Why We Need To Move Beyond Traditional eLearning

Traditional eLearning means those horrible PDFs, old text-heavy, boring stuff, dry information, etc. that are branded as eLearning courses. 

A lot of online course creators have probably come across it at some point as it provides an extremely dull experience to the learners and has awful stock imagery or even none at all. 

Today, we will learn the different reasons why traditional eLearning needs an overhaul to go through from being unbelievably boring.

Uninvolvement Of The Learners

A good and interactive eLearning courses help you in learning by involving, engaging and grabbing your attention throughout the courses. While a traditional eLearning course have nothing to offer and make your experience dull, boring and equally overwhelmed while taking eLearning courses. 

The difference is very similar as you can notice that a learner can easily understand and learn with the teachers whose attention is solely on the students. So try to make your eLearning courses interactive, engaging and full of fun to attract their attention.

Lack Of Evaluation

Many course creators still use traditional methods to create their online courses and take more time in completing their courses. They do not give attention towards evaluating the effectiveness and success of the online courses.

These traditional eLearning courses might not be able to successfully communicate few facts throughout the courses and the majority of information does not provide a long-lasting effects on the learners.

Poor Retention Rates

As an online course creator if you are still providing this type of traditional eLearning courses then you are lacking behind and failing to overcome a huge pitfall of the learning process. This creates a poor retention rate of your eLearning courses among the learners.

Traditional eLearning courses offer nothing but a boring and dull exercise, which once it is over and forgotten by the learners. This type of eLearning course will reduce your popularity and leads to downfall your online course market.

Unresponsive And Inflexible

Traditional eLearning courses are unresponsive and inflexible to the learners and nobody wants to be restricted in completing eLearning courses solely on a desktop or laptop.

Today we live in the digital world where everything is at our fingertips, and more learners are taking eLearning courses on-the-go to save their time and resources. So your eLearning courses need to be easily accessible anywhere on any device.

Non-interactive and Non-engaging

In an attempt to add some interactivity features to the eLearning courses some course providers only add “previous” and “next” buttons to their eLearning courses and then claim that their courses are interactive. But clicking through pages of text makes your learners tedious and boring very quickly.  

Now-a-days learners are more prone to be distracted by their phones. So try to make your eLearning courses engaging and interactive. This will keep your learners on their toes and will also stop them from becoming easily distracted.

Conclusion 

Not all eLearning courses is equal and we all need to stop creating traditional eLearning courses because this type of approach doesn’t work anymore in the fast phase of technology. You should create an eLearning course that has genuine meaning, easily accessible and should engage the learners.

Tips For Better Online Course Management

If you are an online course creator and unable to manage your online courses. 

To effectively manage your online courses, you must choose your battles. 

Your time is limited, so invest your actions that will pay off. This means to reduce the time you put into low-value work, and increase the time that you put into high-value work. 

Today, we will the different ways through which you can manage your online courses as well as accomplish better completion rates for your online courses.

Use A Learning Management System

Using a suitable LMS will help you in completing your online courses quickly. LMS like WPLMS provides drag and drop features in which you have to drag your course content and videos and your website is ready. Using an LMS will give learners immediate feedback, automatic grading and provides multiple-choice quizzes and other gamification factors by reducing your time.

Instead of trying to monitor how your learners are progressing through your course, choose an automation system like WPLMS which can track the progress of every student. It also sends them reminders if they did not sign up for taking the courses and only notifies you when it requires your attention.

Encourage Learners To Help Each Other

You should try to encourage your students to work together and create a learning environment for them. Build a community where students can support, motivate, ask questions and encourage each other when they struggle with the course materials.

You should also allow yourself to take part in this because it will encourage students as well. Participating in your forum or community discussions will save your time in solving the queries of the students and will save the energy and the effort.

Use Your Course Contents For Marketing

Creating content for your online courses takes a lot of time. Many online course creators feel that they have very less time to create an extra content for marketing purposes. Most of your course content can be used in online marketing and if have videos in your courses then you have created enough material to market your new course. 

you can take some videos and course content to share on social media, or repackage the first lesson as a downloadable PDF to attract more learners toward your courses.

Define Short-Term Goals For Your Courses

There should be always a long-term goal to keep us going but defining short-term goals can help in completing your courses quickly. It will also help you in assessing both the daily tasks and the order in which you need to complete your online courses. 

Short-term objectives are like the building blocks that will help you in  recognizing any kind of obstacles that comes in your way while completing your online courses.

Create A Help Section For your Courses

After finishing your online course, the students will try to reach to you for the questions and queries related to your course and this will consume your time and you will not be able to complete your next online course on time. 

