HOW TO: Create Online Training Courses

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What is the future of elearning?   How do you design online training courses?   How do you keep people interested? And how, if at all, will gamification and the social web change the way we learn?

Keeping up to date with the latest changes to software and web services we use for work has become a huge challenge.  And learning to use new software and online services requires a significant investment of time and energy.

Sure, there are plenty of options for coming up to speed. You can search Google for example, but you’re on your own to vet the results.  Or you can attend a workshop or seminar, but it’s expensive, you usually have to travel, and they teach to center of the class, which is either too slow or too fast for beginners or advanced users.

Online training provider Lynda.com had a library of 53,000 on-demand, online video tutorials which it makes available on a subscription basis. And 95% percent of those videos are produced in house.

In this episode, Michael Ninness, Vice President of Content at lynda.com provides an overview of how to design an online training course and the state and future of online training. Topics Discussed:

• How lynda.com grew based on customer demand.
• What makes a great online learning course.
• Formal versus informal presentation styles.
• What type of Internet training do tomorrow’s professionals want?
• Lynda.com’s online social media training courses on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.
• The episode of the Xyleme podcast, in which George Siemens argued that the future of online learning is not necessarily instructor led, on demand training, but rather, a more chaotic, participant organized environments.  
• Delivering compelling elearning to mobile devices.
• Globalization and technology have increased productivity, largely at the expense of workers.  How can online training improve efficiencies.
• Are activity streams and social networks a better way to locate information than directories and catalogs?
• Is gamification the key to keeping people interested?