Gidi,

Welcome to the world of online learning where, in many cases, the reality is, "If I build it they won't necessarily come."

There are so many issues to consider, that I recommend working with a professional who has experience building online course for business purposes.  Here are some considerations I would look at:

1. Do your courses meet the needs of your customers?  To accurately answer this question, you need to ask your customers what they want and need.  It's possible you have built courses for which there is no interest or demand.  Do your research, and be certain you target what your customers want.  Several years ago I consulted for a company that had plans to implement a major new product feature - one that their salesforce said was needed.  Wisely, the company decided to hold a workshop for their largest customer base, and in that process we discovered the feature they thought was desired was actually at the bottom of the list from their customers' perspectives.
2. Are your courses designed and structured so customers can readily find the information they need?  The needs of business customers are often different from the needs of academic students.  Very often business customers are looking for specific information or help; they do not have the time or interest to work through a long course sequence to get what they want. 
3. Does participation in your courses provide an experience that draws customers back to your courses?  This is sometimes called the 'stickiness' factor - elements of course content, design or participation that draw participants back for more.  There are many factors to stickiness - design, graphics, ease of navigation and use, appropriate content, satisfaction, ability to get assistance when needed, interactive activities, a feeling of accomplishment after taking a course or working through a module, and much more.  On the negative side, long videos, large documents and lots of text will quickly kill course participation.

I often ask three simple questions to help determine the effectiveness of a course or workshop.  You might start with these.

1. Did this course meet your expectations or provide the information you needed?  Please explain.
2. What aspects of this course were most helpful for you?
3. How can this course be improved to make it more effective?

- Floyd

Hi Gidi,

It's pretty normal for most people's first attempts at elearning not to succeed. Implementing successful elearning in any context is a complex process and every case has its own unique circumstances that can influence it. Many universities are reporting dropout rates as high as 70% for elearning but this can be for a broad range of reasons and contributing factors not related to curricula, e.g. people who opt for elearning courses often do so because they have conflicting commitments.

For more successful curriculum development, the best advice I can recommend is to inform yourself as much as possible about learning and teaching theory, and practice in general, and how computer mediated communication, i.e. elearning, affects this. One area of research that seems to have some promising avenues to explore is Randy Garrison's Communities of Inquiry project at the university of Calgary: http://communitiesofinquiry.com/

In a corporate or professional setting, you'll probably find Reflective Practice (Donald Schon) and the professional development programmes for medical practitioners at McMaster University in Hamilton (HG Schmidt) helpful, as well as Etienne Wenger's work on Communities of Practice: http://www.ewenger.com/. All of these principles have been successfully implemented in elearning and blended learning contexts. This guy sums up Reflective Practice rather well: http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/reflecti.htm

In implementing and developing elearning programmes, you're going to do a lot of learning yourself. I'd be wary of anyone who claims to have "the answer" or "proven" solutions for elearning issues. Learning and teaching is complex and it's difficult, if not impossible, to establish direct cause - effect relationships between curriculum development and learning outcomes. In this respect, we're all learning and we all depend on each other for finding promising avenues to pursue and share our findings.

Good luck and happy learning!

Hi Gidi,

there is an another angle which i guess should be considered..

1. how much you are connected to students
2. Is there any way students can immediately contact you in case they find any difficulties
3. In online courses, there is always and a regular need to interact with students that you have not participated, you have participated, if not participated then why?, intimation about new contents, asking regular feedbacks etc.. as per my personal experience it really increases participation.
4. your content placement should also be neat, navigation should be simple.

overall along with other's suggestions, i would advise to look at increasing interaction with students..

Cheers
Nitin

Before providing feedback is there a link so that we may review the content or have I missed it?