Understanding how the mind processes information and stores it is vital to educators, instructional designers and eLearning professionals. Simply stated, if you don’t know how the mind works, you have no way of knowing how to design material that will ensure success for your students. Information processing theory is a subject that has been studied, discussed and debated so much that a lot of the information available conflicts. However, there are a few basic principles that are generally agreed upon. So, how do people learn? Essentially, it works in four main stages, and five thought control processes. The four stages are motivation, comprehension, practice and application. The thought control processes are attention, encoding, rehearsal, retrieval and metacognition. When you’re creating instructional materials, you need to keep the stages and thought control processes in mind in order to best facilitate learning.

INTRODUCTION: You may be an eLearning professional, but the subject matter expert or the SME actually flags off your course by providing the all-important content for you and your team to sculpt on. The SME may be a software programmer or a marketing analyst in your company, a professor, doctor, or a best-selling author who has penned books of encyclopedic proportions on the course matter. Whoever may be the SME, it is likely he is not your cubicle mate. You will probably get just a few opportunities to glean relevant content from him. So take the smart route to make the most of an SME interview. Here we will review the key steps you can take before and during, the interview to maximize its effectiveness.

Most likely you have seen the movie Terminator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you haven’t, chances are you know what it is about. Whether you love or hate 80’s science fiction, if you develop eLearning courses this movie has something for you. The secret is in how the story is built.   To clearly understand the narrative structure of the story behind the scenes, here is a brief description of the movies’ plot:

La comunicación efectiva es todo un tema a la hora de hablar de eLearning.  En realidad es más difícil de aplicar de lo que se piensa y resulta ser sumamente importante; ya que los cursos eLearning bien diseñados no tienen ningún valor si no pueden comunicar de manera efectiva los contenidos de aprendizaje. Un diseño optimizado, bien pensado y efectivo tiene el poder de motivar a los estudiantes e impulsar el rendimiento de los mismos. Si usted es serio en la creación de cursos de eLearning, es esencial que siga estas cuatro recomendaciones para enviar el mensaje correcto a sus alumnos.

Usability applies to any user interface, from a door handle to an airplane cockpit - or an eLearning course. It means, simply, how easy it is for users to get what they need out of the device. How usable your eLearning course is, is one of the most important factors that make or break your entire program. Usability is so  critical in eLearning because every minute students spend learning to use the software is a minute out of their time spent learning the content. If you are in the middle or just starting an eLearning course, before you go any further, ask yourself if you have covered the 5 E's of usability .Use these as guidelines or standars to make sure your course is as usable as you can make it.  

Recently, we found some powerful words by Carrie Cousins which made us think on how they apply to eLearning: "Design for readability or don’t bother using text at all. If you want your content to be effective, it must be readable."  As a learning professional, your responsibility is not just to deliver eLearning content to your students - it’s to make sure that it’s engaging and readable. What that means, is that you’re going to have to learn about design, especially typography. At its essence, eLearning is mostly about reading, and if what you’re offering is visually confusing or hard to read, your then your material simply fails to deliver. And since readability is an essential aspect of comprehension, it's necessary to consider the ease with which students can read the text.

eLearning courses are designed for the benefit of students and not to bombard them with irrelevant information. Relevant information is necessary, but if you exceed a human’s brain capacity to understand and retain all the information, then all the learning goes to waste. Designers often ask how they can improve the quality of their eLearning content and make them more engaging. What can they do? Stick to one of design's timeless rules: "keep it simple" .  Applying the principle of simplicity in eLearning means relaying information through the simplest means possible. Less information will always be more. When too much clutter vies for the learner's attention, the learner may not see the forest for the trees. They end up thinking the course isn't worth so much effort, and the content gets lost.  Keeping it simple can be an art. So, let’s discuss some tips to improve the eLearning design and help learners get through the course as fast as possible. Make sure to use these as your goals for next year when you design a new course: 

Do you buy clothes online without looking at the photographs? What sounds more exciting—reading about a seaside town or actually walking through the streets of one while smelling the sea in the air? Why is your computer crammed full with photographs and videos of long-gone birthday parties and family picnics? That is because, we love images! Images talk to us, move us, make us remember, and inspire us in ways that words hardly can. We also happen to learn better through images than with text.  The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times quicker than text!

Bad Stock Photos Make for Bad eLearning How often have you gone to a website, looked at the photos, and said "Oh yeah, there are the happy clapping people, and there’s the arrow going into the target, and there’s the thermometer showing sales figures, and… yawn." Probably more times than you could count. Does that really make you want to read the content? Does it do anything to enhance the information that’s there? Of course it doesn’t. And the same things that are beyond boring and beyond overdone on various websites are going to be equally as un-engaging if you use them on your eLearning course. The dilemma with stock photos is that cheesy-to-the-maximum, cliché, exaggerated, awkward and fake photos do not connect with an audience of learners. You have to make images speak to your learners. Images need to say the 1,000 words you actually want them to. The ideal case is that you take your own photos, but we know that not everyone has the budget, time or available resources, so if you must use stock photography, make sure it’s relevant, not hideously overused and think creatively about choosing and editing them in unique ways.

eLearning and Learner Engagement: What is learner engagement? It’s not just about keeping your students busy. It’s keeping your students motivated, giving them the tools that they need to learn, and fostering a sense of pride in achieving personal goals. It’s about encouraging learning for the pure love of it, not just for the sake of getting grades. When learners are working hard to absorb the material the course offers, and they’re committed to learning that comes without reward other than the learning itself, then they’re engaged. Engagement requires an emotional connection between the content and the learner. And the only way we can do that is by knowing what drives people to spend time, effort, and energy learning your content. This post will help you understand this thoroughly and even learn how to apply it to your eLearning.