Digital Didactics in eLearning

A businesswoman uses a tablet for digital didactics in corporate training.

Quicklinks

Foundational principles of digital didactics
Tips for designing effective eLearnings
Common mistakes in digital didactics
The bottom line.

Your company wants to shift to digital corporate training. You’ve set up your eLearning environment and rolled out the first course. The learning modules look great—modern and well-designed—but the results just aren’t what you expected. Participants aren’t engaged. The learning doesn’t stick. The training feels ineffective. So, what’s going wrong?

The answer often lies in the digital didactics … or lack thereof. A sleek design can’t replace solid instructional techniques—so in this article, we’ll show you how to create an eLearning course that is both appealing and effective. Keep reading to learn the basic principles of digital didactics and learning design, practical tips for designing eLearning courses, and common mistakes you should avoid.

Foundational principles of digital didactics and learning design

By following some basic principles, you can make digital learning more effective—which will help your employees learn and help your company achieve its goals. Here are four things to keep in mind when designing your eLearning courses.

Start with the end in mind

When you’re designing digital courses for the first time, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the possibilities. Should you include quizzes? Video? Interactive simulations? Flashcards? All of them at once?

All these options can be useful—but only if they help you meet your overall goals. That’s why it’s essential to start with the end in mind: by defining clear learning objectives for each course. Without them, it’s easy to fall into the trap of adding features just because they seem interesting.

Once you’ve established the learning objectives, you can take a strategic approach to the didactics. Instead of guessing which elements to include, you’ll be able to select the right tools and methods to help learners achieve their goals.

Use interactive elements strategically

Adding interactivity for its own sake can be distracting, but when used strategically, it turns a passive learning experience into an active one. Interactive elements in an eLearning course are effective when they enhance engagement, reinforce learning, and improve knowledge retention.

For example, interactive simulations can be used to help learners apply theoretical concepts to real-life scenarios. Digital flashcards and micro-learning can be used periodically throughout the course to help learners remember information over the long term. Quizzes help to keep learners engaged and check how well they have learned the information.

Interactivity can also ensure that your courses work for people with different learning styles. Some learners do better with hands-on practice rather than reading or watching videos—and that’s where interactive exercises, such as role-playing simulations, can make a difference.
The key is to ensure that interactivity always serves a purpose—if it slows down the learner without adding value, it can become frustrating. The best approach is to use interactive elements as a “side dish” that accompanies the main course—which should be made up of clear, structured content. This will ensure that your eLearning course is engaging, memorable, and effective.

Using the right mix of multimedia

eLearning courses give you the chance to experiment with a blend of multimedia learning formats. You can include written information, video content, audio content, animations and more—but what will work best for your learners?

As mentioned above, people have different learning styles. Some absorb information best by reading, others by watching videos or listening to audio, and yet others with more hands-on learning formats. By offering a mix of different media, you can cater to the needs of all these different learners.

Offering different multimedia formats also makes your course more accessible to people with disabilities. Employees with dyslexia, for example, will likely prefer video and audio content. But you could also include transcripts of the videos or audio lessons to make the material accessible for learners with hearing impairments or auditory processing issues—as well as to anyone who prefers to learn from written materials.

Avoid cognitive overload

If your course presents too much information at once, you’ll likely overload your students. They’ll gradually lose focus and miss out on the information they should be learning. To avoid this, be sure to break the course up using quizzes, review elements, or interactive modules.

Microlearning reviews with digital flashcards like Knowledgeworker Cards can be a great way to review small chunks of information after they have been presented in a longer, more structured lesson. For example, you could have a video lesson, followed by a flash card review, followed by a quiz or a scenario-based learning module. That will help ensure that learners really absorb the information and store it in their long-term memory.

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Practical tips for designing effective eLearning content

How can you ensure that your eLearning modules are as effective as possible? Here are four tips and best practices that will help you design digital learning courses that meet the learning objectives and your company’s corporate training goals.

Use storytelling

The human brain is wired to pay attention to stories, which makes them an incredibly effective learning tool. Storytelling can take abstract concepts and turn them into something memorable, meaningful, and relatable. And because stories are immersive, learners engage with them emotionally—which boosts learning and makes it easier to retain information.

