Even before the onset of the Coronavirus, market forecasts were predicting that the online learning industry would balloon to $325 billion by 2025. With COVID-19 this growth will now likely explode as educators and companies move more, if not all, learning to an eLearning portal. Now, what exactly is an eLearning portal? An eLearning portal is essentially an online gateway that offers varied learning resources to students and trainees. They consist of a variety of learning resources that includes everything from small online courses to bigger Instructor-Led courses that are more comprehensive, to tools that allow students and trainees to engage in collaborative learning.
Let’s look at 7 tips for creating effective eLearning portals.
Offer multiple forms of learning
Learning can be formal or informal and different people learn better with different learning formats. These formats can include learning assets that allow the user to read, view, learn interactively, test comprehension, and resources that allow the student or trainee to apply what they have learned.
Offer support for multiple devices
This day in age you can create your own website easily and optimize it for mobile and tablet. Having optimization for multiple electronic devices is becoming the new normal and it is very important that eLearning portals adapt accordingly. This is further reinforced by the fact that great disparities in wealth exist for young students. Some students may come from a wealthy family that has access to computers, phones, tablets, and just about any other electrical device you could think of. Other families, on the other hand, may only have access to a phone or tablet. Online learning needs to be designed in a way that allows as much accessibility as possible.
Create your own community of learning
While self-directed learning can be effective, it loses its effectiveness if not combined with resources and tools that allow students and trainees to interact with others. The best e-learning portals allow students to interact together and collaborate on projects and tasks.
Consider offering personalized learning paths
People, in general, do not want to invest a ton of time into a generic course, and by and large, most learners prefer to have a more personalized learning experience. These personalized experiences can be generated through assessments or depending on what specific role/profile the user has. You can also allow the user to customize their own learning path.
Use machine learning algorithms to maximize personalized learning
Machine learning algorithms can use the massive amount of user data available to create micro-targeted personalized learning. Algorithms can detect what subject matter or course material a particular learner is having difficulty with. It can then adjust and provide more details to better help the student.
Make your eLearning portal user-friendly
This may seem like an obvious one but poorly designed, non-user-friendly software platforms and eLearning portals are still being made today. Make sure that ordinary, regular students test your platform. You will learn pretty quickly whether it is user-friendly or not.
Provide good training and offer on-going support for educators
Good training is essential to launching an effective eLearning portal. Many educators who try to transition their in-person learning techniques to online platforms experience difficulty adapting. Change is naturally difficult for most human beings so having an effective training program is very important so that educators can adapt and deliver course material effectively and efficiently. On-going support that is easily accessible helps to speed up the process of management and adaptation. The easier it is to access support, the better the educational experience will be for the student or trainee.
The use of eLearning portals will continue to rise rapidly as the world continues to change rapidly. As Darren Shimku, president of Udemy put it recently: “The biggest challenge is for learners is to figure out what skills are emerging, what they can do to compete best in the global market. We’re in a world that’s changing so quickly that skills that were valued just three or four years ago are no longer relevant. People are confused and don’t know what they should be learning.” In the age of COVID-19, eLearning portals are no longer helpful, they are essential!