With the increasing adoption of eLearning, it has become easy to create online courses.
Platforms like Coursera, edX, Udacity allow creators to bring forward their courses and share knowledge globally. Students across the globe are keen to learn new skills and stay abreast within the community. However, multiple aspects of the online course must meet students’ expectations for the beneficiary to be satisfied with choosing. Many online courses still don't meet students' basic expectations to make their education journey easy and flexible. With online learning, these are some basic advantages learners must experience. Also, these are a few things that essentially make eLearning stand out.
Enlisted are some students’ expectations of eLearning that you can consider while creating your next online course.
Enhance Learning Quality
With an option to use multiple types of resources, enhanced quality of learning is expected. Educators need to ensure that they keep adding updated and engaging resources to add value to students’ learning. Apart from the content, educators can reach out to experts from the niche and bring expertise from dignitaries to their classrooms. This not only engages learner but also help in expanding your professional learning community.
Course Documents & Syllabus Readily Available
Many courses don’t define the syllabus for the prospects to analyze. Students may come across your course and want to check out the in-depth syllabus before enrolling in it. You don’t have to give all the details and share your USPs but sharing the contents you’ll focus on during the course is important. This helps the learner understand the value it will bring to them.
For students who enrol in the course, learning documents must be made available at the beginning. This will ensure that the student knows which lessons will be covered throughout the course, and can use the syllabus as a guide throughout the course. It also provides teachers with an effective roadmap and helps structure their lesson plans.
Meet The Learning Style Or Needs Of Students
No one shoe fits all. Similarly, every student has different learning needs. A personalized approach to learning is a crucial aspect that must be addressed. eLearning allows educators to provide a personalized learning experience to the students. The design of the online course should consider every learning style. For instance, while one student may benefit from video presentations of coursework and lessons, another student may not absorb information the same way and want it presented in text form. To make learning effective, you must have multiple content types available to meet students' varied learning styles.
User-Accessibility & Time Flexibility
One of the key benefits of eLearning is the flexibility it provides. It doesn’t make sense to not avail of this feature while working in an online education model. Making courses user friendly and flexible is going to add value to the courses. eLearning programs must be flexible in their curriculum and suit any learners. The learner should choose a degree or course according to abilities and learning style and stick to it without having any obstacle in learning. Considering that many people do online courses with other things on their hands, students look for courses that don’t have any time boundation for everyday learning. Providing recorded lectures for anytime access is a boon. You can set time slots and specific days to address queries and concerns but fixing a particular time for online courses is a big NO.
Increased Student Collaboration & Teacher Interaction
Since technology plays a mediator's role, students find it easy to connect to other students online and exchange views, participate in discussions, and engage in forums. Their connectivity with their teachers is also improved due to time flexibility and online support rendered by teachers. This helps them get help when they want and complete their projects or assignments or presentations on time.
Enhanced Technological Support
Many eLearning courses are designed with multiple in –course tools. These tools either enhance the learning experience or come as a necessary add-on as per the subject. Either way, the goal is to make the learning process quick, more informative, and efficient. If needed, you must make your course interactive and qualitative with added tools. For students learning in a global environment, these tools enhance their learning experience help them have more interactions, connectivity, access to research material, and the finest of tech support. For all added tools, you must ensure to share guidelines and support material that students can study and make most of it.
Make sure you read this piece on “What Do Students Expect From Online Learning? We Asked Them.” By global online academy. In this survey, 800 students responded to questions about elearning expectations for students including its flexibility, choice, and priorities.
