One of the most exciting things about having your own Learning Management System is the ability to create and distribute custom training content to your learners. Sure, Essential Learning provides the highest quality library of online courses available in our industry, but there are always courses that are unique to your environment. Instructional Design Technology has come a long way in the last few years and there is quite a bit of science to the art of creating quality online courses. Our Content design experts will help guide you on the path to creating your own content while giving you and your peers a place to share your own experiences and perhaps even your own content.
Hello friends. Welcome back to my blog.
We continue our quest to write the perfect e-learning course. At this point, we are on step 3: the actual writing or editing of content for your online course.
After you have organized all your content and are ready to either write it from scratch or edit existing content for an e-learning course, here are some suggestions to keep in mind:
1. Avoid abbreviations and acronyms unless you are sure your audience will know what they are or you explain them.
2. To engage your learners in a social experience, use informal writing that relies on first and second person language. Of course learners consciously know that they are working with a computer program and not a human partner. Nevertheless, just a few simple changes in language such as adding “you” and “we” pronouns can result in dramatic improvements in learning. The reason is that at an unconscious level, we tend to process more deeply when we are in a social-like setting.
3. Shorten sentences (don't have compound sentences that have more than one "and")
4. Use accessible language (ditch henceforth, verifiably, other “two-dollar” terms that aren’t necessary)
5. Use active voice. Don't say "Many things can be done" - instead write "You can do many things..."
If you are taking an existing PowerPoint and converting it to an online course, it is important that you incorporate your notes into the course. Change the wording of the notes and make sure you don’t’ have redundancy with the actual power point slide.
More about writing content for e-learning course to come in future posts. Happy writing everyone!
Michelle