Guide to Designing, Developing and Delivering Online Learning Experiences

Online training can be a horrendous, unsatisfactory experience. Get better with online learning experiences.

Lee Ackerman

Published in

digit-L

13 min readMay 12, 2020

Introduction

Many years ago, I was with a team transitioning training from the classroom to online. We had a successful business for delivering in-person training, offering multiple curriculums and courses within. The topics focused on creating software covering everything from team collaboration, to requirements, writing code, testing and even managing the code. To quickly transition to online, we took the same materials, same instructors and added in some online lab capabilities and voilà, we had an online training component to our business. Reflecting on our approach and results with a critical eye, I see that while our efforts were strong for the time, there’s a big gap between those days and what we strive for today. And a big part of that gap can be seen in transitioning from “training” to “learning experiences.”

Crafting better online learning experiences is more important than ever. To be better, these experiences need to be engaging, effective, and energizing. Such experiences help us keep pace with change and orient us toward a culture of continuous learning, curiosity, and nimbleness. If we fail in creating better learning experiences, the culture will suffer and the organization will stagnate, lag competitors and fade away. Simply put, if you fail to learn, you’ll fail to earn.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to design, develop and deliver better online learning experiences.

Why “Experiences”

Staring with the title and throughout this guide, you’ll see use of the term “learning experiences.” Creating online training and having a goal of delivering training will orient our thinking and efforts to accomplishing just that goal. We ask: “Did we deliver the training?” and can easily state “Yes, we did deliver training” and consider it a job well done. The view is too narrow and leads to weak measures of success. We’re bound to underwhelm and have limited positive impact (if we can discern any impact at all!). There’s an experience, but it’s not as fulfilling, impactful or healthy.

Starting with the idea of a learning experience changes our perspective — we think about:

Who will be involved?
What would each party gain and contribute?
How will we measure success?
How might we encourage students to become lifelong learners?

Taking this first simple step of focusing on the experience is a great start. It changes our perspective from our course to our people. Ideally, it can help us think even broader as we consider the larger challenges we’re trying to solve. We end up transitioning from an inside-out perspective to an outside-in perspective. With this perspective in mind, let’s take a closer look at how we can design, develop and deliver online learning experiences!

Team Collaboration and Coordination

Designing, developing and delivering learning experiences is a team effort. To support the collaboration and coordination needed, I’ve found it best to adopt an agile mindset with a focus on strong team competencies:

Getting and receiving feedback from users
Focus on value and impact for the user and the team
Leadership expected from everyone
Operating with transparency
Always planning, learning and improving

Depending on the team you have, you may find that a continuous flow model or perhaps even aspects of Scrum helpful. I caution that you don’t get wrapped up in the mechanics of a specific model. It can be easy to get trapped into the details and formality and end up just going through the motions. If the mindset and key competencies are missing — it doesn’t matter what you call it, it isn’t going to work.

Design (and Innovation!)

Just having team collaboration and coordination isn’t enough. We can’t just form a team and start building the learning experience. Thinking about the design, or “design thinking”, is critical to our efforts. And, as a nice touch, design thinking aligns nicely with the mindset and competencies we just described above — further guiding our attention toward people, empathy, learning and handling ambiguity.

When we put on our design thinking hat, we really focus on thinking about the influences, interactions, and impact of our creation. A learning experience does not occur in isolation or independently. There are people involved that will participate in the experience. We need to think about them in this interaction. What do they bring with them to the class? Are there different types of people that will participate? Do we need to cater to different audiences? What are their expectations? Do they have concerns, fears or challenges that will come with them to the experience? And if so, how would that impact how they engage and react to the experience? We need to empathize with the people that will be involved in the experience. Feelings, interpretations and past experiences all come with the people as they engage with our experience.

We also need to recognize that we are going to have to deal with ambiguity. We will need to figure out which techniques, exercises, interactions, modalities, pacing and other aspects of the experience best meet our goals and resonate with our participants and help us to achieve our desired outcomes. There is generally some exploration, meandering and discovery as we figure out the design of our learning experience.

Going beyond focusing on the people involved, we can further broaden our perspective and consider the challenge that we are trying to solve. It can be helpful to consider the problems that we’re facing and try to reframe and re-orient. And, we should look for how we can engage learners in design activities. By engaging learners in co-creation and participatory design efforts we find a path to better learning and get buy-in for the experiences that emerge. There are some tools available that can help, including:

Canvases — Using a canvas can be a great way to collaborate, align and get buy-in. Rather than isolating yourself and writing a traditional document, use a canvas and pull together some colleagues, stakeholders or customers. Design together, making the ideas visible and moving sticky notes around to embrace perspectives and fluidity.
Personas and Maps — Personas, journey maps, empathy maps and similar constructs help us to better understand the people involved in our learning experience and their learning journey.

