test9 eLearning Content Types and When to Design Them

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Helen Colman

Helen ColmanAll articles by this author

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You've been tasked with developing your first training course, and the time frame is tight. What next?
That’s a very abrupt first sentence for an article - but that’s how it can feel when an eLearning content
development project is dumped on you for the first time.

Where to start? What type of end product is required? What is even feasible in the project’s time frame
and budget? There are so many questions that need answering but one of the main ones is ‘what type of
eLearning content will you be developing’?

You may wonder if there is a perfect roadmap for relevant and engaging eLearning content, but given
the unique variables of each project, it’s difficult to cover everything in a single plan.

Varying factors include:

Your team size

Amount of content

The subject at hand and ideal mode of content delivery

The audience’s knowledge

Your business goals

Let’s look at the different types of eLearning content so you can make an informed decision about which
ones might be a good fit for your project.

Quick and Easy eLearning Content Types

Some of these types can be created even faster by using a modern authoring toolkit such as iSpring
Suite, so we’ll also look at ways this tool can help in each context.

1. Slide-based courses

Slide-based courses are what most people think of first when they hear ‘eLearning’. They involve the
user taking a self-paced course where learners view slides with interactive units and possibly narration
and other multimedia elements. Such courses often have a look and feel similar to PowerPoint
presentations.

This kind of content might be preferable in a number of different scenarios. Consider using it, for
example, if you:

Have existing learning materials in presentations, documents, PDFs, or other formats that you can easily
repurpose into an online course

Need to get some offline training into an online format fast

Want to put new employee onboarding on autopilot

Need to get a refresher training on a new product or service out quickly

How iSpring can help

There are a couple of things you want to avoid with slide-based courses. The first is making them like a
boring presentation that won’t engage learners. The second is spending too much time developing
them. Fortunately, iSpring Suite can help in both cases. With iSpring you can import existing slide
content, complete with all transitions and animations, and turn it into a course in a couple of clicks or
build a course from scratch in a matter of minutes.

Here’s a demo of a course created with iSpring Suite.

How to Create Online eLearning Courses – The Definitive Guide to the Development Process →
2. Quizzes

Quizzes, tests, assessments, or knowledge checks – whatever you choose to call them – are an essential
component of most eLearning courses. Why? Quizzes allow you to track your learner’s knowledge and
ensure the learning objectives of your training are being met. They are also a fun and interactive way to
break up the content in your training modules and provide a natural breakpoint between main topics
that will give learners a sense of progression within your course.

How and when you use quizzes will depend on the type of courses you are building and whether they
are formal or informal, accredited or not, and a number of other factors. Generally, when you are
planning your course, consider:

For short, informal courses, knowledge checks at the end of topics or modules may be more appropriate
than a long final quiz.

For longer courses, consider a more formal final assessment with feedback and info slides.

How iSpring can help

iSpring Suite has a powerful built-in quiz maker with 14 distinct question types, including interactive
sequence questions, fill-in-the-blanks, and hotspot questions. By combining different types, you can
make complex assessments that will really challenge your learners.

iSpring also has an advanced drag-and-drop question builder, so you can create activities that require
your learners to sort items – for example, to see if they understand basic merchandising rules and can
grab buyers’ attention as in the demo below:

Knowledge Checks in eLearning: Assess to Success →

3. Training videos

Video content is more popular than ever, and with good reason – it’s always more engaging than text or
pictures alone. There are several ways you can use video content in your eLearning:

Standalone training videos. You can use video as the only type of content. For example, you could record
a series of videos on a soft skill like speaking in meetings.
Embedded videos. You can embed videos in your eLearning course. The video could be content that you
created yourself, or public domain, or stock footage. The nice thing about this approach is that you can
use video for certain topics and mix up more interactive elements within the course.

Webinar or live training playback. This method is simply providing recordings of previous live or virtual
classroom training and making them available online via an LMS or other platform. This is a great and
inexpensive way to incorporate video into your eLearning content.

There are also several types of video content that are typically used in training and include, but are
certainly not limited to:

Video tutorials. These are the familiar ‘how-to videos’ and often feature additional on-screen text, call-
out boxes, and other elements.

