E-learning design and development is a tricky business. Instructional designers often overestimate or, more commonly, underestimate the power of development tools. Worse, it seems as though a majority of e-learning offerings are comprised of boring, linear, PowerPoint-type lessons, in which learners are only allowed to hit the Next button.

Truth be told, every authoring tool has its weaknesses and limitations. I will not try to convince anyone that a typical authoring tool gives them the ability to change the orbital pattern of the international space station. However, I believe that the current state of the e-learning industry speaks not as much to the lack of imagination of instructional designers or limitations of the authoring tool, but to a lack of understanding of what is possible with the design tools at their disposal.

Next, please

If you have a Next button in your e-learning, you can bet your bottom dollar that the majority of the users (and I won’t use the term “learners” here because those users are not learning much) are simply hitting that Next button without reading all that text on the screen.

The typical scenario flows something like this: Next, please. Next, please. Next, please. Ah, here’s the quiz at the end. Let’s try it. Oops, we didn’t do so well. No matter, we can repeat the quiz any number of times until we pass it. Then our organization can smile upon me and all of my fellow torture victims because we all proved that the e-learning was effective. After all, we all completed it successfully, and we all passed the quiz! What better proof do you need?

Need for change

In my experience, poor e-learning design isn’t a result of budget and time constraints or even limitations of the authoring tool.  Other factors are at play.

In the best conditions, instructional designers would only be tasked with designing the interactions and scenarios they think best help learners. But in today’s world, the instructional designer is often asked to be the developer and coder, as well as the designer. That’s a bit like expecting an architect to also be a master carpenter and stonemason. Yes, some are able to do both equally well, but the majority of people cannot.

Therefore, it behooves instructional designers to learn the features that are available in the general development and authoring tool—not to mention, familiarize themselves with tools that may already exist within their organization. An understanding of those features will help them determine whether the tool can accommodate their instructional design plan—or even help them better create designs that take advantage of features of which they were not previously aware.

Then, instructional designers would be able to be creative in their approaches for engaging learners. Keep in mind: I didn’t say “entertain” them, but “engage” them. We could put learners in scenarios where they are challenged to make choices, even have them learn from wrong choices—just as we do in real life. Don’t make learners feel like failures for not getting the right answer immediately. Rather, let them know that they are winners for thinking through the process and correcting an erroneous path with something that works.

Learning the tools

I teach others how to create scenario-based learning using various authoring tools. I enjoy facilitating sessions that are all about tips for maximizing the use of tools. By so doing, I hope to inspire developers to look beyond the superficial and investigate further what a tool can do. It’s not enough to know what each feature in an authoring tool can do, designers need to know why a feature exists and how best to use it to aid learning.