Mistakes to avoid while creating an online course for your team

Viren Kapadia October 12, 2020
Mistakes to avoid while creating an online course for your team

Having the right IT infrastructure for conducting training (such as a Learning Management System) certainly helps in easy scheduling of training and in ensuring a good learning experience for trainees. However, one key factor that ensures effective training is good training content. And while organizations may perfect their LMS at some point, ensuring that the training content is good enough is a new level of challenge altogether. An LMS such as GyrusAIM provides a variety of tools to design different kinds of training modules, but still, there are certain common mistakes that trainers make while creating the modules. The following are such common mistakes, which if avoided, can ensure that the training content is engaging and produces the right learning outcomes:

Creating overtly lengthy sessions/one big session for a topic

Most employees have a reducing attention span on account of several factors, most notably exposure to multiple sources generating heavy quantity of information. However, several trainers have the habit of dumping all the training content within a single module, ending up creating very large and lengthy modules. This has the risk of either overwhelming the trainee by the length of the module or causing him to lose attention or get bored during the session. Moreover, several trainees take their training modules over their smartphones or tablets while commuting or during lunch breaks. Long sessions would thus make it difficult to take them to take them at such times. Ideally, you would want to break the topic into multiple tutorial videos of around 10-15 minutes in length.

Not regularly updating the module content

One issue that often skips the attention of the trainers after creating training modules is to regularly review the content and update the same if necessary. This is often necessary for companies that operate within industry sectors that witness rapid changes in technology or regulatory framework.

Not exercising creativity while designing modules

Modern LMSs such as GyrusAIM offer a wide variety of tools for content creation. This allows trainers to create modules which can be structured and designed to suit the topic being covered. However, quite a few training content creators tend to be lazy and create vanilla training content which is not appealing or engaging enough for the end-users.

Focusing more on Design at the cost of UX

It is a no-brainer that a well-designed course tends to be visually attractive and appealing to the user. However, trying to create training modules with a complicated design can often end up making the user experience cumbersome. Therefore, it is important that module creators make a prudent use of various content design tools that LMSs offer.

By avoiding the aforementioned common mistakes, a trainer can maximize the possibility of creating module content that can ensure the desired learning outcomes. However, in practice, it is normal to not create optimally designed modules. Therefore, it is important to pay close attention to trainee feedback which can help in improvising on existing content. To enable this, using a feature-rich LMS such as GyrusAIM could prove to be highly beneficial.