Mobile devices such as Smartphones, iPads, iPods, Tablet PCs have gained immense popularity and widespread acceptance among users. Quite naturally, they are being considered as useful media to impart workplace learning. It makes a lot of practical sense in this age when knowledge transfer needs to take place in the shortest possible time reaching the widest possible audience. However, the challenge lies in the fact that regular media cannot be ignored or replaced with mobile devices for deploying learning. To ensure that eLearning courseware is available to a wide range of audiences within an organization, L&D managers need to make the courses accessible in multiple formats – which means users should be able to access the courses via their Smartphones, iPads, or simply through their workstation. Providing such flexibility does ensure wider registrations for eLearning courseware. However, it does pose a challenge to instructional designers when designing courses to be delivered in multiple delivery formats.

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Anyone who has been involved in instructional design for any length of time will very quickly run into that workplace reality called Rapid Development tools. Often, the most common complaint from the tools team is that the instructional design team wants the tools team to develop the eLearning equivalent of rocket science. While the designers complain that the tools team is forever forcing them to put a lid on creativity and making them think of limitations before they even begin to design anything innovative. And so the tug of war continues, and the course gets pulled in various directions.

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Ever been put off by feedback for a practice question in an online course that was just an unhelpful “That’s incorrect. The correct answer is…”, without any attempt at explaining why the answer was incorrect?

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With most eLearning courses using multimedia to present information, typically, there is a mix of visuals and narration. To this, we also sometimes add onscreen text in the hope of catering to the learning style of our visual learners. In fact this is the primary rationale behind many designers using onscreen text, visuals as well as audio that mirrors the onscreen text to ensure that all kinds of learners can process information through their preferred sensory channel (which the learning styles hypothesis suggests is the way learners receive information). The idea is that it is better to deliver the same content through as many modes or routes as possible, so that no learning style is left out of the reckoning.

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In the last post on this topic, we looked at the fact that our learners do not come to our courses in a neutral mode. They come to the learning experience with an attitude (ranging from favorable to unfavorable) towards the subject, the medium of delivery, and towards the course materials. In this post we will see how we as instructional designers can help in positively influencing their attitude towards the subject matter or topic or training and towards the course materials themselves (eLearning courses in our case).

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