All We Want for Christmas

Here are our top 5 wishes for successful e-learning courseware.

1. We wish everyone would make training relevant for the learner. A learner should know from the start that the course will be meaningful to her everyday work life and will provide her with information and skills to help her do her job better. Courses should be designed around exercises and assessments that are centered on job-related issues or scenarios.

2. We wish everyone would use active voice, a conversational tone and the second person to help learners connect to the learning experience. Formal language that uses passive voice is a barrier to learning that can distract even the most attentive e-learner.

3. We wish everyone would keep it short. E-learning benefits from being concise and focused. This applies to language use as well as course structures. Short courses, or short modules within a course, help keep learner attention. It's also easier for learners to commit to taking a series of 15-minute courses as part of a busy work schedule rather than a single two-hour course.

4. We wish everyone would make e-learning accessible from wherever their learners work, and use e-learning to solve job-related problems. Taking a training course is great, unless three months goes by before you actually have to carry out a task. Providing access to the e-learning program allows learners to review steps in a process, for instance, right at the time they need to know this information. That's when learning has its greatest effect.

5. We wish everyone would support their learners. Provide resources to help them troubleshoot any technical problems. Provide them with access to topic experts if they feel they need to learn more. Provide them with resources they can take away from the course, to help them when they return to their job.