Most courses start with good intent and messy inputs: a module descriptor here, a folder of SME slides there, and a deadline that’s already too close. This post is about the practical moves I use to turn that mess into learning that’s clear, inclusive, and genuinely worth a learner’s attention without adding gimmicks or bloat.
Understanding Your Audience
To create memorable content that learners will engage with and remember, it’s essential to understand your audience. This involves identifying their needs and preferences. Conducting surveys, interviews, and analysing learner data can provide valuable insights.
Methods for Gathering Audience Insights
Surveys and questionnaires are great for gathering specific, discrete information about your students and even potential students. Though they can be and are used for open ended questions, tools like Google Forms and SurveyMonkey excel in multiple choice questions on areas like learners’ socio-economic background, their engagement preferences, and learning goals.
One-on-one interviews and focus groups can be used to really dig deep and gain a more thorough, nuanced understanding of learners’ needs and challenges. Enabling you to design courses that meet the needs of the actual learners who are either taking your course or interested in taking your course.
Learning Management Systems (LMSs) also offer a plethora of analytics and data for you to track actual learner behaviours and performance. This can then be used to identifying patterns and areas for improvement as well as verify any evidence you’ve collected from surveys, questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups.
Using all the information at your disposal to understand your audience helps tailor the content to meet learners’ specific needs, making it more relevant and engaging and learning personas are a fantastic way to make those insights present within the design process.
Creating Learner Personas
Developing learner personas is a valuable technique for understanding your audience. A persona is a fictional representation of your current learners or learners you want to attract to your content. It is based on real data from as many sources as possible.
To create a persona, look at the patterns in the data and analytics. I usually try to pick out three patterns around demographic, goals, challenges, and preferences. Then I build those patterns into three personas, adding details like their age, job role, prior knowledge, and any barriers they face.
By crafting detailed personas that cover the full spectrum of your audience and/or potential audience, you can tailor your eLearning content to meet the specific needs and motivations of different learner groups, ensuring a more personalised and effective learning experience.
For example, if your learners need to learn how to maintain a house, you may want to provide on-demand, just-in-time step-by-step guides on how to fix, maintain, and upgrade things like toilets, sinks, flooring, cabinetry, etc.
If your learners need to practice and improve a skill like a language, you might want to provide short modules that are optimised for mobile devices so learners can access them on the go.
At the other end of the scale, if your learners are studying undergraduate or post graduate courses and degrees, they may need longer, more in-depth content that has embedded academic skills to ensure your learners are prepared for what is required of them.
There are universal elements that can be utilised across this wide spectrum of need that can keep learners engaged and committed to your content.
Key Elements of Engaging eLearning Content
Whether or not you believe that attention spans are getting shorter or that the number of potential distractions has simply increased, humans, as a species, thrive on variety.
This can be a particular problem with learning content which, traditionally, had tended towards long texts dense with convoluted, technical language and ‘sage on the stage’ lectures. This has lessened considerably for children and there are entire philosophies of child rearing and educating that counter this way of learning but, as those children get older the variety of methods of engagement decrease, particularly as the pressures of examinations increases.
The draw and effectiveness of variety doesn’t lessen but what is perceived as ‘serious learning’ does so the framing of ‘unserious’ learning elements is something you may need to consider carefully. It is worth it though to successfully bring in a variety of elements to engage learners and enhance learning outcomes.
Written elements
While written text is still the backbone of most learning content whether on- or off-line, with the exception of ebooks, walls of text generally don’t work well in digital format. Ebooks, whether fiction or non-fiction, work because of the story telling elements embedded within them.
An overarching ‘story’ is harder to embed within most textbooks and other learning objects but a narrative structure – a clear beginning, middle, and end – makes your content easier to follow and remember, and like any good story, once you have the ‘main plot’ you can add in ‘B, C, and D plots’ with the help of additional learning elements.
Multimedia elements
Images, infographics, diagrams, and graphs can be used to illustrate concepts, processes, and data. This helps learners engage with, understand, and internalise content. They can also function as visual breaks, directly or indirectly, and help tie concepts into narratives developed in video and audio pieces.
Knowing why a static of media is being included is key to using it successfully for a few reasons. Primarily thinking it through leads to choosing or creating better pieces that really compliment and further the concepts discussed in the text. It also prevents over or under use and makes writing useful ALT text easier.
