Did you know how elearning came into being? Globalisation is one of the factors that demandedan online training solution for employees: located in multiple, dispersed geographical locations, training them via traditional methods would be time-consuming and costly for business owners. Moreover, markets are expanding and products are increasingly specialized and localized. These are the reasons that there is a needfor online learning development process to update employees’ knowledge and skills.
ELearning development process is the modern technology that you can use to enable your employees to learn whenever they want. It is created by taking into account adult learning theories, learning styles and instructional design principles. There are six stages involved in elearning design, and the development process is as follows: Analysis, Design, Development, Evaluation Implementation,Translation, and Learning Management System hosting.
Adult Learning Theories
The way adults learn is different from that of children. Adult learning theories are not simply a gathering of dialects, models, and thoughts concerning how adults learn. There are various theories of adult learning categorised as andragogy, neuroscience, experiential learning, self-directed learning, and transformational learning. Each theoryhas one aim: to create a productive learning experience for the adult corporate learner.
These provide instructional designers with astructure or guidelines for developing content for adult learners from different perspectives
Learning Styles
Every individual has different learning approaches. Some prefer to learn quickly through reading, while others like hearing or performing practically for particular topics. Therefore, your learning development process requires dealing with the various style of learning. You must do it properly by adding text, graphics, videos, and audio to your programs.
Instructional Design Principles
In the end, you need to apply instructional design principles to make learning easy for employees. Various instructional design models need to be followed, depending on the audience profile and issues. ADDIE is the most common model used to prescribe an audience and content examination; designing of the course in terms of visual, instructional and auditory policy; developing the course utilising the elearning authoring tools; implementation ;and finally, evaluation.
However, the designing of the online learning development process is based on sound learning principles. You need to understand the components correctly, evaluate your requirements, and create an effective learning strategy to share all mandatory information. You need to have the best communication approach to make sure your objectives are understood and acknowledged by everyone.
If you are an eLearning designer, you should consider using agile instructional design for your learning initiatives. Unlike the traditional methods of course creation, the agile method offers some significant benefits that will ensure that your results are outstanding yet also efficient. Below, we look at some of the top benefits of the agile design method.
Highly Interactive
Agile instructional design is heavily focused on the learners and how they will interact with the course material. At every step of course development, the needs of the learner and the manner in which they will participate and engage with the course will be taken into consideration. As a result, course developers are able to develop training materials in exactly the way a learner would find it easy to understand. This is one of the reasons why many instructional designers are switching over to agile design. After all, if you can produce high-quality, engaging content using agile, why bother wasting time on other, inefficient instructional design methods?
Rapidly Produce Content
A big challenge faced by most course developers is the time required for developing training material. This is mostly because developers usually tend to focus on creating the entire content of the course all at once. Obviously, this is normally a massive undertaking fraught with so many issues that the project will end up taking a lot of time. But with agile design processes, designers can now develop courses faster, using less time and fewer resources. This is because agile methods look at the course development process as consisting of little chunks of content that need to be developed sequentially. Only when one section is finished can the development team move on to the next section. This process of course development ensures that the training material is created within a short period of time.
Better Collaboration
A huge benefit of the agile design process is that it facilitates easier collaboration among multiple individuals. Everyone involved in the course, right from the organization that invested in its development to the actual learners, can collaborate with each other and offer suggestions to improve the course. As a course developer, this gives you the chance to hear the feedback and understand which aspect of the course needs to be developed and what new, potential features should be implemented. This can go a long way in helping you fine-tune your next course.
No Last Moment Revisions Necessary
In the traditional course development scenario, developers often tend to make numerous changes and revisions to the content. This mostly happens because the course is developed all at once, and then largely revised later on at the end of development. As a consequence, designers often need to correct a lot of errors to ensure that the training material complies with expectations. However, since agile development involves completing the course in portions, all errors and changes are addressed along the way. As such, last-minute, large-scale revisions become unnecessary.