How to Pick the Right eLearning Format
These pages are meant to aid you in identifying and categorising training needs with available formats of eLearning courses. The process of assigning a format to a given training objective is fairly subjective and driven by experience. The framework detailed on the next page will provide a starting point for this process.

Objectives of the training:

The most useful model for thinking about the objectives of any training mode comes from the work of Ruth Clark.¹

She breaks down training into three categories:

1. Inform: lessons that communicate information
   
2. Perform Procedure: Lessons that build procedural skills
   
3. Perform Principle: Lessons that build strategic skills.

Inform training is largely the transfer of facts and concepts that does not require a high degree, if any, interactivity. An example of this might be a rapid eLearning module produced and distributed quickly to an audience in a given company on procedural changes there.

Perform procedure training is designed to teach step-by-step tasks which are performed more or less the same way every time. Application training modules contain much of this type of training since the procedures are well defined and should be standard across a user group.

Perform principle training is designed to train strategies for situations that may have more than one correct approach or outcome. Dilemma or scenario- based training are very good examples of this objective.

Very little perform training is purely one or the other but usually a blend of both.

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¹Clark, Ruth and Richard Mayer. e-Learning and the Science of Instruction. San Francisco: John Wiley and Sons, 2008