Audio pieces are especially useful for longer form content narratives either self-contained in single pieces or through multiple pieces across the whole of the content, creating a clear structure with a beginning, middle, and end.
In-depth interviews with or conversations between experts being enthusiastic about different elements in their field of choice can be used for either, as can case studies from a first-, second-, or third-person perspective and really link learners to the human connection within or around concepts.
Video pieces can vary from a talking head to a full animation and the purpose of them can vary just as much, covering the uses of both static and audio pieces as well as illustrate things that would be difficult or impractical to do in other ways.
Well thought out media pieces can make content more relatable and memorable, helping to illustrate complex concepts and keep learners interested.
Most media pieces can also be used in or referred to in interactive elements.
Interactive elements
Interactive elements like quizzes, simulations, and interactive videos can make learning more engaging and enjoyable. These elements encourage active participation, reinforce learning, and fosters critical thinking.
There are many types of interactions possible within a piece of learning so, as with media pieces, knowing why and what you want to achieve with the interaction is crucial.
I choose interaction types to match intent. If the goal is recall, I’ll use brief checks or worked‑example fade‑outs. For application, I prefer short scenarios or branching choices with feedback. If I need collaboration, I’ll move to shared whiteboards or discussion prompts that demand evidence, not opinion. The persona work tells me how confident learners are in these spaces, which then shapes the tooling I pick.
The outcome you want to will determine the interactive element you chose. Multiple choice quizzes, assessments, drag and drops, simulations, branching scenarios, discussions, collaborations, hot-spots, interactive videos, etc. and, increasingly, interacting with AI in some way.
Your student personas and functionality will determine how you create and host the interactive element you choose. How comfortable are your learners in different digital spaces, how are they engaging in those digital spaces, and interfacing with the technology needed to access those spaces.
The outcomes, personas, and functionality are also crucial considerations when deciding whether to introduce elements of gamification.
Gamification elements
Gamification techniques for online education usually consist of points, badges, leaderboards, challenges, and missions which can help motivate learners and make the learning process more fun. At least according to proponents of gamification.
These proponents lean on several studies including this one published in TechTrends, and this one published in Eurocall (PDF). These and other papers report improved learning outcomes, enhanced academic performance, and a positive impact on engagement and motivation but overall, findings are mixed across contexts; superficial points/badges can boost short‑term engagement but don’t guarantee learning transfer, and poorly implemented schemes can crowd out intrinsic motivation.
Opponent also lean on the same study published in TechTrends along with others to debate the effectiveness of gamification in improving academic performance, to argue that the extrinsic nature of the motivation generated can undermine the intrinsic motivation of students and they may lose interesting the actual learning in favour of ‘playing the game’ and so long term engagement gains are questionable. These arguments are particularly convincing when allied with the concern that gamification is being misapplied in the race to capture learners from a dwindling pool (particularly in UK higher education).
As with any other element within a piece of learning, the choice to include gamification elements is one that needs to be carefully considered as it may also not be equally effective for all learners or all concepts. Some may find game elements distracting or stressful, and there may be accessibility issues for learners with disabilities.
Designing for Cognitive Load: Bringing Theory and Practice Together
When we talk about making content “engaging,” we often gravitate to surface‑level ideas: adding media, increasing interactivity, experimenting with formats. But behind all these decisions lies a deeper responsibility of ensuring that learners have the mental space and clarity they need to make sense of new ideas. This is where Cognitive Load Theory and Mayer’s multimedia principles have become increasingly central to my own design practice.
Rather than treating multimedia as decoration or novelty, I am more often thinking first about what the learner must hold in working memory at any given moment. Some subjects carry a naturally high level of intrinsic complexity; others are deceptively simple until you look at the tacit skills required. The job of design is not to “simplify” in a reductive sense, but to manage the learning experience so that the right kind of mental effort (what CLT calls germane load) is encouraged and unnecessary effort, minimised.
Mayer’s principles provide a reliable vocabulary for this work. When I’m reviewing existing materials or planning new ones, I look for ways to reduce noise: removing assets that don’t contribute to learning and replacing overly long text with clearer diagrams. One thing I would love to do but haven’t have the opportunity to do yet is pair audio narration with visuals rather than having learners ‘flick’ between text and image. Though I suppose the ‘read aloud’ browser function will read out text and ALT text so provides narration of a sort.
