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How To Create The Best Instructional Design Strategy

Digital courses teach a subject matter without the help of a physical instructor. This gives learners a great deal of flexibility but at the same time also takes away the strong presence and expertise of a teacher from the learning process. This means e-learning courses need to compensate for this absence of a learning facilitator through some or the other digital mediums. Digital does this through various instructional design strategies.

An instructional strategy is basically a top-level plan of how a topic must be taught to your employees. Like any other strategy, the Instructional Design strategy begins with setting up clear learning objectives, determining the actions that must be taken to meet these objectives, along with the techniques to achieve these goals and finally assessments methods to gauge the success. Let’s check out some of basic principles that you can follow to support your instructional design strategy and make it more effective:

Create Easy Navigation

In an e-learning course, it’s important to make the navigation easy and effortless for the learner. Remember that your learners are adults, and they rarely like to be restricted in the way they access content. That’s why you should allow your employees to freely navigate through the course without any restrictions. Divide your content up into distinct sections and topics so learners don’t have look for topics too much. From a design perspective, navigation icons shouldn’t clutter the screen and remain easy to use. This instructional design practice helps them sail through the course effortlessly and choose the topic they want to learn at that moment.

Focus on the Look of Your Course GUI

The design of your course is the first thing that is going to capture the attention of your audience. And design is not just about decoration. Effective design encourages your learners to focus on the content. That’s why instructionally it is always advisable stick to the essentials of course design when creating a template. Avoid unnecessary distractions in your design that can cloud your learners’ minds and create a neat and focused course layout for maximum learning impact. Your GUI should be designed keeping in mind your company’s brand. Be consistent, in terms of colors, fonts, logos and themes with the brand image.

Present Content Wisely

With an e-learning course, you should never make the mistake of cramping all the content in one page. That’s why it is always recommended to divide your content up into several slides. This division should happen logically as per topics and sub-topics. In addition to ensuring better readability, it also uplifts the course’s look and feel to a great extent. It doesn’t overwhelm the learners with excessive information and teaches them one bit at a time. This instructional practice leads to better transfer of knowledge along with a greater attention span.

Make it a Visual Treat

Always remember that digital learning is more of a visual medium. There are so many visually attractive elements at your disposal to convey your subject matter. Videos, images, animations, voiceovers, infographics and many more should be used to convey as much of your subject matter as possible. Visual learning methods make a lasting impact in the minds of learners as compared to plain text.

Include Ample Interactivities

For your course to create maximum impact, it is essential that it make the learners active participants in the learning process. That is why it is important that your e-learning course contains a lot of interactive learning elements. You can include scenario-based learning, which emulates the real life circumstances of your employees’ workplace and teaches the subject through a story built around it. Another instructional method that e-learning can include is game-based content. It is essentially a playable game with your learning content embedded into it. With this instructional method, learners simply play such games to sub consciously learn the subject matter.

Hire An Experienced E-Learning Vendor

The success of the above instructional strategies largely depends on the way they are executed. If your organization lacks the necessary expertise to materialize these instructional strategies in the right way then your final e-learning course will not be up to the mark. That’s why instead of doing it yourself, you should hire an experienced e-learning vendor who can bring your e-learning vision to its appropriate fulfillment. An experienced vendor will have the right knowledge and experience to take care of the many things that go into building a digital learning program.

Before you dive into formulating an instructional design strategy for your training program, it is essential that you do a thorough analysis for your organization’s requirements. If you appropriately take into account your target audience and go step by step with the instructional strategy then you just can’t go wrong.

Instructional Design Strategies to Design Engaging eLearning Courses