3 Tips for Creating Memorable eLearning Content

Written by eLearning Partners and Andrea Maliska

When it comes to content, it’s not enough anymore to just make a video and release it and hope it will provide value. In today’s world, you need to make it memorable. And in the learning and development industry, you need to make it memorable and effective. You have to keep people engaged and they need to learn at the same time.

At eLearning Partners, we understand the importance of communication and how creating a personal connection with your audience makes for the best online learning content.

So we’ve put together a few tips for you to help you create memorable eLearning content.

Put a Story Behind Your eLearning Content

If you really want eLearning content to resonate, put a story behind it. Take a topic and tell a story around it. The goal of this is to teach your viewers a lesson in a way that’s not just another slide deck showing on the screen.

Take the time to draft a short, anecdotal story around a lesson that will grasp the viewer’s attention and keep them engaged. However, you don’t want the story to be too long; today’s viewers have shorter attention spans, so its best to keep the stories around three minutes or less for maximum impact.

Don’t be afraid to make videos for a series of eLearning topics. If you have the same characters, your story will remain consistent, and therefore, more memorable. Your goal when creating content should be to create content in a way that makes it easier to recall for the viewer. This recollection will make the concepts not only stick in the viewer’s mind but stick out in terms of being creative and one of a kind.

Think about those cheesy videos you might have seen while learning a language in school, or something like “The Magic School Bus.” Those examples are a perfect use of videos that are consistent, yet make an impact when it comes to learning.

Get Creative with Your eLearning Content

We are well past the days of slide decks to present materials. Take a stab at using other forms of content to share materials. Ask students to get creative and create something visual to demonstrate their knowledge of the topic.

This method can help push students out of their comfort zone and help them to express themselves in a way that writing can’t. And you might find that some students perform better by expressing themselves visually. If you are afraid of implementing it and seeing negative benefits from it, start small and try with a project or two on an easy to communicate lesson. If it proves successful, then implement it for larger, more complex projects.

Finding new ways to test knowledge is a simple way to implement adaptive learning into your program. It gives students a chance to learn at their own pace, as everyone doesn’t always learn by just reading and writing. It also gives the designers of a course the freedom and flexibility to try new methods of educational content to see what resonates well with students and what doesn’t.

Take a chance and give your students a project (or two) that involves doing something creative as a means to test them.

Make the eLearning Content Easy to Understand

Nothing says memorable quite like content that is easy to understand. If the content is easy to understand, students will have an easier time recalling it. One way to do this is through the design of the document. Maybe color code the paper for each lesson or group of lessons so students can easily find handouts. They will automatically associate colors with lessons, which will make it easier to find.

This can help increase memorability tremendously when it comes to making content easy to understand. You can also add special symbols or clip art to make the content stand out from the rest.

That being said, you also want to make sure the content itself is easy to understand. It sounds like common sense, but make sure instead of using large paragraphs of text on the page, use bullet points instead.

Additionally, make sure that there is no unnecessary content that is presented. This content will just confuse the reader even more and detract them from the lesson at hand. Also, make sure you break up the text into different sections so those students with photographic memories can find what they are looking for quickly if they need to reference anything. Create the content the way you want to read it, that way both you and your students will understand it, receiving maximum benefits from it.

Make Online Learning Memorable

eLearning content doesn’t have to be boring. The world is your oyster, and you have unlimited possibilities when it comes to creating content that will truly resonate with your students.

Take the chance to experiment with your content design and deliver to find something that will be memorable for the students. If successful, students will better grasp the concepts at hand and be able to teach them on their own.