When it comes to education in general, and employee learning in particular, technology has brought major change. Online learning, also known as "e-learning" or, more recently, as "e-education," is a pretty inclusive term and has room for all forms of technology-aided education. But it generally refers to the online interaction between available knowledge (or teacher) and the learner through technological means. 

No longer an abstract concept, e-learning is part of the current employee training strategy of many organizations and is become more popular as time passes by. According to data released by the American Society of Training & Development (ASTD), in 2011, technology-based learning methods accounted for 37.3 percent of formal hours available across all learning methods. Among large organizations, companies surveyed all reported increased usage of formal learning hours used via technology-based methods. And in organizations already recognized as leading investors in technology-based employee training, those companies reported a record high usage of e-learning methods with 50 percent of their formal learning hours being delivered via a technology-based method.

In spite of this, online learning has a few barriers to overcome. Among the most common of them are:

• The high costs of system development, including costs of technology (hardware and software), information transmission network, maintenance of equipment, and production materials.
• The difficulty of implementing of a consistent and sustained effort on the employee side, requiring intermediate technical support and administrative staff.
• In some programs or on some devices, the learners need to have advanced computer knowledge.
• Employees must be highly motivated to participate. The dropout phenomenon is much more common in online learning than in traditional courses, as more impersonal interrelations are in place, thus making it easier for the student to stop a course.
• The relative "dehumanization" of courses until the development of optimal strategies that focus on employee interaction and not on the system.

Although these problems have a not-so-common base, they can be resolved with the aid of a well-planned strategy. Here are 10 useful tips in this regard:

1. Know your audience. You need to understand what they are already capable of and what each course should be able to teach them. Determine their level of education knowledge input, and their aims in making progress. This will prove very useful in setting apart the performance gap, that gap between what they already understand and can do, and what they should know and be able to do.

2. Set clear objectives that your students are expected to be able to fulfill after they would have finished the course. The learning objectives must be SMART (specific, measureable, achievable, relevant, and targeted on your audience). These objectives will help guide the development of each course’s content.

3. Use those learning goals as a guide, start by storing course content relevant for the given task. Keep your information relevant and focused, with minimal foreign details. And "cut" the course content into small bites that are easy to digest by your audience.

4. Use the broad media available in online learning to help you adopt different learning styles, such as auditory and visual learning. Use graphics, narration and text but not necessarily all at once.

5. Specify "WIFM" ("What's In It For Me?") to your workers. Employees aim to know how the different things they learn will help them at the workplace, and also why they are learning them. 

6. Employees usually prefer to have some or a lot to control over the learning material. They want to have the responsibility in the form of their proper learning. This favors the use of self-paced training, providing tools to evaluate their own progress and implementation of progress between different learning activities. One tool which can help in this regard is WalkMe, which softly guides learners to accomplishing their objectives while giving them their own freedom of choice.

7. Provide a "gate" that learners must overcome before they can progress to more difficult content. This "gate" can consist in a demonstration, test or role-playing activity.

8. If the students have different settings and experience levels, take into account the use of a pre-test to "resolve" their knowledge gaps and even to allow advanced students to "opt-out" of the content which too basic for them.

9. Once the course has been created, employees need to be the ones that have access to it, and not just some other developers. Employees are the ones who can offer real-world feedback and insight over the things which can be improved within the course.

10. Consider creating "cheat sheets," "job aids," "quick reference cards," or other useful reminders for learners to access during their workplace time. This will help to keep them focused and provide them with useful information at the same time.

You need to understand the needs of your students, and use some of your skills in order to meet them. In this way, you will significantly improve your online learning programs.

Jason Silberman is marketing director at WalkMe, an interactive online guidance system and engagement platform. He is the lead author and editor of Training Station, a blog devoted to news and ideas on training, learning and employee performance. He just published a free eBook – “Express Train: How to Accelerate Employee Time to Competence” – with tips on overcoming some of the common challenges in employee training. Follow him at @tstationblog.