Creating effective digital learning content is crucial for engaging modern learners but comes with many challenges. Companies must develop specialized instructional design and multimedia development skills with the rising demand for e-learning content and mobile platforms. This high-quality content requires significant research, writing and investment in creative assets.
At Creatives On Call, we have teams of experts across learning sciences, human-computer interaction and instructional technologies that help clients rapidly develop award-winning training content that users love.
Understand Your Target Audience
Defining your learner audience is crucial when designing digital learning content. Content likely misses the mark, resulting in disengaged users and poor outcomes, without clearly identifying audience attributes, needs and contexts.
Focus on these key ideas:
- Align with audience level and background: Match complexity and depth to learners’ current knowledge and context to ensure comprehension and retention. Creatives On Call helps assess audience needs through surveys and representative discussions.
- Consider accessibility requirements: Evaluate technical abilities, potential disabilities and environmental contexts to deliver accessible, equitable content for all.
- Research demographics: Analyze audience size, location, age ranges and cultural factors to fine-tune learning approaches. We conduct detailed analytics into target users.
- Develop user personas: Create one to two detailed, realistic user profiles reflecting audience needs and contexts to guide your design choices. Our team has developed over 500 personas across industries.
Failing to profile and analyze key audience segments adequately often leads to generic, irrelevant content that doesn’t meet learner needs or achieve business goals. Creatives On Call conducts extensive target audience research through interviews, data analysis and advisory boards. Clients receive deliverables like personas, accessibility guidelines and content mapping documents.
Establish Measurable Learning Objectives
Well-defined learning objectives are key to digital learning success. Without clearly outlining the specific skills, knowledge and behaviors users should attain from content, modules risk being generic, overly broad and not concise enough to guide development.
Follow these objectives:
- Set aligned goals: Tie objectives directly to genuine audience needs identified in research. Goals tackle issues like skill building, knowledge transfer or performance improvement.
- Connect objectives to assessments: Establish methods to gauge acquisition for each objective, like knowledge checks, scenarios or microsimulations.
- Map objectives to actual content: Ensure every module and asset directly builds user ability related to target goals.
- Define evaluation methodology: Determine both formative and summative evaluations, including quantitative and qualitative measures timed across learning experiences.
Proper documentation and tracking of objectives through evidence-based assessment is imperative to validate that goals are actually being achieved across target performance indicators. Creatives On Call builds consensus across stakeholders on objectives and assessments, documents them in a database and tracks progress in an online dashboard.
Apply Core Instructional Design Theory
Without grounding in core scientific principles of how people learn, training is often designed based on unfounded conventional wisdom, which leads to poor results. Learning courses must align with knowledge around memory, critical thinking and motivation to ensure retention, skill building and behavior change.
Modern instructional design draws from cognitive science and human-computer interaction:
- Scaffold complexity: Structure content to progress from basic concepts to intricate details following principles of scaffolding for skills and knowledge acquisition.
- Reinforce through repetition: Leverage the spacing effect with distributed practice and repeated exposure for memory strengthening.
- Manage cognitive load: Carefully control the amount of information presented to align with working memory limits needed for schema development.
- Motivate with interactive elements: Install game mechanics, challenges and animations that release dopamine to power motivation and engagement.
Our skilled teams at Creatives On Call develop frameworks keyed to research-based principles of instructional design, project management tools to actualize them and learning engineers to ensure that empirically proven best practices are instituted.
Incorporate Engaging Multimedia
Digital learning uses diverse media for enhanced engagement. Static text alone often fails to capture limited attention spans and communicate complex ideas effectively to digital-native audiences.
Multimedia assets such as these are thus central for impact:
Infographics, video and audio quickly communicate and reinforce ideas that leverage dual-coding theory. Our full in-house creative team develops sleek graphics, animated explainers and professional podcasts.
Simulations and interactive content enable application, experimentation and skills practice, which accelerates mastery through active learning. With computer science and digital art backgrounds, we code custom augmented reality (AR)/virtual reality (VR) experiences, games and scenarios tailored to nuanced learning objectives.
Accessibility and copyright diligence ensure inclusive learning; we maintain standards aligned with The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)/The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), coupled with vigilant copyright practices on creative assets.
Everything we build is mobile responsive and compliant with SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model). Our end-to-end multimedia services and specialized expertise in emerging technologies ensure learning solutions use best-in-class digital content tailored for measurable gains.
Incorporate Universal Design
Universal design (UD) principles help overcome accessibility barriers. Employing inclusive design from the outset increases equity and avoids costly remediation down the line. Inclusive design includes these best practices:
- We pursue ADA/WCAG alignment across interfaces and content types, leveraging an embedded user experience (UX) researcher well-versed in guidelines.
- Multimodal content provides information through visual, textual and auditory channels, enabling varied learning preferences.
At Creatives On Call, our specialists stay current through active participation in accessibility communities and regular professional development around emerging best practices. We build modern learning solutions that empower all learners by taking an active, immersive approach with UD and conducting rigorous assistive technology testing.
Test With Representative Users
There’s no replacement for direct learner testing. Without ongoing validation from real users, learning solutions often fail to resonate once deployed due to faulty assumptions.
- We recruit five to 10 individuals who match the target demographic and persona attributes. Sessions involve a think-aloud protocol where learners use the prototype and provide continuous feedback on confusing, aligned or engaging elements.
- Testing identifies issues from content gaps to confusing assessments, providing empirical data to strengthen the final product iteratively.
Insights from representative learner testing feedback lead to rapid, agile development cycles, enabling evidence-based improvements for maximum relevance and outcomes. Immersive user testing results in solutions finely tuned to audience needs, which closes the relevancy gap common in learning content.
Effective Digital Learning Content From Creatives On Call
As an industry-leading marketing and creative consultancy, Creatives On Call leverages our core strengths in strategic problem-solving, talent sourcing and technology innovation to develop content at scale, including customized corporate training and e-learning courses, that drives measurable outcomes for organizations.
With over 15,000 mid-to-senior-level subject matter experts (SMEs) across instructional design, multimedia production, writing, human-computer interaction and learning sciences, we assemble customized teams to match precise project needs. Guided by research-based principles around targeted personas, scaffolded skills development, motivation through interactive scenarios, and UD, we create a human-centric design process fully aligned with your business needs and modern learning science.
Our mission is to use collaboration and creativity to help your business grow through training materials and solutions specially crafted for your audience, objectives and constraints. Over 500 organizations have leveraged our expertise and process to create digital content their learners love efficiently.
Contact us today to explore how custom e-learning from Creatives On Call can solve your training challenges and skill needs. Read our What Is Content at Scale guide for more information.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are some key principles for creating digital learning content?
Some core principles are to focus on specific learning objectives aligned to audience needs; apply evidence-based instructional design strategies rooted in cognitive science; undertake inclusive design considering accessibility; develop multimedia content that leverages modalities like video, simulations and games to increase engagement; and continually test prototypes with user groups.
How do you design learning content that’s effective?
Critical foundational steps are fully understanding target learners through learning styles, personas and analytics; co-constructing measurable learning objectives; content mapping to sketch structure and flow; storyboarding key sections; and validating instructional strategy with stakeholders through consensus building. This grounds an empowered, agile design process.
