There are a couple of mistakes that you need to avoid committing during content creation. When you create your elearning course, you have to be careful with how you develop it. The design of your course is something that can contribute to its success. After all, it will not only help you deliver the content – it will also help you make the experience worthwhile for the learners.
To increase the retention rate in your course, you have to make it memorable. Not only that, you have to appeal to the emotions of your learners. This is possible if you concentrate on making the experience pleasant for them. That means you should not only focus on content creation. You have to go beyond that. You need to make the learning process engaging, interactive and relatable.
Here are a couple of mistakes that you might commit while creating the content of your course.
- Failing to define the context of your content. The context usually makes your content more substantial. It gives meaning and reinforces the value of the words or phrases that describe your lesson. You need to ensure that your context is clear and is evident during the content creation process. Otherwise, the meaning of your course might get lost in translation and could confuse your learners.
- Creating a linear way of learning. This simply refers to the design wherein your students go from point A to B without the option of going back or jumping ahead of the lesson. Having the ability to go back and forth will allow them to set the pace of the learning process. This will increase their control over the learning curve.
- Dictating everything about the lesson. If you want to bore your learners to the point that you will put their mind to sleep, then go ahead and dictate everything to them. Tell them how to proceed or deliver to them the answers and you will fail at challenging their intellect. You could make them feel frustrated. The new way of learning is all about allowing students to control their education. This is especially true for adults. The more involved they are in the learning process, the more they can retain the new ideas being presented to them.
- Providing the same script for the audio and text. Using both audio and text is alright. However, if you use the text on the screen as the script for the audio, that is another way to bore your students. Make your audio clear and concise and make your text even shorter. Just flash key words and phrases on the screen as the audio narrates their meaning. Avoid redundancy in content creation.
- Not thinking about instructional design. When you create your content, you need to do it in such a way that it can address the different character gaps in your audience. People learn differently – even if they are from the same industry or sector. If you can use instructional design efficiently, you can fill in these gaps to make the collective learning experience worthwhile and effective for all your students.
- Using tools that are not related to the lesson. Sometimes, we get too caught up in the sophistication of the tools and systems that are available to us that we fail to see if they are relevant to the course. Make sure that when you choose the elements during content creation, you will consider how relevant they are and not how impressed your students will be in the learning process. Sometimes, if you choose the wrong tool, you will end up distracting your students and failing to drive your message across.
- Overloading learners with information. The last mistake that you can make is to overload the students with the lesson. If your content is massive, you need to cut it up in bite-size chunks. It is important that you let your students absorb the lesson in batches because that will allow them to retain the ideas presented to them.
Think about all these mistakes will allow you to come up with an effective and efficient course after content creation.
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