Instructional Design Basics for E-Learning Development

If you’re a newcomer to the field of e-learning or instructional design (ID), you might feel overwhelmed by the amount of information available online regarding the various ID models and all the different learning theories. Where to start?

First, it’s a good idea to understand exactly what instructional design is. In simple terms, it’s the practice of making learning experiences effective, interesting, and engaging for a learner. Anyone can create an e-learning project, but a skilled instructional designer will build e-learning that meets the learning objectives and needs of the audience.

You’ll be happy to know that there are some basic guiding principles of ID that can provide a good starting point for your first e-learning project, and can help you make your training more meaningful for your learners. In fact, even if you’re an experienced pro, you can apply these instructional design basics to tighten up your course.

Know Your Audience

Analysis is a big part of the instructional design discipline. You might analyze a variety of factors—but always make sure one of them is your audience. You need to know exactly who you’re designing your training for in order to develop a successful e-learning program.

Ask yourself, and your client: 

• Who are your learners and what are their needs? 
• Are they computer-savvy or completely nontechnical? 
• How much do they already know about the topic at hand? 

Knowing who your learners are and where they are coming from will help you decide how to develop content that best meets their needs. For more specific tips on how to do an e-learning audience analysis, check out this article: How to Do an E-Learning Audience Analysis.

Separate “Need to Know” from “Nice to Know”

Another key ID task is to distinguish need-to-know information from nice-to-know information. You should omit superfluous information that doesn’t help learners do their jobs or tasks.

When you’re deciding what information to include in your course, ask yourself:

• Is this critical?
• Will the learners ever need to know this to do their job? 
• If they don’t know this, what would be the impact? 

If the information falls into the nice-to-know category, leave it out. For example, if you’re designing an e-learning course on how to reply to a vendor e-mail, you don’t need to include a huge section on the background of your organization and its employees, or the history of e-mail. Just stick to teaching learners what they need to know to write effective vendor emails.

Still struggling to decide what to include? Head on over to this article for more tips: The Dos and Don’ts of Separating Need-to-Know from Nice-to-Know.

Follow a Basic Course Structure

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to designing your e-learning projects. To simplify the process for you, we’ve included a basic framework for e-learning courses:

1. Welcome: Welcome your learners to the course
2. Instructions: Explain how they will navigate the course, which buttons they need to click, etc.
3. Introduction: Tell learners why they are taking the course, and what benefits they’ll receive by completing it.
4. Objectives: Outline the specific course objectives, so learners have a good sense of what’s ahead.
5. Content: Build your main course content here. Depending on the length, you might chunk it into lessons, each with its own intro, content, assessment, and summary.
6. Assessment: Give learners an assessment to see whether they’ve actually learned the material.
7. Summary: Revisit the course objectives you stated up front.
8. Resources: Offer additional content or resources that reinforce the course material.
9. Exit: Give final instructions on how to exit the e-learning course.

Most e-learning courses follow this general flow. Keep in mind, this flow doesn’t prevent you from building decision-making scenarios that branch learners to specific content based on what they know; you’ll just do that within the content section. If this all feels a little nebulous, pop on over to this article to see some concrete examples: Basic Elements of an E-Learning Course.

More Resources

If you follow these simple tips, you’ll be on your way to designing stellar courses right from the start. But if you want to dig deeper and learn more about ID practices, check out these great resources:

• An Introduction to Instructional Design
• 4 Easy Ways to Organize Content for E-Learning
• What to Do When Your Course Has Too Much Content
• Top 3 Types of E-Learning Analysis

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