Signalling becomes particularly powerful for focusing learner effort. Even small adjustments (highlighting key steps in a process and aligning text closely with diagrams for example) can shift the cognitive experience from muddled to manageable.
These principles also help with pacing. Breaking content into distinct, learner‑paced segments allows people to pause, revisit, and connect ideas without being swept along by the design. Pre‑training elements like a glossary or a labelled diagram offer footholds that make more complex material feel accessible rather than overwhelming. And where examples are needed, I lean heavily on worked solutions that show the full complexity the first time and then gradually reduce the scaffolding as learners gain confidence.
One unexpected benefit of working with cognitive load in mind is that it encourages restraint. It becomes easier to justify not using an image when it doesn’t serve a clear purpose, or to push back on a request for multimedia when text alone would be more effective. My own ALT text decision tree has helped refine this judgement (it’s in my post Making Learning Content Accessible: A Designer’s Guide to WCAG Perceivable Principles): If an image doesn’t meaningfully advance understanding, then crafting alt text for it becomes unnecessary and so does including the image at all.
Good multimedia design, then, isn’t about making learning look more colourful or polished. It’s about being intentional, transparent, and humane. At its best, it makes the cognitive journey smoother, not because the content is simpler, but because the path through it is clearer.
Designing for Accessibility
Accessibility is something that should be considered from the beginning of the creation of any learning. It widens the pool of potential learners, improves the experience for all learners, and is time consuming and potentially expensive to add in later.
Many countries have laws and regulations, such as the Act on Welfare of Persons with Disabilities in Republic of Korea (대한민국), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the Equalities Act in the UK, the European Accessibility Act, or the MinTIC Resolution 1519 of 2020 Web Accessibility Guidelines (PDF) in Columbia, that prohibit disability discrimination and/or require online content to be accessible.
Most of these countries base their legislation around compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) (commonly 2.1 AA, with 2.2 adoption growing) which defines how to make web content more accessible, and failure to do so results in legal issues and penalties.
Outside of legal requirements, designing accessible online courses has other tangible benefits for both you and your learners. Ensuring that all users, including those with disabilities, can access and benefit from your content promotes inclusivity and equal opportunities for learning and participation which, in turn, broadens your potential audience by making your content usable by individuals with disabilities, older adults, and people using different devices and technologies.
Making content accessible, for example by using ALT text and clear headings often aligns with best practices for search engine optimisation (SEO), increasing your reach even further by improving your site’s visibility and ranking on search engines.
Accessible content enhances the overall user experience by making it easier to navigate, read, and interact with. This benefits all users, not just those with disabilities, and often leads to higher engagement and retention rates, as users are more likely to stay on your site and interact with your content if they can easily access and understand it.
Designing accessible eLearning courses reflects a commitment to social responsibility and ethical practices, demonstrating that you value and respect all users both current and in the future. As technology evolves, accessibility standards may become more stringent. Ensuring your content is accessible now can help future-proof it against upcoming changes and requirements whether they are external changes like regulations or internal ones like your target audience.
By prioritizing accessibility, you create a more inclusive, user-friendly, and effective online presence.
Universal Design for Learning: Designing for Variability from the Start
Despite what I think and have just stated, accessibility often enters the conversation as a compliance exercise; important, necessary, but sometimes framed as work that happens after the “real” design is done.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) changes that framing entirely which is why I’m rather fond of it.
Rather than retrofitting accessibility, UDL invites us to imagine from the outset that our learners show up with different motivations, backgrounds, sensory needs, time constraints, environments, cognitive preferences, etc. It treats diversity as a starting point rather than an exception.
As I say, I’m rather fond of UDL so I’m much more likely to design for flexibility rather than homogeneity. Instead of assuming there is one “best” way to present information, I look for meaningful alternatives: a video with captions and a transcript; a text explanation supported by a diagram; a process that can be experienced visually, aurally, or through step‑by‑step interaction. These aren’t extras, they’re parallel pathways that give learners the autonomy to choose the mode that best supports their understanding.