Constraints

We now have a great foundation that shapes our mindset and provides some mechanics for how we will innovate and create. But, we never — ever — operate without constraints. That is, there are limits to what and how we can create and deliver. While constraints can sound like a negative, I see them as a positive. Constraints challenge our thinking and lead to innovation. Some constraints to consider with online learning experiences:

Attention / Distractions: Attention spans for online material is around 5 minutes. This is especially relevant as you think about “telling” or “showing” types of interactions. If you are lecturing, demoing or even sharing a video — you just don’t have that much time before people lose focus. Remember that you are competing with multiple screens and devices. And, your learners have a day job. Work continues to come in and pulls the learner toward getting things done.
Engagement / Coordination: When face-to-face, it can be hard to inject and find a way into a conversation (especially as the group size gets bigger). However, as we transition to online, this becomes even more difficult. This is a big issue for course design. We need to find ways to keep everyone engaged in the learning. If we don’t keep them engaged and feeling part of the learning, we will lose them. Sitting, staring and listening leads to disengagement. Movement and hands-on activities help people learn but are often overlooked when transitioning to online.
Resources: There’s never enough time or money.
Change: Life and work are not static. You are racing and competing with change. Our students, stakeholders, subject matter experts and facilitators will change their mind. You will need to accommodate and embrace change.
Definitions of success: Whether we look at an organization, groups or individuals, we’ll find a variety of definitions for success. If we define success too narrowly, we may overlook alternate learning paths and approaches that are valued by some of our learners but differ from our own views.
Distribution: Participants are distributed both geographically which, at a minimum, can bring time zone challenges. A broader geographic spread can also bring cultural differences.

Making Lemonade

As they say: ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade!’ Recognizing constraints can be a good first step in challenging orthodoxies and sparking innovative thoughts and approaches. Let’s look at some possibilities:

Multiple Screens. Having multiple screens and devices can pose a challenge as students’ attention can be pulled elsewhere during the class. Depending on your situation, you may be able to design your experience to take advantage of multiple screens. For instance: a laptop is used as the main interface for sharing slides, class chat window, main audio / managing break out rooms; a second monitor is used as a shared Kanban board, shared group workspace (Google Doc, Whiteboard such as Miro/Mural/Stormboard), or even a personal workspace that the class can visit (cloud-based workspaces for developers); and, a phone can be used for polls, games, and other interactions with results directed back to the main screen.
Distance. Your students are distributed. No one is in the same location. This can be a positive as no one has to travel and costs for the learning experience are reduced (no flights, no hotel, no classrooms to book). Recognizing this change, you can look at how to better drive learning. Trying to condense learning into a few days of face-to-face is not always best. Slow learning can be powerful and a big win for online learning experiences and should be embraced. There’s more time to apply, reflect and share back. Potential avenues of leveraging distance include: keep students’ attention by breaking the class into smaller time commitments; introduce asynchronous activities / work to go along with the synchronous class time; encourage students to practice new skills and share back with the class; and, provide students with time to create a learning journal / portfolio.
Engaging everyone. Yes, it can be hard to give everyone a chance to speak. We’ve all been on calls and talked over someone, did the random pause of silence and then talked over each other again! Recognizing this challenge up front, we can put energy into finding alternative ways to engage: text-based chat frees us from being constrained by audio; break-out rooms enable us to create smaller groups with their own audio channel (and screen sharing) to make it easier for everyone to contribute; asynchronous communication via threaded discussions, videos, learning portfolios, and small study groups provide time and opportunity to share; polls offer the chance for everyone to share an opinion and engage; video makes it easier to connect as people; and, collaboration tools such as Google Docs and interactive whiteboards such as Miro/Mural/Stormboard make it easy for everyone to write/draw/create together.

Developing Learning Experiences

While there’s a linear flow to this article, it is critical to recognize that we are building and proving ideas for our learning experience as early as possible. We iteratively and incrementally build the experience. Design shapes development, and development shapes design as we balance between intentional and emergent design. Taking small steps gives us the opportunity to deliver value early, adapt to change or stop when we’ve delivered enough value. There are many tools available to help us build learning experiences — almost as many tools as they are ways to experience learning.

