Top 5 Instructional Design Strategies that Aid eLearning Development

eLearning efforts at your organization need to be perfectly lined up with your vision for corporate training. Instructional design strategy goes a long way in ensuring the strategic alignment of your eLearning strategy with your company’s training needs and objectives. The instructional design strategies you employ to design and deliver the learning experience help you achieve your training goals by boosting engagement and retention.

5 Instructional Design Strategies for eLearning Development

Here are five instructional design strategies that will help you create more engaging and retentive learning experiences:

1. Guided Learning

Learning can be really fun when you have someone to walk you through it. It also is easier to grasp something when learnt in small bits, step-by-step. Guided learning makes use of these two learning principles and ensures higher learner engagement. 

Guided Learning is one of the most popular instructional design strategies for eLearning development. It is used for different types of training, such as sales, software systems, process and operations training, etc. It proves to be particularly resourceful during the onboarding process by helping new hires find their way through the training.

2. Scenario-Based Learning

Scenario-based learning provides a retentive learning experience based on tackling real-world situations rather than theoretical concepts. It is an instructional design strategy for eLearning development that puts learners in situations where they learn by doing interactive tasks and taking decisions.

Scenario-based leaning promotes practical knowledge and problem-solving skills using real-world scenarios. It is widely used in software systems training, sales, and compliance training.

3. LEAD

LEAD or Learning Through Exploration or Discovery fosters the active participation of learners throughout the learning journey. LEAD enables enquiry-based learning and allows learners to explore and interact with the learning elements in a virtual setting. It offers the flexibility of discovering and gaining knowledge in a very interactive and engaging way.

LEAD is a great instructional design strategy to familiarize your learners with a specific place or a product. It also works out well for learning experiences where you want your learners to have the flexibility of learning at their own pace. LEAD is used mostly for employee orientation, safety training, and product training.

4. Storytelling

Incorporating storytelling in your eLearning design keeps your learners immersed in training. By boosting learner engagement and motivation, stories enable learners to achieve the learning objectives faster and improve their performance. It also ensures greater knowledge retention. Storytelling is a great instructional design strategy for almost any type of training, from orientation and new-hire training to product and soft-skills training.

5. Gamification

By applying game mechanics and competitive elements, gamification allows you to create engaging and retentive learning experiences. Rewards, badges, levels, points, leaderboards, etc., makes learning fun and motivates learners to complete their training. Adding competitive elements in the eLearning course also promotes a culture of social learning in the workplace.

Gamification is the perfect design strategy for creating courses that require high impact learning with longer retention. Sales and operations training are most known to leverage gamification because of its amplifying effect on sales and operational efficiencies.

Learner engagement is paramount in corporate training. By leveraging these instructional design strategies, you will be able to create tenacious, immersive, and retentive learning experiences that boost learner engagement.

G-Cube is among the fastest-growing learning-tech organization in the entire Asia-Pacific region with 80+ awards in the last 6 years, and a noteworthy experience of 20+ years in the said domain. Our LMS (Learning Management System) Suite is highly compatible to the current eLearning needs of varied industries. For any queries, please do write to us.