6 Tips for Digital Learning Content Creation

Recently, Dan Meyer shared the Desmos guidelines for building great digital math activities.

These guidelines offer ways to design a wide variety of effective digital learning content. They also align nicely with the design principles we promote through our work with designing innovative learning experiences through Learning Environment Modeling (LEM). All of which help achieve learning objectives through optimally designed elearning courses  - making video content achievable and successful. 

With that context, I thought it would be helpful to adapt the Desmos guidelines to address the broader design requirements for general digital learning content. Through content creation, the Desmos guidelines can be adapted to help students interact and improve online learning techniques. Here are six suggestions to guide your work:

1. Contextualize learners by creating an intellectual need for information and skills

All too often, we design learning content by leading with the information we want participants to know. We are well-intentioned in doing this. We want to establish clear definitions, to create a common understanding of the learning task at hand. We want to ensure that the learner knows what they need to know – i.e. what we need them to know. This linear model occurs because we design learning the way we experience learning. Through cause-and-effect, clear definitions, and parameters, we hope to impose the same kind of rigorous structure we experienced. 

This method of presentation usually deprives learners of context and removes their ability to freely associate to engage with the learning courses. They are set adrift in training materials, told something is important instead of truly understanding why. They often have no idea why it’s important or how knowing about it makes a difference in their professional or personal lives.

Instead of leading with information, we should think about beginning our learning sequences with context – we should ask how we can help participants experience what they need. We should facilitate reflection that creates a personal context for the information. Interactive learning begins with association, relationships, and curiosity so the students want to seek the information for themselves. 

It’s easier to get learners more invested in the “what” by starting with the “why.”

2. Design learning content on a trajectory of informal to formal

It seems we’re always in a hurry to “get to the point” with our learning content. Instructional designers create training materials with clear objectives in mind and then design the course to reach that objective. We want to get the “right answer,” the formal version of our information, in front of learners straightaway. Once we’ve established that foundation of  “formal” information, we’ll move directly to effective application and discussion.

The challenge with this approach is that it eliminates opportunities for deeper, more effective learning – a genuine, self-motivated inquiry about our information. Often, we present the right answers before even allowing the opportunity to think about other possibilities and why they’re not the formal answers we’re aiming for. Presenting the “right answers” up front makes it more difficult to interest learners in speculation or in thinking outside traditional boundaries. Talent education should be about developing critical thinking skills and adaptive learning techniques, not the regurgitation of facts that someone else dictated. 

A more successful approach is to start with an informal, no-right-answer inquiry, and from there move gradually toward formal definitions and explanations. Begin with hypothetical scenarios. Ask for situational conjecture. Present a small fragment of your information and have learners discuss its implications without knowing the full context. Invite them to discover and explore before formalizing the experience. This is especially important in elearning content because it can be so easy for students to want to skip to the end of videos, courses, and even entire modules.

3. Maintain a constant view of the Big Picture

Everyone agrees that segmenting content into smaller chunks is a good practice when developing digital learning content. To develop eLearning content that is effective, you need to give the learner the ability to process all the information you’re giving them. Whether the content delivery method is learning with video, reading, or an activity, we want to create focused, easily digestible content experiences.

While segmenting content into granular, focused pieces is good, it can also lead to a loss of the Big Picture. Participants can easily lose sight of why the specific information or skill they are learning matters. They forget where it fits into the grand scheme.

In other words, we want to keep learners contextualized throughout all their learning experiences. When presenting an activity or chunk of information, we should remember to insert Big-Picture reminders or reference points.

Context is important at every stage of the online learning process. Build content that has consistent reminders of the overarching themes and how the bits of knowledge they’re learning contribute to it.

4. Design learning content to foster collaboration and conversation

Learners often work asynchronously at their own pace when they engage with digital content. That makes it easy to forget about designing for collaboration and conversation.

With this in mind, we want to look for opportunities in our content design to ask reflection questions that will stimulate personal inquiry and conversation. We want to stimulate participant thinking with questions that will generate genuine discussions, conversations that move well beyond reciting the right answer.

As the Desmos team points out, we want to:

Maximize the ratio of conversation time per screen, particularly in concept development activities. All other things being equal, fewer screens and inputs are better than more. If one screen is extensible and interesting enough to support ten minutes of conversation, ring the gong.

This can be done by designing informational videos that stimulate this kind of thinking

5. Take advantage of and test apperceptive mass

As subject matter experts, we generally create learning content from the perspective of a “knower” who is sharing information with someone who is an “unknower.” In other words, we treat our learners like homogeneous blank slates onto which we will impart a specified quantity of data. An effective subject matter expert treats this task without arrogance and condescension, usually through more interactivity and engaging questions that facilitate conversation. 

Taking this approach overlooks the fact that our learners have already amassed a great deal of professional and personal knowledge. They have developed an apperceptive mass that’s incredibly valuable in processing and understanding new ideas. Though we have the authoring tools to give them information we think they need, they receive and process through the lens of their experiences and the context that allows them to learn new concepts. 

When we’re working with adult learners, particularly communities of practice, we can design our content to take advantage of apperceptive mass and create deeply engaging and impactful learning experiences. With such groups, it’s important to help learners test the limits of their previous experiences when it comes to drawing conclusions or making intuitive leaps.

6. Make it easy to interact and play

Our professional experiences tell us that providing easy points of entry into a task increases the likelihood that people will persist with and perform the task well. Participants don’t mind if a task becomes incrementally more difficult, even extremely difficult, if they can start the process and get up to speed with relative ease.

The same holds true with learning design. We want to make it easy for participants to become engaged with our content. Information and skill development may become difficult in later stages, but the beginning should always be easy.

Wherever possible, we want to make the experience playful through interactivity and experimentation. Allow learners room for exploration. Let them play with the ideas first, without consequences or concerns about being wrong, before moving into more formal instruction.