes. If you had to draw a line representing the emotional landscape of your course, what would this look like?

8. Outsourcing it

A well-formed online strategy is a three-tiered triangle. At the top are online resources best built by highly capable e-learning suppliers. At the bottom are resources generated by learning staff and employees and shared between peers. But the middle tier should be a healthy chunk of learning content created by the organisation itself, using rapid development tools and techniques.

The future of learning professionals should be a sound grasp of the techniques and tools that can be used in creating learning content – such as video skills, for example.

9. Shoddy visual design

Although it can be misleading, users will get a sense of the quality of an online course from its visual design in much the same way as they get a sense of the quality of a face-to-face course from the venue.

10. Poor content management techniques

Don’t build some inscrutable tangle of flash files that we have no way of editing when the text changes or updating when our branding moves on.