Top 10 things when setting up your eLearning platform

Switching to eLearning for your company’s employee training can be a major challenge. Legal considerations like data security or other concerns might be preventing you from getting started. But don’t let them come between you and a successful eLearning program. In this article, we’ll present the top 10 things you should be aware of when setting up your eLearning platform and show you step-by-step how to get off to a good start.

When designing your eLearning courses, consider the employees who will take them. How old are they? What is their educational background? Do they prefer to learn on a desktop or a mobile device? Do they need a group learning environment, or would they rather learn on their own schedules?  

 Answering these questions can help you tailor the course and learning environment to their needs. After all, a 40-year-old finance executive with two small children at home will learn differently than a 22-year-old marketing intern.

By adapting your courses to meet your employees’ needs and preferences, you can help them thrive on your eLearning platform, which improves both the completion rate and employee morale. 

Switching from in-person training to digital learning means dealing with data security and GDPR compliance. That can be nerve-wracking, especially if you aren’t 100% sure about what to look out for. 

• Be sure to get your compliance officer and data protection officer involved from the very beginning, as GDPR concerns may even affect your choice of eLearning platform.
• You’ll want to minimize the amount of data that you collect and save, and anonymize as much data as possible. 
• When you need to save course completion records — for compliance reasons, for example —define how long the data will be stored and create a procedure for deleting records after they are no longer needed.

The right authoring software — also known as a learning content management system (LCMS) — is crucial to your company’s eLearning success. Authoring software lets you create your eLearning course without a dedicated computer programmer. They usually include a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editor, course templates, and other features that make it simple for you to create your courses. 

Depending on your needs, you might want to look for an LCMS with collaboration and review features, a translation module for multilingual courses, or interactive learning features like tests.

The learning management system, also called an online learning platform, delivers the courses and course materials to your learners. Here are some of the functions that you’ll find in an LMS:

• Allow you to manage your online courses from a central location
• Deliver the course content and materials like downloadable PDFs, audio files, etc.
• Let participants communicate with each other, for example in a comment section or chat 
• Provide information and reports on learning outcomes

Ideally, you’ll want to look for an LMS that gives you some additional features. For example, you should be able to group your employees into different target groups based on your chosen criteria. Courses should be mobile-responsive so they display properly on any device. 
The best eLearning platforms have more advanced features as well. For example, they might offer adaptive learning, which lets students customize their learning paths or test out of certain courses if they have enough prior knowledge. They might also make learning more interactive with video conferences and gamification.

You can learn more and download a useful checklist in our comprehensive article about choosing the right LMS for your company.

Designing your learning environment goes beyond just adding your corporate branding. Design impacts the way your learners interact with the content. For example, if you have older learners who are less familiar with eLearning, you should keep the interface simple and clear. If you are targeting a younger audience of learners — or if your corporate style is very fun and energetic — you can amp up the colors and gamification.

Good design also ensures better accessibility. Legible fonts and contrast between the background and text colors will help employees with visual impairments (or who just can’t find their reading glasses) read the text more easily.

Finally, design can include the way the course is structured. Present information in a logical order and vary the types of questions. This will improve user engagement and motivate your employees to keep moving through the course. The right eLearning platform will give you a variety of design options to choose from.

Before you release the course to your students, you’ll want to ensure that it is effective and error-free. You can do that with the help of a carefully structured review process that includes control groups, subject matter experts, editors, and more.

This review process can be complex because so many stakeholders are involved. To make sure it goes smoothly, plan for four phases: storyboarding, prototyping, beta testing, and final launch. You’ll review all aspects of the course, from didactics to design. The review will also include the technical performance of the eLearning platform as well as content accuracy, grammar, and spelling.

The most beautiful eCourse won’t do much good if your students don’t complete it. That’s why it is essential to keep learners motivated. The right eLearning platform will give you a variety of options to increase employees’ engagement and motivation.

People can be either intrinsically motivated — e.g. because they are interested in the task itself — or externally motivated — e.g. by things like compliance regulations or company requirements. 

• You can improve your employees’ intrinsic motivation by: 
• Letting employees choose which courses to complete when possible
• Using adaptive learning, where they design their own learning path and/or test out of material that they are already familiar with
• Offering short “learning nuggets” that help them address specific issues quickly

You can increase external motivation with gamification, employee bonuses, rewards, and more.  
 

Always keep accessibility in mind when designing your courses. Even if none of your current employees have a disability or special learning needs, an accessible eLearning platform can benefit everyone.

For example, by using a clear, high-contrast design, you can help people with visual impairments. But that will also help people who feel overwhelmed by busy design.

If you provide subtitles and transcripts of your courses, you’ll help employees with hearing impairments and people who learn better by reading text. You’ll also help employees study wherever they are, even if they need to turn the volume off — like on the train or in a waiting room. That makes learning more convenient for everyone.

Before creating the curriculum and content for your courses, you should clearly define your company’s learning needs and objectives. First, assess the status quo. Then define the goals of your learning program and create a roadmap for getting learners from A (your status quo) to B (your target).

That will help you understand which courses you need to create and define learning goals for each course. After that, you’ll be able to design the content. During the design process, consider which content all learners should watch and which lessons they can skip by passing a “pre-test”.

Your eLearning platform should make it easy to use different instructional methods, including video, written content, and quizzes or open-ended responses. This will help students anchor their knowledge. You should also incorporate real-world examples so students can easily apply what they are learning.

Once your course is up and running, it’s time to collect student feedback. That takes effort, but feedback from actual students is invaluable. It can help you fine-tune your courses to make them more engaging and effective.

To make sure you get the kind of helpful responses you need, ask specific questions. Asking: “Were you happy with the course” will not tell you what to improve. 

Instead, ask a series of questions such as the following:
Did the course keep your attention from beginning to end? If not, why?
Did you find the material too easy, too hard, or just right?
What could we do to make the learning experience even better?
    
You should collect feedback regularly from a variety of students. Ideally, you should automate feedback collection so that the responses arrive without any extra work on your part.