No matter how engaging your eLearning content is, a poor user experience can harm learner engagement. Find out how LEO GRC uses responsive and adaptive design to deliver great user experiences.
At LEO Learning, we put a lot of time and effort into designing engaging and effective eLearning content. But that’s just one part of the solution to achieving high learner engagement. The other half is providing a seamless and niggle-free user experience for every learner who accesses our courses.
We’ve recently redesigned our off-the-shelf eLearning courses, including those on financial crime, operational risk, and most recently, market conduct. As part of that redesign process, we opted to use Gomo Authoring, the authoring tool created by our sister company, Gomo.
The key benefit of that decision is that gomo Authoring enables us to provide our clients with responsive and adaptive elearning courses.
More from the blog: '5 Learning Design Strategies for Learner Engagement'
What is Responsive and Adaptive eLearning Design?
Responsive design and adaptive design are actually two different concepts, although they are quite similar:
Adaptive design means that an eLearning course will automatically resize to fit on the screen it’s being viewed on—whether that’s a mobile, desktop, or laptop screen. It does this by detecting the screen size and then choosing the most suitable layout for that screen based on a set of predesigned layouts.
Responsive design is slightly different. It expands on the benefits of adaptive design by the use of a column-based layout system, which takes into consideration each element on the screen.
So, for example, when the screen is viewed on a phone, the screen will revert to a single column layout, with the text element appearing underneath the image element. While on a desktop, the screen layout will have these elements appearing side by side.
Gomo combines both of these approaches to deliver responsive and adaptive eLearning. Additionally, Gomo adds further flexibility with the use of screen conditions. This feature allows us to set rules on how certain kinds of content should appear on different screens, for example, diagrams and videos.
Why Should Responsive and Adaptive Design Matter to You and Your Learners?
Essentially, using a responsive and adaptive authoring tool, like Gomo, makes our eLearning courses device-agnostic. Our new generic courses can be viewed on any type of device or screen size, but more importantly, they look good and work well on those devices too. Responsive and adaptive design breaks down barriers to course access and completion, making the eLearning more accessible by design.
This is especially valuable for organizations with a broad learning audience, as they can be confident they are providing learners with a high-quality user experience, whether they’re using a top-spec PC, travel-friendly laptop, or mobile device.
For learners, responsive and adaptive design simply means a more enjoyable and less frustrating learner experience. Content is easier to view and course navigation is clear and easy to follow, even on small screen sizes.
A common problem with less flexible multi-device eLearning is that it simply scales down content so images, videos, and diagrams appear in less than ideal sizes. For example, a video that is in a landscape format may be locked to portrait or a horizontal flow diagram may be so scaled down that it ends up illegible. These niggles can be very offputting for learners, even if they’re really engaged with the content itself.
Responsive and Adaptive eLearning Can Make the Difference With Compliance Training
With compliance training, there are two keys to success: first, provide engaging learning content and second, deliver a smooth and friction-free user experience to as wide an audience as possible.