Quick Tips to Improve Training Quality
Creating elearning can be both time-consuming and intense. To help make it a little easier, here are three tips that can have an outsized effect.
Link objectives to content.
If you use an objective-driven process (and you should), include a text reference to each objective when you write the content related to the objective’s topic.
How does this help? It ensures that the screen content is clearly related to an objective. (At Microassist, we do this with a short text description—such as “EO1 List the things”—in the notes section of our PowerPoint storyboard.) If a subject matter expert says, “We need to talk about X,” the response can be “Which objective should I link this to?” (If the answer is “none,” congratulations! Scope creep has been prevented.) As a bonus, if each knowledge check or exam question also includes a text reference to the objective, you’ve ensured that each question measures an objective and has content that addresses it.
Read the course out loud.
Before the course is finalized, read the text—screen content, narration, everything—out loud.
How does this help? How often have you seen a mistyped word that has the correct spelling for the wrong word (like “faulty” for “faculty”)? Or noticed that small words like “for” or “the” are missing? Or realized that when a verb was changed from plural to singular, the noun wasn’t changed? Reading things out loud forces the reader to slow down and helps highlight mistakes, making them more likely to be caught.
[Editor’s note: If you aim for style precision, you may enjoy “A Note on Details: Which versus What?” It asks whether elearning multiple choice questions should begin with “what option should you choose” or “which option should you choose”? Correct spelling is obviously important—do wording details like this really matter?]
Navigate the course with a keyboard.
See if a user can make it through the whole course, accessing all of the interactions and completing the knowledge checks and quizzes, using only the keyboard.
How does this help? Keyboard access is one of the most important factors when ensuring that a course is accessible to people with disabilities (for an in-depth exploration of what’s required for accessible online training, see our new Training Manager’s Guide to Accessible Elearning). Successful navigation with a keyboard means that people who can’t manipulate a mouse can complete the course—as can those who use a screen reader. As a bonus, it means that the course is easier to navigate for those who prefer to use a keyboard.
The creation of elearning is a complex and multifaceted process. These simple things can make the lift a lot easier and improve training quality.
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More on training quality and effectiveness
- Creativity within Constraints: When Cost, Resource Scarcity, or Deadlines Make Effective Elearning Seem Out of Reach — Budget limits. Deadlines. Legacy tools. They don’t have to mean sacrificing creativity, engagement, or effectiveness. An interaction catalog can help you develop effective elearning under constraints.
- 3 Essential Elements for Evaluating Training Effectiveness — Is your training working? How do you know? Here’s guidance on evaluating your workplace training and ensuring you’re meeting the business goals training was supposed to support.
- The Importance of Using Roles When Developing Learning — Want to provide consistently high-quality training? Here’s why using roles to organize your process is so important to developing learning.
This article was originally published in our July 2018 issue of our Learning Dispatch newsletter.
Photo of red arrow by Stephan Henning on Unsplash
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