10 eLearning Pitfalls to Avoid in 2022
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When creating eLearning content, authors need to consider many factors. Their job is to create compelling and helpful eLearning content that clearly matches the organization's brand and mission. They must learn to make even the simplest eLearning project valuable. Even seasoned instructional designers make eLearning pitfalls. Because there is so much to consider while building an eLearning algorithm, it becomes difficult to keep track of everything.
So, here are the 10 most common eLearning pitfalls to avoid to boost your effectiveness. Keeping learners engaged during a course or class is a major issue for all teachers. This may be even more true when creating excellent eLearning courses. So, before you keep going down the incorrect path, consider the following list of historical eLearning authoring blunders.
Even seasoned instructional designers make eLearning pitfalls
Your users aren't adequately onboarded.
When adopting a learning management system for your company, you must ensure that your employees are properly trained – knowing how and why your users are interacting is equally critical. If they don't, they'll be puzzled and won't participate, which means you've wasted your time and money.
You and your learners' lives will be a lot easier if you have a straightforward, easy-to-use system. By welcoming and reminding learners about their training, features like triggered emails encourage them to use your LMS. Allowing a user to access various applications with just one set of credentials or Single Sign-On will not only help them learn the system more quickly, but it will also benefit you. A simple onboarding process saves you and your team a lot of time and effort because users don't have to be guided through the process.
There’s no management involvement.
Getting senior personnel on board with online training is an overlooked stage. If you do not enlighten them about the benefits and obstacles, you risk losing their interest in the outcome of your training efforts. Worse, they may regard it as a waste of time. If you're just getting started with training your customers or staff, it's a good idea to include leadership from the outset.
Become a training champion and begin cultivating a learning culture throughout your organization. It's also not too late if you're already training. A brief explanation of the benefits, return on investment, and time savings will demonstrate the genuine worth of your work. You could even incorporate them by allowing them to take a course on their own or by adding them as Managers and Admins to your LMS.
This will assist you in delegating work and will improve the possibility that the benefits of adopting the LMS will be spread throughout your organization.
Choosing the incorrect Learning Management System (LMS)
Due to the wide variety of LMSs available, it's simple to use one that isn't ideal for your needs. In other cases, you've grown out of the software you purchased a few years ago, or your firm has already invested in an LMS and you need to adapt it to match your needs. Your training efforts and the return on your investment may be affected for various reasons.
Don't be a squanderer. Switching LMSs is easier than you think and can result in significant long-term savings in terms of time, money, and effort, as well as increased learner engagement. As a first step, why not make a list of the advantages and disadvantages of your current system – both large and small? This should assist you in determining whether it is time for a change.
All operations are performed manually.
Numerous capabilities now enable you to automate boring manual duties
Micromanaging your LMS requires time-consuming tasks such as adding users one by one, enrolling each learner in unique courses, tracking compliance training and recertification. And it's diverting your attention away from more vital duties. Fortunately, the leading LMSs have come a long way. Numerous capabilities now enable you to automate those boring duties and reclaim time in your day. These capabilities include the following:
- Triggered email reminders that guide your users through their training
- Scheduled reports that are transmitted to you and the recipients you specify automatically.
- So that if a course needs to be repeated after six months, a year, or longer, they have immediately added it to the course again without your intervention.
- HR or CRM integration so that users are added or removed from your system automatically.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of automatable jobs.
You're not getting the most out of your valuable learner data.
Your LMS contains significant data that can help you improve your training and engage your learners. Many people who conduct training either do not use the reports or are unaware of the beneficial information that can be tracked.
Depending on your needs, you can run numerous reports in your LMS.
- Course status reports identifying who is engaged with their training
- Course history reports seeing who has completed their training
- Course module reports detecting if there is a bottleneck in your course
- You can even conduct a survey report to collect feedback from your learners
And, as previously said, all of these reports may be automated, making it quick and easy to obtain information.
You are squandering the content you already have.
One component of online training that frequently discourages individuals is the content. Creating courses and developing new content sounds like a lot of effort. However, this does not have to be the case. The reality is that you probably already have a lot more content than you believe, and it's just waiting to be harvested.
You'd be amazed at how many of these are already available to you, particularly if you've already attended traditional, in-person training. These are the fundamental components of a new course. Make them engaging by modifying, adapting, and combining them to create engaging online course content.
Your content is entirely textual.
We're not suggesting that text-based courses don't work, but they can be tedious for learners. This can have an effect on your engagement rates, discouraging learners from returning. Including multimedia components like photos, videos, and music is a tried-and-true method of enlivening content and appealing to learners.
Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL) is an example of this in action. The bulk of their courses includes video footage to offer an engaging learning experience. It received a tremendously high engagement rate and excellent reviews from its learners. If you're on the fence about employing multimedia for your audience, try it out and see if it increases engagement.
You’re not receptive to feedback.
Online education should be two-way. You deliver training to your learners, who then provide feedback. Feedback is critical since it can assist you in refining your existing efforts. If you are not already leveraging learner feedback, begin today.
Surveys are one way to accomplish this. These can be included in courses or delivered to learners when they complete them. Additionally, you can solicit feedback from your learners once they complete your course. Don't forget to mine your reports for valuable information as well. Completion rates, exam results, and other metrics demonstrate where your audience is (or is not) engaged and what is not working for them.
The primary objective of navigation in an e-learning course is that it should not obstruct learning. Examples of navigation that obstruct learning include situations in which the learner must determine what to do next or pathways that lead to a dead end. If the learner is forced to consider “what should I tap/click next” at any point during the course, the navigation is not as efficient as it could be.
While including suggestions or instructions to assist learners as they advance through the course might be beneficial, the presence of recommendations or instructions indicates that the navigation should be enhanced. The navigation structure of an e-learning course should be intuitive, and it should be reviewed for dead ends or circular routes. Thus, the design of links and buttons is critical.
New features are not thoroughly tested.
An excellent LMS should be introducing new features
If you've been delivering training for some time, you've probably developed a routine. You do things in a specific way, with specific features and tools, and it works for you. That's OK, but are you overlooking elements that could make your job easier?
An excellent LMS should be introducing new features that make things easier and more efficient—have a look! Give it a shot, whether it's introducing Gamification to your courses or developing one-of-a-kind learning portals in your LMS.
Conclusion
Suppose you recognize some of these elements in your existing or in-progress e-learning programs, regardless of the subject matter. In that case, it's easy to make frequent mistakes that significantly impact your learners' completion and engagement rates.
Now, it’s time to enlist the assistance of eLearning experts! At Groove Technology, we have a dedicated eLearning team that will assist you in developing an efficient eLearning program using cutting-edge tools and processes. Have you ever experienced some form of any of these eLearning pitfalls or believe that firms make additional common training mistakes? Let us create your incredible LMS. Contact us today for full consultation.