The same applies to engagement. Rather than relying solely on quizzes or discussions, I like a bit of variety. I might not be able to offer a direct choice in the courses I develop but I also do not rely on one or two interaction types. In the last module I created learners were asked to create artifacts to share, complete h5p interactions, interact with AI experts (that can be done both in typing and dictations), they could share voice and video notes, they could type messages, there are walk throughs using excentric characters to make complex materials more memorable though narrative. I think the one thing there isn’t is a straight quiz.
What matters is not the format but the alignment to the outcome. I’d honestly like to have more choice available to my students in modes and routes of engagement because when learners can pick the route that makes the most sense to them, the cognitive and emotional load of “how to engage” diminishes, letting them focus on the learning itself. The impact of which you could measure with tools Kirkpatrick’s Four levels. I have a practical guide to get you started.
Assessment is perhaps where UDL has had the greatest impact on my thinking and again an area I’d like to have more agency over but juggling accrediting bodies often limits the choices available. I’d like to think that is changing because allowing learners to demonstrate understanding in more than one format, a short essay, a narrated walkthrough, a prototype with an accompanying rationale, doesn’t dilute academic standards. The criteria remain the same; the modes vary. The result is often more equitable, more authentic, and more representative of how diverse professionals communicate in the real world.
Designing this way does not mean creating endless additional materials. In fact, UDL often reduces workload. Offering multiple pathways encourages us to strip away unnecessary complexity, write clearer instructions, and use more purposeful media. My ALT text decision tree (in my post Making Learning Content Accessible: A Designer’s Guide to WCAG Perceivable Principles) is a good example of this: by questioning the necessity of each image, I end up with cleaner, more focused content that happens to be more accessible as well.
What I value most about UDL is its ethos. It positions learners not as problems to solve but as humans whose differences deserve respect and anticipation. When content is designed with variability in mind, the experience becomes not only more inclusive but more engaging for everyone.
Best Practices for Accessibility
Following the WGAG guidance is best practice and for both technical and content elements that you have full control over. For elements that you don’t have full control over, like third party tools, databases, and platforms, searching for an accessibility statement will help you make an informed decision on the choices you make.
Tools and Technologies
There are many eLearning authoring tools available, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
Articulate 360 for example bundles authoring (Storyline, Rise) plus collaboration (Review 360). You’ll typically publish to an LMS for delivery. It includes the popular Storyline and Rise tools which are fairly intuitive and make for engaging learning pieces.
Lectora is known for its Section 508 and WCAG compliance but is also a powerful tool in its own right. Adobe Captivate, also a powerful tool, is known for its flexibility and advanced features making complex simulations possible.
Most authoring tools also come with integrated AI assistants now which can help you achieve your vision for your learning content but may also be a point of concern or extra thought if GDPR is relevant to you in any way or you are concerned about your content IP.
Other considerations in selecting tools your budget, the ease of use in relation to your skill set, as well as the specific features and capabilities that you need.
AI‑Enhanced Learning Design: A Practical and Human‑Centred Workflow
AI has become a quiet but transformative part of my day‑to‑day practice as a learning designer. Not in the “robots taking over” sense, but in the far more mundane, and far more helpful, sense of reducing the administrative and cognitive overhead that normally sits between raw SME materials and the creation of meaningful learning experiences. For me, AI is most valuable when it becomes a thinking partner that offers structure, possibilities, and momentum, while still leaving all pedagogical judgement and decision‑making firmly in human hands.
One of the places I’ve found AI genuinely useful is in early‑stage gap analysis. Module descriptors, learning outcomes, and SME‑provided content rarely align neatly. In fact, the more complex or time‑pressured the project, the more likely it is that the descriptors and the artefacts educators produce drift apart. To make the process workable, I use a consistent structure of four headings (Core Theoretical Content, Summary of All Week Activities, Workload & Gap Analysis Notes (High‑Level), and Potential Gaps / Pressure Points) and ask an AI model to organise all the provided materials under these categories, comparing them to what the stated needs are from the module descriptor. Using AI in this way doesn’t replace my judgment; what it does is give me a landscape view much earlier than I would otherwise have it.
Under Core Theoretical Content, I want a clear map of the concepts, theories, and models the SME has actually covered in their raw content and comparing it to the expectations stated in the module descriptor. AI does well at surfacing these quickly, especially when descriptors are verbose or written for regulatory purposes more than instructional ones. It then becomes immediately obvious whether the SME materials address those expectations, or whether certain theoretical foundations are nowhere to be found. I cannot, should not, will not write the subject matter content so knowing what is here as early as possible lets me talk to the SME at the earliest point possible for them to fill in some gaps.
