The sad truth about today’s eLearning and online education milieu is that students, learners and trainees know about the content they are provided with, but do not understand it. The concurrent online education and training industry has become a platform of distributing just the content and not focusing on how it should be delivered. The focus has completely panned over to just chunking material and content, losing grip at the actual motto of keeping a holistic vision for learning and training for the students. After going through such an expansion, facing a problem like this for the eLearning as well as the online education industry must be distressing.
When a web-based or online education or eLearning course and content is designed, a lot is kept in mind. Online reading behavior of the learners, readers and students is taken into consideration and understood. Researches from a long time have reported that people do not actually read all the material, they rather just scan it. And if people don’t actually read all that they are provided with, it is a ludicrous decision to still keep chunking them with more of it and make them go through a text-driven eLearning and training course.
But that being said, it does not mean that the whole course or program should be designed with high-level graphics altogether. A program should be designed in such a way that it accommodates less textual data, and has more visual aspects, with higher chances of interactivity, thereby lessening the time taken by learners to understand.
The best solution to implementing these measures is by adopting instructional strategies examples like Macro and Micro strategies. For the best results, it is said that there should be equal involvement and participation of both, Macro and Micro strategies in the whole process of eLearning course and program’s design and development.
MACRO STRATEGY: When an instructional strategy is designed, the overall treatment of the course or program is decided upon, and the whole setting and theme of the course is written in detail. This is known as Macro Strategy.
MICRO STRATEGY: After deciding upon the whole Macro Strategy part of the course and program, the way how each module will be presented or delivered is jotted down in minute details and worked upon. And the thought is kept in mind of visual presentation with minimal textual content. This example of instructional strategy is known as Micro Strategy.
EVALUATION OF LEARNERS: Another key point to always keep in mind is that by providing a chance for the students to check and test, they themselves get an opportunity to assess what they have learnt. This automatically increases engagement and excitement among the students.
In conclusion, it can be said that eLearning should be student or learner-centric, rather than trainer or instructor-centric, which what it is today. But the solution is simple as there are various Instructional Strategies that can be adopted to deliver eLearning training programs and content in the most effective way, like Macro and Micro strategies and then adopting measures to help assess on their own what the students have learnt during the course.