Nowadays distance teaching and learning becomes more and more popular. Without the face to face feeling and feedback, as a teacher, how to attract learners’ attention during the distance teaching becomes a popular question. This article gives you some tips and resources empower nontechnical subject matter experts to create engage courses using nothing more complicated than Microsoft PowerPoint. Click to view sample courses >>

Courses with Pictures
Anyone who’s ever designed an eLearning course, corporate brochure or any form of graphic design, has at one time or another been asked to replace one or more images that could be perceived to be offensive or biased.

Lee and Bowers (1997) studied a group of university students to determine under which set of conditions people learned best. The participants were given a pre-test, they then learned the material, and then were given a post-test. Their learning was compared with the learning of a control group that took the same pre- and post-tests, but studied a different topic in-between. When compared with the learning performance of the control group, the people in the different groups always demonstrated more learning:

• Hearing spoken text and looking at graphics – 91% more learning,
• Looking at graphics alone – 63% more,
• Reading printed text plus looking at graphics – 56% more,
• Listening to spoken text, reading text, and looking at graphics – 46% more,
• Hearing spoken text plus reading printed text – 32% more,
• Reading printed text alone – 12% more,
• Hearing spoken text alone – 7% more.

Courses with teacher’s Narration

Students who listened to a narration explaining how a bicycle tire pump works while also viewing a corresponding animation generated twice as many useful solutions to subsequent problem-solving transfer question than did students who listened to the same narration without viewing any animation (Mayer & Anderson, 1991,1992). It’s so easy to record the narration for the eLearning courses from microphone.

Many eLearning tools help you to create multimedia eLearning courses with narration and video clips. Such as Wondershare PPT2Flash Professional.

Courses with featured sample video

The multimedia effect is consistent with a cognitive theory of multimedia learning because students given multimedia explanations are able to build two different mental representations – a verbal model and a visual model – and build connections between them. A sample video could give the students an engaged impression.

Free Image Resources

• Microsoft Office Online.  Microsoft offers quite a few really nice images.  For example, just do a search of “business people” to start. 
• Stock.xchng.  This is a good blend of free images and links to relatively inexpensive stock images.
• Flickr.  There are many photo community sites like Flickr where people upload their photos for use based on the Creative Commons license.