Everything You Need to Know to Craft the Perfect eLearning Strategy

An eLearning strategy is a business’s plan for building and delivering content for user education. Every eLearning strategy is unique to the business that develops and implements it. The best eLearning strategy for you might be entirely different from the best strategy for another business in the same industry — it depends on your business’s specific situation and goals for the future. However, the importance of an effective eLearning strategy and the recommended steps to create one remain mostly the same from case to case.

Typically, successful eLearning strategies begin by identifying a need and articulating a goal to address it. The most effective strategies are focused on a clear desired outcome or set of outcomes. You can begin to define a goal for your eLearning strategy by asking yourself a few important questions:

• How do you want your strategy to affect your business? For example, do you want to reduce employee turnover or improve sales numbers?
• How do you want your strategy to affect your users? Your eLearning strategy could be designed with several different groups in mind. For example, do you want to reduce time to value for customers or reduce support tickets submitted by gig workers?

eLearning strategies also outline how businesses will design, build and deliver learning content.

• What topics will your eLearning courses cover? Specifically, what kinds of skills or knowledge do the material need to impart to meet the strategy’s goals?
• What kinds of resources will you make available to learners to help them gain the needed skills or knowledge?
• What kinds of tools will you use to deliver resources to your online learners?

Questions like these can help guide you as you formulate your eLearning strategy. Let’s dig a little deeper into the impact eLearning can have on your business. We’ll also share some tips for improving your eLearning strategy and engaging online learners. Finally, we’ll look at a few eLearning examples and use cases to help you come up with ideas for your eLearning courses. 

eLearning Advantages And Disadvantages

Creating an effective eLearning strategy can be challenging. How do you know it’s even worth the effort? Here are some examples of common eLearning advantages and disadvantages to help you weigh the value of eLearning at your organization:

Better Performance

You can use online learning software to give your employees access to training content through an eLearning portal. Your employees are more likely to benefit from the information when it’s available to them at their point of need. Information the employee learned in a seminar they attended weeks ago is unlikely to be remembered when it matters — but eLearning gives employees continuous access to the resources they need to be successful.

Operational Improvements

eLearning can directly benefit operations at your business in several ways. For example, an efficient eLearning strategy can help decrease onboarding time for new hires and reduce their time to productivity.

Customer Retention

eLearning can also improve an organization’s customer retention. Your eLearning strategy is responsible for educating customers about fundamental aspects of your organization’s products or services. When customers have an efficient method of learning about your products or services, time to value decreases. Lower time to value means customers will realize the benefits of your product or service quickly and be less likely to churn.

Cost Reduction

When your users understand how your product works, they can become self-sufficient. Users with very little knowledge of your products will likely need help frequently with even minor problems. Giving your users access to ample eLearning resources can greatly reduce the volume of incoming support tickets, which translates to lower support costs.

Disadvantages

There are very few disadvantages to eLearning, but some of the most common complaints are the heavy reliance on self-motivation and lack of social elements within the learning experience. One possible solution is to use dedicated learning management software that’s designed to tackle challenges like these.

Effective Online Learning

One of the greatest challenges associated with creating effective online learning experiences is keeping learners engaged. The best eLearning interactions don’t just give the learner a list of information to memorize or a slideshow presentation to watch. Instead, they give the learner an engaging experience that helps them absorb and retain the information. 

Creating engaging eLearning experiences is not easy. There are many examples of poor eLearning implementations that have failed to engage learners. Here are a few tips for creating effective eLearning courses that successfully engage your users:

Keep Course Lengths Short

The courses you create for your eLearning strategy should be short and sweet. One of the best parts about online learning is that it’s self-paced, so you should give your learners the freedom to complete courses in short chunks. Plus, users typically have an easier time digesting information when it’s presented one step at a time rather than all at once.

Create Milestones

Place milestones throughout the learner’s journey to motivate them. You want your users to feel like they’re making tangible progress as they complete courses. For example, you can break up courses with short quizzes at the end of each section to give learners a sense of closure and accomplishment each time they master a new skill or topic.

Personalize

One of the top reasons users struggle to engage with learning content is that they don’t feel like the content is relevant to them. You can use high-quality learning management software to personalize the learning experience for each learner to ensure it’s relevant and engaging.

Use Multimedia Content

Mixing media is a great way to improve engagement. If you only use one kind of content, your learners are most likely going to lose interest quickly. For example, if they’re expected to read long blocks of text over and over again, or look at diagram after diagram, they’ll probably get bored fast. You can keep their attention by varying the medium you use to present your content.

How To Make Online Training More Engaging

It can be challenging to learn how to create engaging training material. eLearning content has to be built with user engagement in mind in order to be successful. Here are a few more tips for how to make online training more engaging:

Make It Interactive

Most people learn more effectively when you give them a way to actively apply their learning information. Instead of simply presenting information to your users, incorporate chances for them to practice what they’re learning with interactive examples or training modules that mirror real work scenarios.

Gamify It

Using gamification to tap into your learners’ competitive natures is another way to drive engagement. You can use learning management software with gamification features to set up your training to award points to learners as they progress through the content. This encourages learners to consume content in bite-sized pieces and motivates them to keep progressing.

Add an Instructor

Even though eLearning is self-paced and does not typically include an instructor, that doesn’t mean you can’t offer users additional help in some scenarios. Some businesses use blended learning to combine the flexibility of an online environment with the engagement of a live instructor.

eLearning Topics

Elearning topics can be the same as any other kind of user training topic. You can use an eLearning strategy to build courses for many different purposes and audiences. Here are some examples of a few of the most common use cases for eLearning courses:

• Gig workforce training - The gig workforce is a rapidly growing part of the economy. Flexibility is important for gig workers who work variable schedules by nature. Self-paced eLearning courses are a great way to deliver consistent training opportunities to gig workers.

• Customer education - eLearning is one of the most effective, scalable, and accessible ways for a business to deliver learning content to its customers.

• Employee training - Employees can also benefit from an eLearning strategy. Just as with customers, eLearning is an effective way to deliver relevant training content to employees in an accessible and convenient manner.

• Real estate Agent training - Real estate agents are another group that can benefit from eLearning. Real estate agents typically work unusual schedules and are constantly on the go, so it’s especially important for them to have on-demand access to online learning resources.

• Partner training - If your business works with a network of partners, you probably know it can be challenging to keep everyone on the same page. You can use a dedicated eLearning platform to provide a central location where partners can access accurate and consistent information about your brand.

eLearning Courses

If you’re looking for eLearning ideas, here are some examples of different kinds of eLearning courses to help you out:

Onboarding

eLearning courses are perfect for onboarding new employees or customers. For example, Slack has a great “resources” section that makes it easy for new users to familiarize themselves quickly with the platform.

Product Training

Online courses are also great for breaking down complex topics and simplifying them. If your organization sells a particularly complicated product or service, eLearning courses can help demystify it for inexperienced users.

Certifications

You can also use eLearning courses to help your users earn certifications. Offering certification courses is a great way to boost learner engagement because the learner gets something tangible out of the course. Certifications also provide a single source of truth in which learners can feel confident.