The Summary of All Week Activities gets two passes. Once at this first overview stage. I will plug in any activities the SME has included in their raw content to see what knowledge and skills are already there. I come back for a second pass once I’ve created activities to make sure they fit within the workload comfortably.
The Workload & Gap Analysis Notes gives me a way to observe the shape of the learner’s journey. Even a quick, AI‑assisted pass can illuminate where the cognitive burden spikes unexpectedly or where pacing is likely to feel uneven. It highlights places where assessments arrive too early, or where preparation is too thin, or where the time expectation doesn’t match the complexity of the task. I always check and challenge these observations myself, but AI provides a surprisingly useful first read.
Potential Gaps / Pressure Points brings everything together into recommendations. This is where I invite AI to propose explanations for the patterns it notices: a missing scaffold here, an under‑developed skill there, a concept that got missed or went off on a tangent, weeks that would benefit from more practice opportunities.
None of these suggestions move into the course untouched, but I use them as a starting point for conversations with subject experts and for my activity creation. I like to create a few more holistic, weekly activities rather than tasks for each concept so having the ‘gaps’ in skills or knowledge as a guide speeds up my own planning by focusing my attention on the places where my intervention will make the greatest difference.
Similarly, when time pressures make it difficult to produce varied or imaginative activities, AI offers a useful springboard. It can draft scenarios, initial quiz items, or alternate ways of encouraging reflection. I often ask for fun way to cover the concepts/skills that learners won’t expect, just to see what it comes up with.
What makes this approach work is the human pass that follows: fact‑checking, sense‑checking, contextualising, rewriting, removing clichés, ensuring accessibility, and aligning everything to the intended cognitive demand. The raw generation is rarely what ends up in the final course, but the ideas themselves are often more inventive than the ones I would have produced at the end of a long day with six deadlines.
Used in this way, AI feels less like a threat and more like a kind of scaffolding; supportive, temporary, and always subordinate to human expertise. It provides shape, and sometimes pace, but never replaces the pedagogical thinking that ultimately determines the quality of the learning experience.
Best Practices for Content Creation
Truthfulness and accuracy of content should be at the top of any best practice list for content creation but especially elearning content creation. Building trust with your learners will draw them back if and when they want to continue learning and ensure that they think of you when making recommendations to their friends and associates.
In addition to truthfulness, maintaining a consistent design and tone throughout your content helps to create a cohesive and predictable learning experience. This includes using consistent fonts, colours, and layouts.
Style guides and templates make it easy to create a consistent experience for learners if they are followed consistently and including your branding not only gives content a visual consistency and professional feel, it also good advertising for you.
Providing regular opportunities for meaningful feedback and reflection helps learners to consolidate their understanding and identify areas for improvement.
Feedback might lean heavily on the interactive elements mentioned before for formative assessments and peer reviews or be as simple as asking learners to keep a learning journal that they can use to reflect on their progress and challenges, as well as how applications for what they have learned.
Feedback is not limited to learners though.
Measuring Effectiveness
Asking for feedback on your content is a crucial step in continuous improvement and maintaining your appeal as well as measuring elearning effectiveness.
Taking an iterative design approach to continuously improve your content can ensure your content stays relevant to your target audience but only if it is done thoughtfully.
Using data gathered through surveys and feedback forms, assessments and quizzes, or even platform analytics to adjust and enhance your content means you can prioritise the ones that will have the most meaningful impact for your learner and abandon the ones that will make little difference to your learners or how your content performs in the market.
Staying up to date on the latest trends and innovations will also provide fertile ground for developing innovative enhancements and adjustments for your content both in response to feedback and as a creative outlet.
You can then pilot test with small groups to see whether your innovations and adjustments produce the desired outcomes as well as identify and resolve issues before a full rollout, saving a lot of stress and, potentially, money.
Conclusion
Creating engaging and effective eLearning content requires a deep understanding of your audience, the use of interactive and multimedia elements, and a commitment to accessibility and continuous improvement. By experimenting with different techniques and tools, you can create eLearning experiences that are both enjoyable and educational.
