Mantra for Enhanced Learning Experience

There is a simple mantra for delivering not just an e-learning course but an enhanced learning experience – Engage your learners!
Yes, in my e-learning pentagon I touched upon this angle and here now I write some simple tips on how you can engage your learners.
1) Break the course into independent modules: Yeah I know we all do that, but then we link and sometimes even arrange them like train bogies, one following the other!
What we need to really do is make them independent of one another. Break them free- let it be a roller coaster ride and let your learner decide which one he chooses first and which one he has had enough of!
2) Spruce up the course with varied contents, use texts, animation, graphics, video, audio, discussion forums, chat, etc. This will help you to appeal various facades of learners as an individual and /or a group.
3) Web 2.0 has made it pretty obvious for us to implement social media as part of our learning experience. Facebook, Flickr, blog, tweeter, etc. will help the learner to take learning to an unofficial level, breaking down traditional learning boundaries.
4) Add different levels of interactivity with peer-peer and peer-tutor; discussion forums and chats also try to engage the learner in building part of the course taking interactivity to another level!
5) And finally do not over deliver, what this means is Keep It Simple and Sober; do not overdo the course with lots of images, tests, graphs or interactivity, get a balance of everything. Best way is to get some users involved to understand how we are getting along!

Five commandments for developing an e-learning course

When starting with any e-learning course there are five commandments I generally follow, I call those commandments as the e-learning pentagon.



Purpose:
Any e-learning course that we develop will have its purpose, as simple as we need to have a learning objective. Why are we creating this course? What is the motivation for creating this course?
Investigate:
As you understand the purpose of your course you should also investigate the content. No wonder there would be subject matter experts at aid but then while developing a course you need to develop an understanding of the subject.
When creating a clinical nursing course you must investigate and find out more about the lingo, terms, and make it a very clinical course!
Audience:
When you see a course do you feel that it is either too easy or too difficult to understand? That’s because one has missed an important angle of the pentagon, the audience!
When developing an e-learning course one needs to develop an understanding of his audience, you need to think from the learner’s point of view.
Engage:
Interactivity – gets the learner hooked to the course. Engage him with small interactive modules, tests quizzes, animation, etc.
Test:
Pilot run your course before releasing, you’ll be surprised with the last minute house-keeping you will need to do!

What Is This Buzz All About?

What is this buzz all about? E-learning! But then don’t we all know about e-learning? Isn’t it that technical thingy where we post text files, quizzes, questionnaires with some images and graphics, to save a whole lot of time and money spent to distribute it otherwise, so we all know about it. What’s the big deal?
CRAP!
E-learning goes much beyond posting text files or quizzes online. It’s creating a platform to share the information, knowledge in an interactive environment. Yeah a part of it includes creating quizzes or posting text, but then that’s it, it is just a part of the process!
E-learning is a tedious task which involves understanding the learning aim and needs, understanding the content and understanding ways for its best representation to help the users grasp the knowledge the best way. Developing and using the graphics and interactivity, blending it with current online trends, developing new ideas, managing budget and the time schedule so that the course is ready in time for users. Finally, bringing together the subject matter experts, graphic designers, instructional writers and technical team to work together in harmony to blend in there inputs. All in all, it’s a wide array of different activities – overlapping, separate, independent and dependant!
E-learning is not bombarding the learner with knowledge but getting the learner to actively participate in learning, challenging his/her ability, allowing him/her to take initiatives, addressing a range of his/her skills while mocking a scenario. It’s all about giving them an interactive environment where they can, not only learn but hone and use the skills they learn while they learn them.
All in all, e-learning is a step to get the user out of the passive learning experience to an interactive learning experience, which involves investment in terms of time, money, resources, people, technology and a whole lot of information disseminated with a lot of thinking!

e-Learning......

Gone are the days when students studied in a classroom where teachers tried to pour out what they knew. Traditional teaching has revamped and reinvented itself with the advent of web technology. With the advent of internet we are facing a generation which has no living memory of a world without internet!

E-learning in itself is an umbrella term for providing online (computer based) learning solutions. Now this includes a variety of teaching material, coursework, assessment, discussions, chat and many more features of web 2.0 shared over the internet/intranet which is either a part of a distance or a classroom learning program.

In the early days it was predicted that e-learning will radically change the learning paradigm and classroom teaching will be long forgotten in the history, but as e-learning has matured its shown a symbiotic relation and the traditional classroom teaching has evolved and today we see the advent of blended learning which is bringing together the best of both worlds!