How to stop Juggling and Achieve Great E-learning
Is Managing Your E-learning a Juggling Act?
Do your e-learning solutions remind you of your phone’s home screen? A digital hoarder’s paradise with so many apps and streaming services that you can’t see the background? We’re living in an age where getting everything you need requires more apps than NASA’s mission control has monitors, and frankly, it’s exhausting. Think about it, you’ve got Netflix for drama, Disney+ for nostalgia, Prime Video for that one show everyone’s talking about, and Apple TV+ because it came free with something you bought. Then there’s Slack for work conversations, Notion for organizing your life (theoretically), Trello for projects you’ll definitely finish someday, and Zoom for meetings that could have been emails.
Sadly, this fragmented approach is also where so many e-learning businesses find themselves needing a crash course in juggling. Want course content? That’s one provider. Need mobile access? Different app and provider. Looking for cost-effective delivery? Another vendor. Hoping for actual engagement? Yet another solution to juggle. And when it comes to assessing if you’re actually making the best choice how do you even begin to decide?
With a view to helping you make sense of the chaos, here’s a round-up of four basics of e-learning excellence to give you a starting point.
The Four Pillars of E-Learning
Successful e-learning, like a properly brewed cup of coffee, requires certain elements that cannot be skipped, ignored, or replaced with cheaper alternatives that “do basically the same thing.” We consider them to be Mobile readiness, Off-line availability, Cost-efficiency and Engagement.
Excellent e-learning brings all these elements together to ensure that knowledge flows smoothly, consistently and with the sort of quality that makes people come back for more. It’s not boring, it allows for mobile access that works offline, (even in a Wi-Fi dead zone), offers cost savings that don’t cut corners, and content that engages on the same level as the most popular reality TV.
These pillars rest on a foundation of solid, informative, enjoyable content development, and an LMS (learning management system) that keeps everything running smoothly whether your learners are at home in their pyjamas or in a corporate boardroom. Unlike all those streaming services, a good LMS puts everything you need in one place, shows you who has completed what and who hasn’t started, and makes it easy to search for and find what you need.
Learning on the Go – (even with Zero Bars)
We can’t ignore the fact that a lot of modern life happens while we are on the move. This means that we need to recognise that Mobile-first is a necessary part of any e-learning design. The ability to access training from your phone while standing in a queue or sitting on a bus or plane is essential for success. People need to be able to take it with them wherever they go, anytime, anywhere.
The mobile aspect links very closely to offline accessibility. Patchy, slow and non-existent internet connections are not yet a distant memory, particularly here in Africa. It’s vital that your LMS allows offline access for the learner. It’s also critical that the system synchronises learning progress when connection is restored. Seamless continuation, regardless of the connectivity situation is one of the hallmarks of a great learning management system. Whether your team is working remotely, traveling, or dealing with spotty internet, learning
continues without the little buffering ‘ringworm’ of delay or ‘the internet ate my homework’ excuse.
Cost-Efficiency: Five-Star Learning Without the Five-Star Bill
One of the sad realities of both multiple streaming subscriptions and fragmented e-learning solutions is bill shock at the end of the month when you finally add up what those multiple options for covering all the bases actually costs! Paying separately for content creation, hosting, mobile apps, engagement tools, and learner management adds up faster than those premium channel subscriptions. Something worth thinking about is that sometimes spending money properly the first time saves you from spending it badly many times thereafter. So, like those family streaming subscriptions that allow everyone to get what they want in one place, finding a turn-key solution for your e-learning content creation and hosting is definitely going make your finance team happy.
It’s logical that a team who both hosts a learning management system and uses it to produce and publish content will know exactly how to get the best results from it. They will know that clever content development can create reusable learning assets. They will also be able to get the best reporting and automation out of the system, saving you and your admin team hours of wrestling with spreadsheets.
This experience goes a long way towards ensuring that the money you do spend actually achieves something measurable, rather than simply making everyone feel like they’ve participated in education.
Engagement: Not Your Grandma’s PowerPoint
If learning were a social gathering—and the best kind often is—engagement would be the guest who keeps everyone entertained without resorting to embarrassing party tricks or tedious monologues. Engagement is impossible to fake successfully. Flashing lights and funny noises are distracting and don’t get people to actually pay attention and absorb the information. The other end of the spectrum—text heavy PowerPoint slides—relies on the assumption that your learners have the highest level of motivation to learn and are willing to do the reading required, for success. It’s fittingly described as ‘Death by PowerPoint’.
How do you get your learners to want to learn and prevent them from simply sitting through learning experiences while mentally composing shopping lists? What do the best streaming platforms do? They don’t dump content at you—they learn your preferences, suggest relevant shows, and keep you coming back for more.
Intelligent content development that uses gamification techniques, combined with responsive learner management features, creates the kind of personalised learning experience that keeps people genuinely interested. Progress tracking is used to motivate rather than intimidate. Interactive elements are designed to be familiar and intuitive, so learners can focus on the content instead of being distracted by figuring out how to use the platform. The outcome? Real learning with detectible results.
Conclusion: All Together Now
Instead of suffering through the ‘there are twelve apps for that, and none of them talk to each other,’ experience that is so common today, you can use the elements we have just discussed to measure your current e-learning solution. Does it give you a holistic solution? If not, perhaps it’s time to look for one that does. Your learners and your bank balance will thank you.
Dennis Lamberti
Head of Content Development
As a founding member of Media Works, a company that helped educate over 1.5 million adults in South Africa, Dennis has honed his expertise in developing learning programmes for nearly 30 years . His focus is now on learning pedagogy and cognitive load balancing.