Three Ways to Guarantee Your E-Learning Fails

E-learning is an important part of training employees. Some organizations use it exclusively and some blend it with other learning activities. There are a lot of things you can do to create successful elearning, but here are some guaranteed ways to make sure that you don’t succeed and waste a lot of time and money in the process.

Three habits that guarantee your courses miss the mark.

Build courses that are irrelevant to your learner

One of the most common complaints I hear: “the course has nothing to do with me.”

Learners say this all the time, and they’re usually right. The course designer skipped a key question: what does this person actually need to do after this course?

A few patterns make courses feel irrelevant:

• Blanket compliance training that doesn’t account for what individuals already know or do
• Content heavy on information with no practice or application built in
• Courses with no required action, leaving learners with nothing to apply

Skip that learner’s question and it’s easy to build an information dump that checks a box but doesn’t help anyone. Information is only part of learning. Real learning happens when someone can apply the content to their actual work.

Build courses that waste time

Before any project starts, I ask one question: is this an information course or a performance course? An information course certifies that someone has seen the content. A performance course changes what they actually do on the job.

Here’s where the mismatch causes the most waste:

• Building a complex, interactive scenario when all you need is a completion checkbox
• Building a plain information course when the real goal is to change behavior

The first case overbuilds a simple problem. The second underpowers a serious one. The key is knowing which type fits the situation before you start building, and that means understanding what the client actually expects out of it.

Build a course that looks like it was made in 20 minutes

Visual design matters more than people want to admit. A course that looks rough signals low quality before anyone reads a word. You don’t want your course to look like crap. 💩

But you can use the four basic principles, known by the acronym CRAP: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity.

These principles do a lot of work:

• Contrast makes key elements stand out so learners know where to look
• Repetition creates consistency across screens so the course feels cohesive
• Alignment connects elements visually and makes screens easier to read
• Proximity groups related content so learners understand what belongs together

Applying these principles won’t save a poorly designed course. But they’ll make a good course easier to follow and a mediocre one much more credible.

Key takeaways

Take these three problems into your next project review. Check whether your content ties to something learners actually do. Check whether the course type matches the real goal. Then run your screens through the CRAP test.