Some useful notes on good Instructional Design principles for E-Learning.
- Each course is divided into individual lessons. This ensures that the student is not overwhelmed with the material. In these fast-paced times, students often want to learn the material during breaks between other tasks
- Each course has 5 to 15 lessons and is no longer than 100 pages total. E-learning courses are often broken into a number of small modules that a student can access in a random sequence. Whether you take this approach or not depends on the material and your requirements. If you are providing training for some kind of certification, you cannot give the student the flexibility to choose the material and the sequence. If you are providing refresher material, small modules can work well.
- A course Web page has a maximum of 200 words. Too much text on a single page can be tedious. It makes the course seem more like a textbook than an online experience. Short pages that do not need to be scrolled are ideal, allowing students to absorb the material at once. But often not all of the material will fit on one screen. Don?t be so concerned about a student scrolling a page that you artificially divide the material into chunks that are too small.
- A course Web page has a minimum of 20 words. Too little text doesn?t convey information. Many online courses use slides with bullet points and talking heads?not very effective for conveying information as I explain in the section on interactivity.
- Each page shows the current page number and the total number of pages in the course. With page numbers and a total number of pages, students are working toward a goal. Many students are professionals with tight deadlines and need to know how much further they have to go. Without these numbers, students can feel as though they are traveling down a long, dark tunnel with no light at the end.
- Each course has one introductory page that includes a short abstract of the course, the objectives of the course, a list of lesson titles and a picture and short biography of the instructor (including a video welcome message). This lets the student know what to expect from the course. It also informs the student about the qualifications of the subject-matter expert who created and is presenting the materials.
- Each lesson starts with a description of the points that will be covered in the lesson. This well-known aspect of presenting materials gives the student a perspective about the lesson before it begins. It can give a comforting feeling that questions that arise in one part of the lesson will be answered in a later part.
- For long or complex lessons, a summary page is included at the end that describes the main points. A summary ties up the information neatly and reinforces it. For short lessons, a summary may not be necessary and may seem redundant.
- Each page includes a link to a help page describing the course navigation buttons. Make certain that the students can get even basic help from every page in the course.
- Each course includes a glossary containing definitions for all subject-specific terms used. Technical terms throughout the course can be linked to a glossary pop-up page. This useful tool allows students to instantly refresh their memories about terms or facts without interrupting the flow of the course. [not convinced - alt text or acronym tags can be used]
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