Some tools that are important to keep in mind include:

Simple low-fidelity tools. Especially in early efforts. Low fidelity representations invite feedback, adjustment and drive us to focus on ideas rather than the fit and finish. If you and your team are co-located, find some walls and use that space, sticky notes, and whiteboards to start to build.
If your team is not co-located, give thought to the tools that you will use to coordinate, create, comment and discuss. Slack and MS Teams to discuss, coordinate. Trello or other Kanban tools to make work visible. Miro/Mural/Stormboard for engaging whiteboard experiences. G Suite for sharing and collaboratively writing documents and working on presentations. GitHub is a great platform to use for many of these aspects and offers versioning for all the content you’re creating.
There’s more to an experience than just the content and materials that the students will see. Keep in mind that there will be facilitator guides, distribution of materials (All materials digital? Physical materials?), facilitator training, and potential building out of environments to support any lab work (if the experience relates to use of any tools)
Additionally, we need to consider tools that support video, audio, gaming or mobile interactions (chatbots, messaging, etc.).

Delivering Online Learning Experiences

As we approach and execute delivery of the learning experience, we need to continue with the mindset that we’ve cultivated and established up to this point. This isn’t a race to get through materials, a need to check boxes, or to just complete some form of compliance. As teacher (or facilitator or instructor) — we’re focused on impact.

We need to connect with our students and support them on their learning journey. Here are some suggestions on how to make the most of this experience:

Learn everyone’s name. Coming into the class, you should already have a roster, get familiar with the names and do you best to use students’ names.
Answer questions. This may seem obvious, but when a student asks a question — you need to do your best to answer. Further, you can also pull other students into the discussion and have them provide perspectives as well.
Tell (relevant) stories. People connect with stories. As an instructor you can connect with your students — and connect them with the content through stories. Stories also build your credibility (as you speak from experience) and help to bring the content to life. And, ask students to share their stories! A good teacher learns from their students.
Have a co-facilitator. This is especially important in online delivery. Having one person run a learning experience is especially difficult. Work with your co-facilitator in advance and have clarity on where and when you need assistance. Expect to need assistance with: monitoring chat during synchronous interactions; setting up and supporting break-out rooms; helping students debug technology; setting up polls, opening them up and making sure that results are captured/shared; capturing notes and feedback; updating parking lot; and, updating the class Kanban board.
Pay attention to energy levels. The class is set up with a plan. But, as a teacher, you need to be ready and able to adapt as needed. Each class is unique and will have ebbs and flows in energy, engagement, and progress. Pay attention to: prompts from your co-facilitator that the class needs a break; the co-facilitator is seeing the chat window and icons that suggest a break (coffee mug, snoozing emoji, pace indicators, etc.); be wary of silence; and, keep an eye on the “attention measurement” feature of your training software.
Be mindful of culture and time zones. Being online, you may have a much broader distribution of students which introduces time zone and cultural challenges: Your class should be designed for frequent interactions and breaks. Recognize the time zones you’re dealing with and be prepared to adjust. In some cases, it may be helpful to consider shutting down early and asking folks to do a bit of homework. Culture may also lead to different student expectations/behaviors. Do your students feel comfortable asking questions? If not, consider how you can confirm progress or engage in discussion and interaction. Lingo and cultural references can lead to confusion. Whether from the domain you’re teaching or just a regional phrase, be aware that not all cultural references translate well or easily. You want to bring yourself to the classroom, but you also don’t want to alienate or confuse your students. If there’s a phrase that reflects “you” and helps to convey an idea, consider how you can use it and be inclusive.
Stay on topic. Yes, there can be some deviations from the main topic. But, teaching a class is not all about you. You are there for the students; consider any tangents from their point of view. What value is the tangent adding? If the value is questionable — consider sharing it during a break of outside of the class. Sharing can help forge bonds, but students have goals and definitions of success for their participation — don’t get in the way!
Stick to the schedule. Your students have commitments beyond the classroom. These commitments could be work related or family related. Either way, you have made a commitment to them about the time boundaries for the class.
Use smart questions. Building on the course content, create a list of topic-aligned questions to generate purposeful discussions. Good questions are important. Try to stay away from “Any questions?” or “Did that make sense?”, and move towards “What are some challenges you can see with doing X?” or “Can you think of a scenario where you might use Y?”.

The Interconnectedness of Design, Development and Delivery

These three dimensions of creating an outstanding learning experience are interconnected. As we learn more about development or delivery it should feed back into design and future iterations of the experience. Just as design leads us to select tools and techniques, the tools or techniques we chose bring constraints and capabilities to the mix that impact design. Be open to learning, recognizing the impact of choices and adjusting. To create a learning experience, we must be open to learning.