If elearning is brand new to your organization or your audience has very little experience or confidence with technology, it can be valuable. However, after the first year or two of doing elearning, it's not necessary every time anymore.
With one of my clients, we have a link to a PDF instruction for how to navigate the course on the first page. The people who still aren't feeling confident can open that tip sheet and keep it open in another tab for reference while they take the course. Everyone else can just skip right to the content.
Sometimes the argument will be, "well, it doesn't hurt to have it there for review." The problem is, it does hurt learners who already know how to click next. They waste time going through the same explanation over and over in every course.
That's the first thing they see. Now you've set the expectation that your course will be a waste of time, regardless of how good your content is. Instead of engaging learners by immediately showing them something relevant, you're making them tune out. It makes it harder to get their attention again for the content.
Could you convince your boss to do a pilot with a single course without the introduction? If you get a bunch of technical support complaints, then you know the instruction was actually necessary. If no one complains, then you can probably safely take it out (or at least make it easy to skip).
If you have to include an instruction page don't force the learners to review it. You can do this in a number of ways:
Make instructions optional by adding two buttons on the first screen - one to go directly to the course and another to launch the navigation instructions.
Add a custom tab labelled Help to the player - that way users can access the instructions at any point in the course if needed.
I echo what Nancy said...always give the learner the option...95% of them are going to understand the basic navigation of any online course. Then again, the other 5% are typically going to call you before they select the help option...
4 Replies
If elearning is brand new to your organization or your audience has very little experience or confidence with technology, it can be valuable. However, after the first year or two of doing elearning, it's not necessary every time anymore.
With one of my clients, we have a link to a PDF instruction for how to navigate the course on the first page. The people who still aren't feeling confident can open that tip sheet and keep it open in another tab for reference while they take the course. Everyone else can just skip right to the content.
Sometimes the argument will be, "well, it doesn't hurt to have it there for review." The problem is, it does hurt learners who already know how to click next. They waste time going through the same explanation over and over in every course.
That's the first thing they see. Now you've set the expectation that your course will be a waste of time, regardless of how good your content is. Instead of engaging learners by immediately showing them something relevant, you're making them tune out. It makes it harder to get their attention again for the content.
Could you convince your boss to do a pilot with a single course without the introduction? If you get a bunch of technical support complaints, then you know the instruction was actually necessary. If no one complains, then you can probably safely take it out (or at least make it easy to skip).
If you have to include an instruction page don't force the learners to review it. You can do this in a number of ways:
I would also think that new hires might need the option to understand how to work through the eLearning as they may not have used it in the past.
I echo what Nancy said...always give the learner the option...95% of them are going to understand the basic navigation of any online course. Then again, the other 5% are typically going to call you before they select the help option...
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