1. Be Your Student
Try viewing your course as your student would. Look at the user interface (design and navigation). Do you know what section you are in? Do you know how many sections there are? Do you know how to review previous content? Here is a big one — Does your student know their goals and objectives for the course or the section they are in? Do they know why they are even there? Look at the content. Is it too high level? Where are the basics? What questions does the content raise? Let the questions flow and try and answer them all.

We worked on a project that involved creating an online course based on a live course. I sat in the back of the class and took notes on what I saw. Many students were asking questions. If I sat through the same course again I would hear similar questions being asked. To us, this means there is an information gap. In this case, there were two gaps. The basics were not being covered and there were many questions about real life examples. We wrote down all of the questions and comments and used those as “LifePoints” within the online course to fill that gap and bring information the students could directly relate to.

2. Provide Assessment Feedback
Assessments or tests should not be available simply to learn about how much or how little a student knows. Assessments should also help a student learn what they don’t know or don’t understand. Use this opportunity to help the student by explaining why an answer is what it is or reinforce information they got correct.

3. Bring the Teacher Back
Many eLearning sites focus away from a teacher or a guide and focus strictly on the content. This can work in many situations but think of a student walking into a classroom without a teacher. With just a book of information, the student may not relate to the content or understand their goals and objectives. A teacher is often a delivery system of information and each teacher brings their own approach while bringing life to a subject. Students enjoy knowing there is someone they can connect with.

A teacher or guide can be video or animated. They can be human, animal, alien, or even an inanimate object. They can be a constant or show up from time to time, introducing information, asking questions,  delivering details, providing step by step tutorials, and expressing real life examples and situations.

4. Get Hand’s On
Another engaging tool in our belt is our ability to create hands on experiences. A student can learn a lot quickly when they have a virtual way of interacting with something. Realtime 2D and 3D (like games use) can allow a student to “touch” an object by clicking and dragging to turn it around, clicking on different parts to get details, and even changing variables to see how they change how the object works or an end result.

Getting hands on does not have to be the best of the best technology. You can have a mathematical formula that has fields the student can type numbers into. As they type them in the answer changes. With this, a student can explore relationships between numbers and answers. Simple and effective.

5. Taking Notes
I don’t know about you, but I would be hopeless without my notepad, and I hate the idea of entering a classroom without a way to get notes down. Create a simple notes button that lets a student type something they want to remember. A student might need to know something specific, they might want to write down a relationship between something else they know to help them retain or comprehend information.

You can keep track of the page the student is on and allow the student to see all notes or the notes on a a specific page they are on. They may be able to click on the note to jump to the page they were on when they typed it. They can email or print the notes as a reading guide. You might even provide a button next to each paragraph that places that paragraph into a document for further review. There are many approaches to taking notes (that I will discuss in an upcoming article). To jot down an idea here and there and having it always available is a powerful tool in eLearning.