How Dissecting E-Learning Courses Will Improve Your Design Skills

Why deconstructing great courses makes you a better e-learning designer

You don’t get better at e-learning by watching tutorials. You get better by picking apart courses you admire and trying to replicate what you see. That one habit builds more skill than almost anything else.

What you actually learn by deconstructing a course

Pick a course you find interesting. Try to rebuild one section of it in your own authoring tool. You’ll run into problems. That’s the point.

As you work through those problems, you learn specific production techniques. You figure out how to replicate a particular interaction. You discover that something you thought required custom code can be done in a different way. You build vocabulary and instincts that you couldn’t get from watching someone else do it.

Don’t limit yourself to e-learning courses. Ads, game interfaces, mobile apps, and interactive websites all offer techniques worth stealing. The best designers borrow from everywhere.

When you start deconstructing courses, a few production patterns will emerge. I try to find those techniques that are persistent and fine tune how I would use them over and over. I also look at ways I can create a template from something I’ve deconstructed so I can use it again.

Also, look for things that look good and try to replicate those. Everything visual in your course, fonts, color scheme, spacing, tone, contributes to how the course feels before anyone reads a word. A clean layout with white space feels different than a dense dark screen. That impression is yours to set.

Key takeaways

Pick one course (or other example) you’ve seen recently that did something you didn’t know how to do. Download it or screencapture it, and spend an hour trying to reverse-engineer one section. You don’t have to finish it. The point is the problem-solving.