When it comes to eLearning, we talk about flexibility, ease, engagement, interactivity, etc. As technology has evolved over time, so has training from closed classroom training to eLearning which has brought a paradigm shift in the learning methods and experience. However, this shift has been so quick that our instructional designers are overwhelmed with the changes and have been continuously evolving.
The instructional designers have not only been coping with the technological enhancements required but the changes in the mindset of how’s and when’s of the training as well. On top of all this, they are required to adapt and evolve themselves to the multi-device world. The learner today has the whole world available in their palm, virtually.
While the how’s and when’s have changed, the what’s of the training still is dependent on the audience, context, job, etc. The training has been consumerized thus the instruction designers have to change and prioritize their approach and curate/design the programs that are customer-centric. The support that the instructional designers provide is by saving the learner from sifting through the ocean of knowledge present in the world of the internet and collate it to make it relevant to their needs. This has always been the basic role of instructional designers/trainers. The constant change that they have been successfully adapting to is technology and delivery platforms. How to cope with this change?
Evolve as learning architects
It has never been straightforward to design a course in any era of training. There are numerous steps that the trainers have to take before even starting to formulate the training program. It all starts with a training needs analysis. In today’s scenario, this analysis also includes how and when the course can be accessed.
As a learning architect, you can divide your course into different stages of the learner’s journey that can be segregated into “must know” and “good to know” modules and bites of information. Get in the shoes of the learner, exploit the technological aids and curate the course keeping the learner’s “must-know” requirements. Not to overlook and forget to include the strategies for multiple options of delivery on varied sizes of devices.
Evolve as Thinkers
Gone are the days when one strategy used to work for all the programs you launch. With the fast-paced changes and modern learner thinking, you are required to perform ongoing experiments with new approaches, strategies, and patterns. Various options will lead to different user experiences and might work differently for a different set of learners. Continuous involvement would require not only the mix and match of the strategies but requires innovative, thought-provoking ideas. Behaving as thinkers will help you evolve from the traditional textual context to developing more engaging content with the use of various multimedia options that can be accessed on all kinds of devices.
While keeping the broad objective in mind, and curating the content, the visual design and layout should be made keeping in mind the different kinds of devices your learners might use. Keeping it minimal, simple, crisp, concise, sober, is the most effective way of cutting out the fat to deliver the most relevant and effective course. Placement of the content and navigation options should be considered and designed in a manner that is effectively responsive on all the devices. This does not mean that the navigation should be similar for all the devices with differences in font size and button size. The alignment should be adaptive to the screen size of the learner.
Conclusion: An efficient learning management system, Blackbaud LMS, comes with the feature that can help you curate the training program that will respond efficiently aligning itself to the screen size of the device. Keeping the points mentioned above, you can easily thrive in the multi-device world of eLearning.
