The Ultimate Guide to Buying E-Learning Courses for Business

In this article, we take a deep dive into what to look for in an e-learning course before you buy it. Business training courses have evolved in recent years, and there are some key quality markers that you should look out for and seek out if you are looking to ensure quality learning for your team.

If you’re a head of department, or part of your leadership, or head of a training department, and you’ve been tasked with finding courses related to current technology, and indeed the technologies that are most likely to impact your industry today, then this article is for you.

If you’re worried about choosing the wrong course, if you’re worried about it not being accessible enough or compatible, we have broken down the key things to look out for and the simple steps you can take to ensure you’re purchasing quality course content for your organisation. You’ll walk away with a clear understanding and confidence in your buying decisions.

Audio narration is super important

Buyers should look out for things like audio narration for course content, which is a huge benefit, especially for audible learners versus learners who can focus well on written word.

Look out for interactive moments within e-learning courses

Another thing to look out for is interactive moments within course content. Often it’s very easy for course publishers to put words on a page without giving a level of interactivity midway through the course. So whilst yes, question and answers at the end of course modules are impactful, what we find often more impactful is midway through modules having interactive quizzes. Things like short question and answer with a slider that users can be asked to estimate certain things, or it could be some form of short memory game, or true or false. Just something that is more of a pattern break between course content slides to keep learners engaged.

Video content engages people

The other thing that we find valuable for learners is video content. At least one video per course module helps to ground the learner and make them feel like they are being guided through the course, rather than being given essentially a body of text to consume.

Quality over quantity

When building e-learning courses, one area to focus on ensuring quality structure is the quiz section of a course. Often when providing multiple choice quiz questions, there is almost a human subconscious pattern that you provide the longest answer as the correct answer, and it’s easy to provide incorrect answers as shorter, probably because it’s easier. So that’s one thing to keep in mind: don’t allow your subconscious to take over. And when constructing questions and answers for course material, try to add variation in the length of answers from a word count perspective, to ensure you’re not producing a pattern that learners can pick up on. This isn’t to trick learners up. Instead it’s to ensure that we are providing knowledge and training that stimulates, rather than something you just go through the motions on because you understand a pattern in the correct answers, or indeed the incorrect answers.

Compliance and training proof

With SCORM 1.2, we can log if a learner has completed a course. So when a company integrates into their own learning management system, or LMS, or they utilise someone else’s LMS, as long as they are using a SCORM compliant LMS and the course itself is SCORM, which is essentially just a fancy name for a file type for course material. Then the training department, the head of training, or whoever is helping to push this training initiative will be able to point to proof that however many learners were put through got through to the end and completed the course.

Ensure course content is up to date

Course publishers should always provide clear signs of when a course was updated and up to date as of a certain date. Courses going out of date can be quite risky, especially if a learner is going through a course that talks about things related to compliance or the law. So ensuring that companies and businesses purchase courses that have been produced ideally within that calendar year is important.

Things to look out for when running in your own LMS

The most common reason is if your LMS does not support SCORM. However, that is a rare occurrence, given that the majority of modern LMS systems accept SCORM. SCORM is the most widely accepted file format for course learning content. So buyers can double check if their LMS accepts SCORM, but we can say with relative confidence that it will, and we would be surprised if it doesn’t, given it’s the most prolific file format for learning courses.

Accessibility is king

Accessibility is a huge part of course content creation and course publishing, and we believe that course publishers should have a strong focus on accessibility across their entire course library: ensuring that colours are highly legible, that font sizes are large enough to not cause a learner to strain their eyes. And just in general, an accessible course is an enjoyable course, as a general rule, and a rule that we like to remind ourselves of every day as we publish new courses.

Blocknorth prides itself in providing highly accessible courses with a range of modalities for learning across audio narration, video content, and interactive quizzes that keep learners engaged. Our range of AI training courses is a great example of the course content that we describe, which includes that wide range of learning modalities and accessibility features.

We think that the value in course production is in the attention to detail and the provision of interactive moments within a course versus large bodies of text. And that often separates a good publisher from a great publisher.