Jen Nikolaeva

Developing a course or training programme can seem challenging, especially without a clear plan. Whether you’re part of an L&D team, in HR, a company trainer, or an expert, when tasked with creating training, you’ll need a step-by-step guide to get started straight away. E-learning is one of the most convenient forms of training today, and this guide provides all the essential steps to keep close at hand.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines e-learning as learning conducted via electronic media, typically on the Internet. Any online course that you encounter is one. It has become popular to implement e-learning in any training — from schools to universities, from work environments to hobbies. People love sharing knowledge and learning new things.

E-learning can have different formats — online webinars and pre-recorded videos, a Coursera course, reading materials, audios and podcasts, and many more. Anyone can create a course, but the challenge here is to create an engaging, high quality course that actually helps your learners achieve learning goals.

A good course will have goals and outcomes and actually guide the student from point A (where the person doesn’t know anything) to point B (where the person knows how to do certain things). That’s why online course development is a task that requires careful planning and implementation. Let’s take a closer look at the guide for high quality e-learning.

The first important step is understanding why you need an online course. Ask yourself: 'What am I trying to achieve?' Set clear goals and outcomes, and consider if e-learning is the best solution to get you there. If there are other tools that can solve your problem better, there’s no need for e-learning.

Since we’ve come to a conclusion (if you’re reading this part, I believe we have) that we need an online course, our next step would be preparation for the development itself.

The start of the e-learning development process consists of the following:

While developing content for the course, we need to understand who we are developing it for. Who’s our target audience? Kids, teens, adults? If adults, what is their approximate age and what are they looking for in a course? What skills do they need? What format is the most suitable for them? You might want to conduct surveys or interviews with your potential students.

If the course is going to be commercial, we’ll need to research our competitors. This will simply give us insights about the market, formats, prices, duration, and approaches. Take a look at what you find and decide what suits your case best. This step is optional for corporate learning, since internal courses are not usually shared, and the goal of the course is not about monetisation.

Before diving into content development, we should set learning goals and outcomes for our e-learning. What will be the result of our training? What skills and/or competencies will our learners gain?

You will need certain resources to bring the course to life. Whether you’re developing a course for a big corporation, or just for yourself, you need to take into consideration that you might need to pay your experts and other team members and purchase an LMS (Learning Management System) or other tools.

Now that we know who our course is for, what their learning needs are, and how our course will differentiate from (or be similar to) those on the market, we can start planning our content development.

Our next plan will have the following steps:

Let’s dive into each one.

Depending on the size of your project, you will need to put together a team of SMEs (Subject Matter Experts), instructional designers (or learning experience designers), editors, graphic designers, testers, etc. Big commercial projects need a more advanced team. The smallest team can be just yourself if you are the SME and know how to put together a course (and this guide is here to help you!).

A framework is an approach to designing, creating and delivering course content.
A methodology is the way you design the course content so that you achieve learning goals and outcomes.

Let’s take a look at the most popular ones.

ADDIE stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation.

Depending on the complexity of the project and its goals, this workflow can change and that’s okay.

For example, let’s imagine you launch a course on customer service.

This instructional design approach is meant to change the learner’s behaviour. First of all, you plan out learning outcomes that the course needs to achieve, then choose tools that help you create and assess such learning outcomes, and then design the programme. This methodology got this name for planning from the end to the beginning.

You can use Bloom’s Taxonomy (a learning objectives classification model) to help you out here.

Define what level of each competency or skill your learners need to achieve by the end of the course.

The breakdown of levels from lowest to highest goes like this:

• Remembering (define, list, identify);
• Understanding (summarise, describe, explain);
• Applying (use, demonstrate, execute);
• Analysing (compare, organise);
• Evaluating (support, justify, critique);
• Creating (design, construct, invent).

For example, for our customer service course, we might have the following:

• Describe the impact of effective conflict resolution on customer satisfaction;
• Analyse past customer interactions to identify patterns in customer complaints and conflict triggers;
• Design a conflict resolution plan for a specific type of customer personality;
• Develop a troubleshooting checklist for common technical issues.

It stands for Four-Component Instructional Design. It is used for teaching complex skills, by breaking them down into measurable parts. The four components are:

Create an outline of the course and plan out when each step will be carried out. This will help you structure your workflow and have an understanding of when the course can be launched.

To launch your course, you need a place to put it. An LMS is a tool that helps you deliver your course content in chunks, set deadlines, save progress, analyse student behaviour, assign roles within the platform, etc.

Shoot for the LMS that has a mobile version — your learners will be able to access the courses from anywhere and anytime, adaptive learning paths — so you can adapt certain content to your learners' skills and knowledge, and transparent analytics. For example, Seturon has all these features and you can book a demo to take a closer look.

This is the fun part — the creation itself!

• Start creating content according to your plan.
• Keep in mind the goals you’ve set for the whole training and stick to them throughout the process.
• Upload the content to the LMS and structure the materials.
• Set schedules (if your course is supposed to have them), deadlines, videos and pictures, etc.
• Don’t forget to include feedback forms or surveys to have insights into how your course is perceived by the learners.

Enrol your students into the platform and assign them the needed courses. Track their progress and analyse their learning behaviour.

Gather feedback from the surveys and forms you’ve put into your course. Analyse it and plan the course refactoring accordingly to improve it.

Well done! Now you know how the e-learning course development works and how to create your own online course. In case you need assistance in your course creation, our Seturon team of Learning and Development professionals can create a course tailored specifically for your needs if you’re a business, blogger, or an expert.