For example, an eLearning course on data security and phishing might present the story of a group of coworkers who have all been targeted by a phishing attack. As learners watch each employee respond to the phishing attack—and see the subsequent outcome of their response—they learn how phishing works and how to respond appropriately. But the stories are far more memorable than if the same information were presented as dry facts.

The key to effective storytelling in eLearning is ensuring that the story contributes to the overall learning objective, stays focused, and draws readers in with a narrative that feels relevant and true to life. Done right, storytelling can make your eLearning program more engaging, immersive, and effective.

Incorporate adaptive learning paths

Learning paths let you design targeted training programs for your company’s employees. But even if you carefully prepare learning paths for different target groups, not everyone learns at the same speed. Some people have extensive background knowledge, some are new to the field, and others might just learn more quickly or more slowly than others. So how can you create a learning path that works equally well for everyone?

Adaptive learning paths use learning analytics to adjust each employee’s learning path based on their interactions with the eLearning material, feedback about the courses, quiz results and more. Learners can also test out of certain modules or courses, so they don’t waste time on material they already know. A full-featured LMS like Knowledgeworker Share makes it easy to tailor learning paths to each employee’s particular needs.

Add targeted gamification elements

Internal motivation is key to getting employees to meet their eLearning goals. But sometimes internal motivation needs a little help. That’s when gamification comes in. Gamification elements—like leaderboards, points systems, levels, learning quests or challenges—can provide a boost of external motivation that encourages learners to keep going even when their internal motivation flags.

Gamification also provides an extra element of fun that keeps employees engaged and interested. It might even create a healthy sense of competition between coworkers as they work together to earn points for their team or reach the top of the leaderboard. This makes learning more entertaining and keeps employees coming back for more.

Choose effective quiz and test formats

Quizzes and tests in eLearning modules can do more than just check whether learners remember information. They can also reinforce learning and encourage reflection, in addition to providing helpful feedback. For example, open-ended questions require learners to synthesize information and actively use their learning to formulate a response. And drag-and-drop questions can reinforce the relationships between concepts. You can learn more about the different types of quiz and test questions in this article: Various Question Types in Knowledgeworker

Common mistakes in digital didactics and how to avoid them

There are three common mistakes that companies make when designing their eLearning courses. Let’s take a look at what they are and how you can avoid them.

Too much theory, too little practice

Learning theory will only get your learners so far. To truly understand what they’ve learned, they need to put that information to active use. There are a number of ways to do this. After employees learn the theory in an online module, you could invite them to a hands-on workshop, assign them to shadow a colleague on the job, or even design a scenario-based learning module that lets them practice their skills virtually. The important thing is that they have the chance to actively use the information they have learned.

Overloading your modules

Your eLearning course needs to be clearly structured to be effective. A module that tries to cram in too much detail or includes non-essential information will overload your learners. When designing your courses, be sure to define which topics should be covered in each module and stick closely to the plan. If you’re afraid your module might be veering off course, consider having a colleague or beta tester review it and give you honest feedback.

Unnecessary interactive elements that distract from learning

Interactivity is great, but you don’t want to have too much of a good thing. Dragging and dropping the correct answers to a question will help students learn and boost engagement—but having them click on each bulletpoint in a checklist will just feel like a waste of time. Always consider whether the interactive element is contributing to learning in a meaningful way.

The bottom line.

eLearning opens up a whole world of options in terms of didactics—but you need to use them judiciously. Having a nice-looking course won’t get you anywhere if it isn’t well-structured and effective. To make sure your eLearning program helps your company meet its goals, you should start by defining clear learning objectives. Then carefully choose your learning formats and interactive elements to support those goals. Throughout the course, take advantage of the digital didactic options to make learning more personalized and interactive. Include gamification and multimedia where it makes sense—but always ensure that it reinforces learning rather than distracting from it. When digital learning is designed with purpose, it not only makes training more enjoyable but also delivers real results for your employees and your company.

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