Why Your E-Learning Course Feels Boring

It’s not the content, it’s the design

We’ve all had to take courses that were boring. We also probably see many complaints them and how to get away from building boring courses.

The questions are what makes a course boring? And how do we remedy that?

I tend to think it’s less about the subject matter and more about it’s connection to the learner and the instructional design decisions made when building the course. That means you (we) are the source of boring e-learning courses.

What makes a course feel meaningless

I’ll start by saying that what we call a boring course is usually rooted in the fact that the course is mostly irrelevant to the learner. Or the relevance is buried in a lot of other meaningless content. A result of the classic tension between need-to-know and nice-to-know content.

There’s a real difference between content that’s dull and a course that feels irrelevant. Take compliance training. The subject matter isn’t inherently boring. But when it has no connection to what the learner actually does at work, it lands flat.

In a number of organizations I’ve taken ethics training that at some point referenced bribery. I’ve never been bribed and I don’t think I’ll ever be bribed, which makes the content completely irelevant. The content doesn’t stick. The information is there, but it has no context. Without context, there’s no meaning.

Similar situation. Every year I have to take some compliance training and within it is a section on insider-training. We’re not publicly traded. Why is this part of my training? I don’t know. Because it’s not relevant to what I do, it’s easy to tune out.

When objectives focus on information instead of action

Another reason courses feel boring is how learning objectives get framed. Many are built around delivering information rather than changing behavior or developing a skill. The learner gets screen after screen of facts. But there’s no clear sense of what to do differently when the course is over. Without some sort of call to action, the content becomes a chore to navigate.

Every course should connect back to a real action or decision. If someone can’t answer “how does this change what I do at work?” then the design needs more work.

How to build courses that feel relevant

Learning isn’t just consuming content. It’s processing that content and putting it to use. A course is one part of that process, not the whole thing.

Think about how people actually work. They handle situations, make decisions, and interact with others. Good course design mirrors that. Frame content in decision-making scenarios that reflect real-world decisions. That way learners aren’t just reading about a policy. They’re practicing how to apply it in context to their responsibilities.

Stop pushing information at the learner. Start putting them in situations where the information matters.

Key takeaways

Before you build your next course, ask what the learner will do differently because of it. Build your content around that answer. Relevance isn’t a nice-to-have feature. It’s the foundation that turns information into something learners actually use.