Part 1: How to Plan for an Effective E-Learning Course

In this 4-part series, WorkPlan takes you through the phases of creating an effective e-learning course using WorkPlan Learning’s LMS. This is part 1 of the series where we share tips on how to make a comprehensive plan to help you start creating.

So, you’ve decided to embark on the journey of using a Learning Management System (LMS) for your business! WorkPlan Learning is designed to create, distribute, and manage the delivery of educational content within your business; e-learning content development is the first step.

Online e-learning courses are an effective and comprehensive way to teach skills, speed up onboarding, educate on a topic, and much more. Compared to traditional instructor-led training or simple briefs/videos, e-learning can increase knowledge retention by up to 60% and requires 40-60% less time to learn.

One of the most important steps before creating and launching an e-learning course is the planning phase. This step ensures that the course is well thought out and does what it’s meant to achieve. This plan should consider and cover the following items:

Understanding Your Audience

Knowing your audience is an integral part of planning an e-learning course. To enable the best learning for your team, it’s important to understand what they want and how they learn, which can be time-consuming and tedious, but it’s imperative to e-learning content development.

It’s best to complete a training needs analysis to identify gaps in knowledge skills and abilities that need addressing. For more information on training needs analysis, read our previous article Completing a Training Needs Analysis Will Set You on the Path to Growth.

WorkPlan Learning makes this analysis process easy through in-built communication within the LMS. You can collect individual and collated data by sending a simple survey out to the team, which can help guide content creation. Learning what the team wants to improve on, what they think they are good at, and what they think could be better at are key results that can determine whether a course is needed or not.

Base Information

One of the easiest questions to think about is: What is this course about and how long will it take to complete? Once you’ve completed a training needs analysis, you will have a clear idea of the subject matter to create a more concrete structure moving forward.

The length of the course is also important to consider in the beginning. While e-learning is more effective and engaging compared to standard methods, the longer a course drags, the less an employee will retain knowledge. If your content takes longer than fifteen minutes to complete, consider breaking it up into smaller portions.

Expected Outcomes and Benefits

Knowing the intended outcomes of a course will provide an endpoint for you to work towards and ensure that the content is structured linearly.

For example, when onboarding a new employee, the desired outcome should be that the employee is fully briefed on the information needed for their first week of work.

Also give thought to how your course will benefit the learner. What benefits will the intended outcome of the course bring? Is it going to be used on their first day? Is it to understand the subject matter for an important meeting? Once you understand the benefits your learners will receive, then you can provide value to them.

Evaluating Tools

Once you have a clear understanding of what your course is going to be, it’s time to assess the tools you have so you can build your e-learning course. Ensuring you have a way to easily share this content, communicate with your team, and receive feedback is an important part of developing e-learning courses.

WorkPlan Learning is an LMS that combines all aspects of online learning on an easy-to-navigate portal. Rather than splitting time, resources, and attention between multiple programs, WorkPlan Learning allows business owners to streamline training and communication, while aligning learning to team objectives and strategic goals. Whether it’s a single online business or a multi-national corporation, WorkPlan Learning enables your people to learn on demand from anywhere.

That concludes Part 1 in this 4-part series covering the creation of an effective e-learning course in WorkPlan Learning’s LMS. In Part 2, WorkPlan will cover designing an engaging e-learning course.

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