So to deal with the learners when they need help with the course, create a help section for your course from where students can find information on their own. Create a syllabus with the most important course information, and post it in the help section after finishing your course so that students can find it.

Conclusion 

As per my views, these tips will surely help you in managing your online courses. The more you will manage your online courses, the faster you can achieve the completion rate of your online courses. This will not only cut down your stress but will also help you in bringing in more students.

Five Ways To Interact With Your Students

Online course creators provide affordable and better courses and the learning experience of their students.

But, many online course creators are worried about not being able to interact with their students properly.

Today, we will learn about the 5 ways that will help you in interacting with your students.

Live Stream On Social Sites

There are many social networking sites like YouTube and Facebook Live which you can use to connect with your students. Using live streams on these social sites will help you in interacting with your students better and will also make them feel like they are part of something that is happening right now.

Be sure to publicize your live streaming event in advance so that more students can join or connect with your event. During the live streaming, you and your students can leave comments and discuss on the different queries and questions that will help you in presenting your course better to the students.

Live Webinars

Hosting live webinars regularly will help you in interacting with your students and gives you a chance to come close to your students as in a traditional classroom of an educational institutes. During live webinar students can see the slides presented by you and also hear the lecture that is given by you. A student can also participate in your webinar using text chat or voice chat. This will create a feeling of support and will enhance their learning experience to succeed in their online learning.

Building a Facebook Community 

Building a Facebook community is a great way to interact with your students. Many online course creators are using Facebook groups to connect with students and are gaining huge benefits from it. Participate in the Facebook community by reviewing their queries, replying to their comments, answering their questions and encourage them to share their thoughts and experiences. This will help you in providing a better learning experience to the students.

In a Facebook community, students can share questions, articles, contents and other resources related to the course which can help other students to clear their doubts and confusion. Click here to know more about the benefits of building a Facebook community here.

Creating Chat Rooms And Channels

There are many chat platforms like- Facebook, Slack, and Discord, etc. you can easily create chat rooms and channels on these platforms for your online courses through which you can interact with your students in real-time. You can also use these channels for off-topic discussions which will help you in keeping focused on your courses and its content.

It’s a good idea to use both the Facebook community for the chat rooms and other platforms as a channel so that you can interact with every student which suits their individual preferences.

Hosting Events And Workshops

Hosting events and workshops in the real world by selecting a particular place or venue is the best way to interact with your students. This will help you in marketing your online courses and make your courses popular among the students. 

To make your events and workshops Successful choose a suitable venue where a large number of students can join. You can also host your events in multiple cities to attract more learners toward your courses.

Conclusion 

As per my views, whenever you create a course and want to interact with your students you can follow these five easiest ways to interact with your students.  These five ways will help you in marketing your online courses as well as make your courses popular among the students.

VIRTUAL REALITY IN EDUCATION

Virtual Reality is implemented by a combination of technologies that are used in order to visualize and provide interaction with a virtual environment. These environments often depict three-dimensional space which may be realistic or imaginary. A key feature of VR is that it allows multi-sensory interactions and the space being visualized.  Here we look at how this combination of multi-sensory visualization and interactivity make VR ideally suited for effective learning. 

Virtual Reality or VR allows a user to interact with a computer generated three-dimensional model or virtual environment.This may be realistic or imaginary.Virtual reality is a technology that replaces sensory input derived from the real world with sensory input created by computer simulation.

Various Benefits Of Using Virtual Reality In Education

1. VR can stop classroom smartphone distraction :

According to the study, results of which were published in the Journal of Medical Education, students spent a fifth of their time in the classroom using their mobile devices for the activities not relevant to their school work.

The research findings showed that the students checked their smartphones 11.43 times on average during their lessons. If these smartphones were used for VR technology, the problem could potentially be solved. They would not be able to waste their time on smartphones because they would use their devices to engage with VR software. 

2.  Eliminates Language Barriers :

Language differences can be challenging in today’s multicultural societies. If students want to study in a foreign country, they need to achieve fluency in a foreign language to be able to understand the material if they are taught in that particular language. With virtual reality, language translation can be built into the software and there will be no language barrier that can prevent students from achieving their educational goals. 

3. Outstanding Visualizations :

Computer generated Reality recordings enable understudies to investigate various substances and have an elective learning background that is outlandish in the conventional study hall. Wearing a VR headset, understudies can encounter high caliber instructive representations that positively affect the entire learning process. VR can help understudies effectively comprehend complex ideas, speculations, and subjects. They can hold complex data at a lot higher rate.

An average person can remember only 20% of information that they hear and 30% of information if they see it. But if they get this information through personal experience, they remember up to 90% of it. VR technology creates an immersive experience that helps students learn effectively. 