Presenter screencasts. These feature your screen and the video from your webcam simultaneously.

Software tutorials. These are used to teach how to use software. Typically, the video capture tool will
automatically detect when you move the cursor, press keys and click screen elements, and will add
visual cues for these actions to the video, like highlighting boxes on data entry fields.

How iSpring can help

If you opt for video-based learning only, you may wish to use a standalone video editing tool. But if
you’re also going to create other types of eLearning content like slide-based courses and quizzes, then
an authoring toolkit can be a better and ultimately cheaper option. iSpring Suite includes a built-in video
studio that can create high-quality videos by recording your screen, webcam, and audio and then editing
the clips all inside a single platform.

How to Create Employee Training Video: A Practical Guide and Tips →

4. Podcasts

Podcasts have risen in popularity to become a mainstream form of media familiar to just about
everyone. They are already used in various spheres of business, so organizations have also started using
them as a convenient tool for learning and development.

Podcasts are mobile and available 24/7, so employees can listen and learn whenever they want. They
also offer a number of opportunities to improve employee retention, since they don’t require a specific
time to listen – the audience can listen to podcasts while doing virtually any other activity, including
working.
Podcasts are great for non-assessable training, particularly skills that revolve around mindset,
motivation, and other ‘soft skills.’ They can also be useful for presenting longer format use cases and
scenarios in the form of ‘stories’ that would be way too long to present in, say, a dialog simulation.

5. Dialogue simulations

A dialogue simulation is an eLearning content type that simulates a real-world conversation with a
customer or other third party. It’s great for teaching customer service, sales skills, and any type of
training scenario that involves the need for conversation between two parties to establish facts,
negotiate, and reach mutually beneficial conclusions in a risk-free environment. Good dialogue
simulations tend to use branching scenarios, where each decision an employee makes has consequences
that affect the outcomes and the next stage of the sim.

How iSpring can help

iSpring Suite makes creating outstanding dialog simulations simple and quick with no need for technical
coding. To make them more realistic, you can add backgrounds, characters, and voice overs for each
scene. You can upload your own images or use the built-in collection of assets. A great way to save time
on course development is to use iSpring Content Library, which offers a large set of characters of
different ages, ethnic groups, and professions, and a huge collection of locations suitable for different
situations.

Check out an example of a dialog simulation built with iSpring below.

Black Belt In Negotiations: How to Improve Your Employees’ Skills with Dialogue Simulations →

6. E-books

This type of eLearning content is not seen as often as the others mentioned, but it’s a very quick and
easy way to share things like standard operating procedures, step-by-step processes, and other manuals
with your employees, and provide a good reading experience.

This is a great option if you have material sitting around in Word or PDF format that is underutilized or
simply not available to learners in a format that is easy to access and consume.
How iSpring can help

iSpring Suite has a built-in tool that quickly turns your documents into interactive digital flipbooks. You
can upload them to an LMS, share with your learners, and track as they read.

Books are great to read on mobile devices. They automatically adapt to screen size and orientation, so
it’s comfortable to read them on iOS, Android, and Windows tablets and smartphones.

Here’s an example of such a flipbook:

How to Create a Digital Flipbook →

Advanced eLearning Content Types

The next set of content types requires more of everything to develop. More skills, more time, more
budget, more human capital, and in many cases, more technology.

These are the types of content you might consider for an especially important cornerstone training
program. Although you might not use these immediately, it is worth knowing about them and how they
may fit into your wider learning program or roadmap.

7. Interactive videos

In normal training videos, learner passivity or lack of engagement can become a drawback, particularly
in longer format videos. This can be where interactive videos fit in. Technology now enables us to
provide interactions with videos, such as hotspots and quizzes. This could be a good choice if you want
to add the ability for users to click, drag, scroll, hover, gesture and complete other digital actions to
interact with the video’s content.

For example, Samsung created an interactive video that walks customers through the different features
and navigation buttons for their phone’s camera. An interactive menu prompts the viewer to choose
which features they want to learn about and tells them how to enable the features on their own phone.

Samsungs' interactive video example