Development of eLearning Best Practices Good Organizations Need to Follow
Creating custom eLearning is like making a tailored suit for your organization’s learners—it needs to fit perfectly. Off-the-shelf courses can only take you so far; Custom eLearning allows you to address the unique needs of your members, industry context, and specific learning goals. However, designing engaging and effective courses from scratch can be challenging.
This guide will guide you through best practices for custom eLearning development. You’ll learn how to smoothly collaborate with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), apply visual design principles that improve retention, avoid common development pitfalls, and continuously improve your courses. Let’s build the best learning experience!
Ebook
Microlearning for Organizations: The Playbook for Engagement, Retention, and Revenue
Find out how to turn long, one-of-a-kind courses into short, focused, and impactful, engaging events that meet students where they are.
From Concept to Delivery: The Custom Process for eLearning
A successful custom eLearning project follows a systematic process to keep projects on track.
Needs Analysis
Start by identifying a specific learning need, such as job vacancies or new skills your members need. Members survey or review certification requirements to define clear learning objectives in advance, as these will guide everything else.
Design and Storyboarding
Next, define the course by deciding on content flow, interactions, and media. Create a storyboard or prototype to map out a screen-by-screen system that displays text, visuals, and interactions. Getting stakeholder feedback at this stage saves a lot of time later, as skipping the message board stage often leads to expensive changes.
Development
This is where the course comes to life. Developers use tools like Articulate Storyline or Adobe Captivate to create modules, render illustrations, record voice-overs, and program simulations. Check out the Storyline Examples that Speak and Rise in the resources below.
It is important to test as you build in a test environment to catch performance issues early.
Review, QA, and Implement
Before launch, conduct thorough quality assurance by having an SME review for content accuracy, a technical problem tester, and a user feedback testing team. This catches typos, broken links, and confusing instructions. Finally, publish the course in your LMS, set up registration or marketing, and ensure that support is available to students at launch.
Micro epiphany: Plan twice, build once—solid front-end design makes development and delivery smooth.
Working with SMEs and Creative Teams
Custom content shines when it combines deep expertise with engaging delivery, which means your SMEs and creative teams need to work together.
Involve SMEs early on during the requirements analysis and design phases, not just at the end for a reality check. Use your learning objectives as a filter for training SMEs in scope, separating what content is permanent versus what is “nice to have.” Work iteratively by sharing initial sketches or one sample lesson rather than a fully developed lesson, allowing them to prepare the lesson in small pieces. Encourage mutual respect: the SME has the authority over the content, while the Instructional Designer has the authority over the learning design.
Also, bring in creative professionals—such as graphic designers and multimedia producers—from the start. They may suggest visual or interactive ideas, such as an infographic instead of a text table, or a video of a member interview, which enhances the learning experience. Establish a clear review process using central tools and define who has the final say on content (SME) and educational quality (Instructional Designer).
Micro epiphany: Content experts + design experts = learning magic, but only if they really work together.
Real World Examples of Custom eLearning Development
- Health care: Interactive microlearning modules help nurses practice clinical decision-making through scenario-based simulations that build real-world skills.
- Finance: Compliance eLearning programs use industry scenarios to teach professionals how to identify and report ethical risks, improving accountability across teams.
- Production: Hands-on safety training includes 3D visualization and testing to ensure workers are performing advanced procedures before entering the production floor.
- Nonprofits: Volunteer boarding lessons mix storytelling and play to increase engagement and teach goal-driven skills quickly and effectively.
Here are some great examples of custom eLearning content for organizational learners:
5 Small Learning Examples That Increase Engagement and Completion Rates in Organizational Learning
Visual Design Principles That Improve Retention
The way the lesson looks has a direct impact on learning; good visual design directs attention, facilitates comprehension, and strengthens memory.
- Simplicity and consistency: Embrace white space and avoid clutter so that each screen focuses on one main idea. Use your organization’s brand colors, fonts, and logos consistently. The unified look of the icons and image styles means that readers spend less energy adjusting the interface and more on the content.
- Visual sequence and images: Direct the eye using size, color, and placement so that important headings are larger or more distinct, while supporting text is subtle. Use a meaningful image that reinforces the content—such as an accompanying chart or diagram—rather than generic images that can confuse or distract.
- Interactive and accessible design: Design interactive materials using common symbols and different styles so students know exactly what they can interact with. Ensure accessibility by using high-contrast colors, adding patterns or labels for color-blind readers, and providing different text for important images.
A well-designed course feels easy to navigate and understand, allowing students to focus on the content. Good graphics aren’t about making things pretty—they’re about making things clear and engaging.
Micro epiphany: Good design is invisible—if readers can’t see it, it’s doing its job.
Avoiding Common Pitfalls in Course Development
Even older teams run into classic pitfalls in custom eLearning development.
- Information overload: Kicking through all the information may be difficult for students. Use a “nice-to-know vs. need-to-know” test and leave out irrelevant content.
- Lack of interaction: Treating students as passive spectators will quickly lose them. Build on interactions every few minutes, such as checking multiple-choice information or a drag-and-drop activity.
- Ignoring mobile users: Designing for large screens only alienates mobile users. Test your course on a variety of devices, fix awkward text, and use responsive design features.
- Inadequate testing: Rushing the course may cause embarrassing problems. Ask your non-engineer colleagues to take a new course to catch overlooked problems before hundreds of members experience them.
- No tracking: Without tracking, much can be forgotten. Organize reinforcement strategies such as a summary cheat sheet or discussion thread, and end with a clear call to action.
Micro epiphany: Sometimes what you don’t put in or what you do is just as important as what you do.
Measure, Change, Repeat: Iterating to Improve
Delivering a custom eLearning course is not the finish line; The best programs treat lessons as living content that can be developed over time.
After the presentation, collect short end-of-course surveys to ask students what they found valuable and what could be improved. Check your LMS performance metrics to see if students are scoring well, taking a long time to complete, or dropping out of a particular module. If applicable, track real-world behavioral changes, such as increases in membership enrollment following a recruitment strategy course.
Use this information to keep refining the course. If the data shows that people bomb a topic, reteach it differently; if the section is considered boring, add a collaborative situation. Treat your course as Version 1.0 initially, and use real-world feedback to release 1.1, 1.2, and so on. Your members will notice that the lesson is getting better and know that you are listening.
Micro epiphany: The best lessons aren’t born perfect—they evolve to perfection through feedback and correction.
Development of eLearning Content for Training Needs
Designing custom eLearning for your organization is a journey that involves rigorous planning, teamwork, creativity, and continuous improvement. By following best practices—a clear development process, close collaboration with SMEs and designers, strong visual and interaction design, avoiding common mistakes, and iterative optimization—you can create learning experiences that truly impact members.
Remember that every lesson is an opportunity not only to inform, but to inspire and enable change. Keep students’ needs at the heart of your design choices, and you’ll deliver courses that don’t just “cover content,” but actually promote growth and skill in your community.
This was our deep dive into custom eLearning design. Next in this series, we’ll look ahead to how AI is shaping L&D and how organizations can use these emerging tools. Exciting things on the horizon!
Get your copy of Microlearning For Associations: A Playbook For Engagement, Retention, and Revenue today. It distills years of design expertise, data-driven insights, and real-world examples into an actionable roadmap for organizational leaders and L&D professionals.
Additional Services
Once you’ve downloaded our ultimate guide for organizations, check out these resources to learn more about custom eLearning development:
