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Designers of e-learning programs face a number of challenges in designing the openings
of learning programs and sections. Some are practical; others are motivational.
The following guidelines help instructional designers address these challenges:
• For long-term courses, orient learners.
• For virtual classroom sessions, provide enough lead time for enrollment.
• Avoid an initial focus on “administrivia.”
• Launch into the content as early as possible.
The following sections describe these guidelines in detail.
For Long-Term Courses, Orient Learners
In her study of a cohort of learners taking an academic course online, Conrad (2002)
found that students had a high level of anxiety entering the course. To alleviate it,
many wanted access to the course a week in advance so that they could see what
was expected of them, become familiar with the technology, and find out who their
classmates were.
The learners in Conrad’s study are like many students in long-term academic
courses. So, whenever possible, provide them with access to information in advance
of the start of a course.
For Virtual Classroom Sessions, Provide Enough Lead Time for Enrollment
Similar orienting material is needed for virtual courses. As learners in classroom
courses must often make arrangements for their absence from the office before a class
or make travel arrangements to attend class, so learners in virtual classes must enroll
in advance, receive passwords to gain access to the course, download software
to run the course, and make sure that the software works on their systems and behind
their firewalls (if any) before the course actually starts. Unfortunately, many
administrators for online courses have learned that online learners—like classroom
learners—wait until the last minute to enroll, not leaving sufficient time to prepare
themselves to participate in the online session.
Avoid an Initial Focus on Administrivia
Although the course objectives, grading issues, payment issues (for public training
courses), and similar administrative considerations play a key role in the ultimate success
of a learning program, starting with these issues often serves as a demotivator.
Learners are there to launch into the content and want to do so as soon as possible.
One key challenge for designers of e-learning programs is how much information
they should provide on “how to take this course” at the very beginning of a
course or unit. For example, in the early days of e-learning, many courses included
twenty- to forty-minute units on how to take the course because the designers assumed
that learners were not familiar with the keyboard, and courses used the systems
in nonintuitive ways. This “overhead” frustrated many learners.
Of course it frustrated learners who were familiar with the course and wanted to
work with the content as quickly as possible. But this overhead also posed a problem
for those people going through a course for reasons other than learning. For example,
one group of instructional designers submitted their course for a competition
on e-learning. But because the course required all users go through a forty-minute
introduction to the keyboard and the course, the judges could not get to the course
content in a timely manner. Not surprisingly, the frustrated judges chose not to grant
an award to the course.
Launch into the Content as Early as Possible
Readability research suggests that content designers must hook readers at the beginning
of a learning program to increase the likelihood that readers will stick
around to the end. This is especially true with e-learning because learners are often
dropping out. For asynchronous e-training, some organizations have anecdotally reported
dropout rates as high as 90 percent. Dropout rates are similarly high in e-
courses offered by live virtual classroom and asynchronous discussion. Some universities
have anecdotally reported dropout rates as high as 67 percent (though more
institutions experience dropout rates closer to 33 percent).
One of the ways to avoid such high dropout rates is to grab the attention of learners
from the beginning of a learning program. This suggestion is not unique to elearning;
Gagne (1985) lists grabbing the attention of learners as the first of his nine
events of instruction, which he proposed long before e-learning earned its current
popularity.
Journalists face the same problem. Readers of news stories generally read the first
paragraph to decide whether they want to continue reading an article. Therefore,
news stories are written in a format called “the inverted pyramid.” That is, the most
important information is at the top of the story, and information that follows is of
decreasing importance. One journalism student reports that his professors said that
50 percent of readers stop reading by the end of the first paragraph; another 10 percent
by the end of the second.
Because it must carry the most important information—and because it is the only
paragraph that many people read—the first paragraph of a news story receives a disproportionate
amount of attention in news writing. The paragraph is called the lead,
because it leads the news story, and it must perform two functions:
• Report the main information about the story—who, what, where, when,
why, and how
• Grab readers’ attention so they continue reading
To ensure readers’ attention, reporters limit the length of a lead paragraph. A
common limit is thirty-five words.
Although content in an e-learning program does not necessarily follow the inverted
pyramid, because it is often presented in order of complexity (elements of less
complex content build on each other to be presented as more complex content), the
need to grab the attention of learners at the beginning of an e-learning program, as
well as the start of sessions of live virtual classes and units of asynchronous courses,
is no less important than it is for a news story.
Many experienced designers suggest hooking learners first by giving them a small
taste of the content, then presenting the administrivia of a course or lesson. At that
point, learners should have developed an interest in the content and not only have the
motivation to stick around, but the interest in validating their expectations of the content
and learning the expectations about their participation in the learning program. | 
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