4. Social Integration of Students :

Understudies accomplish better outcomes in a positive learning condition when they can interface with their friends. Computer generated Reality can improve social reconciliation of understudies with various adapting needs and styles. 

Understudies who ordinarily attempted to turn into a piece of a gathering were acknowledged by their friends since they had solid innovation abilities. These are the discoveries of Dr. Connor Galvin who assessed a computer-generated reality learning program that included 20 schools. This innovation can guarantee positive results for youngsters encountering issues at home, with learning challenges.

Conclution

Schools are utilising the gadgets in an assortment of ways – from enabling medicinal understudies to encounter modern experimentation without costly hardware to letting confirmations prospects visit school offices essentially. 

Others are investigating how the gadgets can be utilized to make “virtual stacks” in the library or take visits to anyplace on the planet to think about anything from workmanship to paleo-history. Specialists state the innovation is being conveyed in engineering programs, in human expressions, and in social insurance fields. Nursing, word related and non-intrusive treatment and veterinary innovation understudies at Stanbridge College utilize augmented reality gadgets to improve preparing in life systems, torment the executives and contamination.

As schools explore different avenues regarding their utilization of VR, they additionally shift in the coordination of how they furnish understudies with these encounters. The Internet study demonstrates that 55 percent of establishments have a committed VR space, 51 percent have a portable or impromptu space, 38 percent let clients look at VR hardware and 26 percent utilize a versatile truck that can move from area to area.

Virtual reality may seem like emerging technology, but a recent Internet survey suggests that higher education institutions aren’t shying away from embracing a potentially transformative teaching tool.

HOW TO MAKE E-LEARNING CONTENT?

When we refer to eLearning content, we mean the entire process of creating and designing it.  To create an e-learning content we must keep in mind the major factor the audience for whom the whole content is being prepared. The main focus of any content based on e-learning is to get the project done in an effective manner.

There are a few steps that all e-learning content development process must undergo.

1. Analysis

It is usually the first step when it comes to the eLearning development process.  At this stage, we should be able to realize the learning content, profiles of the audiences we are targeting and the objectives of learning.  Once we take up the course, pay attention to the kind of tasks that are meant to be accomplished. Based on that information, a proper strategy is created to be able to come up with an excellent way of presenting the content.

2. Creating the Design

The design is a high-quality plan of the whole instructional approach of the course. Some of the most common procedures at this stage include solving problems and scenarios. In this stage, it is also decided how the content is broken down – whether it will be into courses, screens or even modules.  In a situation where several courses are supposed to be created, each course has to be created using a unique design strategy. In this stage, we should be done with all the visual instructional elements. Our web designers should be well-informed before they begin the job.

3. Scripting

In this stage, the content to be used for each course is finalized and divided into modules. Then the content to be used on each screen is decided. The document used for scripting is usually a word document, but sometimes powerpoint presentations also work fine.

4. Prototype Development

In this stage, we are presenting the whole course using a few slides.  the content on screen and audio are finalized. All decisions that are based on the presentation of the content on the screen, interactivities to be applied, colors, images, and animations(if required) are all finalized. During this stage, there is a lot of writing, rewriting that is taking place. The prototype should be working on the eLearning content management system.

5. Developing The Course Without Audio

In this stage, a practical course without audio is prepared. Then the changes are made to the content and narration if any. It is very costly to create an audio file and then recreates it without any iteration. Therefore, the audio developed has to be in sync with the text and pictures.

6. Developing the Course With Audio

The moment the audio script is finalized. The quality of the audio and pronunciation are essential and have to be perfect. The audio developed has to be in sync with onscreen text and animations. Timely placement of visuals and audio is very important for eLearning.

7. Creating The Learning Management System Version

The first 6 stages above are mainly creative. The final stage which is the creation of the Learning Management system Version is more mechanical and technical. Once it is approved, it is ready to be hosted on the learning platform.

The main reason why all the stages mentioned above are followed by the eLearning companies is that of the stakeholders. Since the Stakeholders are involved in all stages, the development team to proceed to the next stage.  At the end of the whole process, learners get a course that helps them get quality and learn easily.

Irrespective of the nature of the eLearning content, we should always ask how this is going to benefit the audiences. This is extremely crucial from the point of advertising. The audiences are less interested in what your courses contain, but are more interested in knowing how it can help them to improve their performance or help them to get better jobs. Therefore we as an eLearning content creator have to keep it in mind that we need to design them that can directly communicate the utilitarian value to the potential customers. The most important aspect of eLearning development is defining the right learning objective.