General Best Practices for Designing eLearning Pages

elearning course pages should be designed for optimal online delivery and learning experience.

Here are some general tips for designing your eLearning pages:

• Structure your page content clearly. People often scan quickly though a page, reading headers and the first few words of a paragraph or list.
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• Put the important information up top. Put all explanatory information, as needed, below.
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• Include a header and a topic sentence at the beginning. (What is this content about?)
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• Keep content text to the minimum required. (The more words on a page, the less likely people will read it all.)
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• Leave white space on the page to aid readability.
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• Use bold and italics consistently for specific reason in order to make text stand out (e.g., for directions to the learner and for the names of buttons; do not use all capitals or underlining as these are harder to read).
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• Make sure lists use parallel construction (the lead-in sentence and each bullet item must make a complete sentence).
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• Left-aligned text is easier to read than fully justified text.
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• Add graphics or illustrations that clarify or aid understanding (purely decorative images can detract from learning).
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• Make link text meaningful and ensure it matches the document or page name.
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• Size any graphics for the image area on your page.
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• Use multimedia and interactivity (such as animation, video, actions, image maps, hot spots) to increase understanding and learning, avoid simply for “eye candy”.
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• ‍Let the learner be in control of playing multimedia and audio using the Player Controls instead of auto-playing (narration audio is typically set to auto-play, but the learner can use the mute button if required).