E-learning tools

Why it matters

Self-paced e-learning lets a company train hundreds of people on its own schedule, and lets a teacher give students practice outside class. But "e-learning" often means clicking Next through slides with a quiz at the end, which teaches very little. Good e-learning uses interaction for retrieval, decision-making and feedback, not decoration.

What makes e-learning interactive in a useful way

Interaction should make learners think about the content. Useful kinds:

• Questions with feedback that explains why each answer is right or wrong.
• Scenarios and branching: "Your push was rejected. What do you do?" Each choice leads to a consequence and feedback. Cathy Moore's scenario-based approach puts these decisions at the center.
• Practice in a safe environment: a simulated terminal or, better, a real practice repository with instructions.
• Sorting and matching: classify commands into "changes history" and "safe to run".

Less useful interaction: click-to-reveal tabs that hide text, drag-and-drop with no thinking, and Next buttons. They add clicks without adding learning, and hidden content can be an accessibility problem.

The tool landscape

You do not need a paid tool to learn the craft. The design skills transfer.

Standards: SCORM, xAPI and cmi5

If your course will run in a learning management system (LMS), you will export it in a standard format so the LMS can launch it and record results:

• SCORM (1.2 and 2004) is the long-established standard for packaging courses and reporting completion and scores to an LMS.
• xAPI (Experience API) records richer statements ("Ana resolved a merge conflict") to a Learning Record Store, including activity outside the LMS.
• cmi5 is a profile of xAPI that defines how an LMS launches and tracks content, combining xAPI's flexibility with SCORM-style structure.

You will set up a course in an LMS in the Training Delivery & Evaluation course; for now, know that authoring tools export these formats.

Designing a short module

Use backward design even for a 10-minute module. Example: "Undo mistakes safely in Git".

1. Objective: given a description of a mistake, choose the safe Git command to undo it.
2. Evidence: five scenario questions at the end, each a different mistake.
3. Learning:
   • A short explanation with one diagram: "Some commands rewrite history; some add new history."
   • A worked example: undoing a pushed commit with git revert.
   • Three practice scenarios with feedback, for example:

You committed a typo fix to main and already pushed it. Your team does not allow rewriting main. What do you do?

• git reset --hard HEAD~1 then force-push. Feedback: this rewrites shared history, which your team forbids and which breaks others' copies.
• git revert HEAD then push. Feedback: correct. Revert adds a new commit that undoes the change, so shared history is kept.
• Delete the repository and clone again. Feedback: this does not remove the commit from the server.

4. Summary job aid learners can download.

Notice that the feedback explains the consequence. That is where most of the learning happens.

Accessibility in authoring tools

Choose content types that work with a keyboard and a screen reader, add alt text to images, caption videos, keep sufficient color contrast, and avoid timed interactions unless the timing is the skill. Test your module once using only the keyboard.

Pilot it

Before releasing, watch two or three people from the target audience go through the module while thinking aloud. You will find confusing instructions, broken branches and questions with two right answers. This is SAM's "successive approximation" in miniature.

Common mistakes

• Converting a slide deck into "e-learning" by adding Next buttons.
• Feedback that only says "Correct" or "Incorrect".
• Interactions that hide essential content behind clicks.
• Building in a paid tool before validating the design on paper.

Quick recap

• Interaction should make learners decide and retrieve, with explanatory feedback.
• Free tools (H5P via Lumi, Google Forms, Twine) are enough to learn the craft.
• SCORM, xAPI and cmi5 let an LMS launch and track content.
• Design backward, check accessibility and pilot with real learners.

Try it

On the Do tab, build a short interactive module with a free tool.