NOTE: LearningZen Co-Founder Dennis Phillips is writing a series of blogs with regard to Getting the Most from e-Learning (GMEL) This is number one in the series. The introductory blog can be found in the archives.
A farmer, being on the point of death, wished to be sure that his children would give the same attention to his farm as he himself had given it. He called them to his bedside and said, "My children, there is a great treasure hid in one of my fields." The children, after his death, took their spades and mattocks and carefully dug over every portion of their land. They found no treasure, but the fields repaid their labor by an extraordinary and superabundant crop.Just like the farmer, we educators want our students to be anxiously engaged in looking for great treasure. In order to do that, we need to create interesting and valuable content. One of the key issues with e-learning is overcoming the high dropout rate. There are no national statistics, but a recent report in the Chronicle for Higher Education found that institutions report dropout rates ranging from 20 to 50 percent for distance learners. And administrators of online courses concur dropout rates are often 10 to 20 percentage points higher in distance offerings than in their face-to-face counterparts (Frankola).
According to a recent white paper (Engaging in the New eLearning) the most important factor in making e-learning effective is the students “must see the value in what is available and what is asked of them—and they must spot that importance swiftly. There is little patience for murky benefits to be revealed in the future.”
Our eLearning programs must have obvious and immediate benefit or we will lose the attention of those we serve with our training. A teacher in a seminar, or a classroom, has a captive audience. The value can come slowly and the educator has multiple opportunities to catch the attention of the student. Not so in e-learning.
At LearningZen, we have addressed this important factor in two ways. The first is the ability to prove that learning has taken place. LearningZen provides a certification to each and every student that completes a course and passes the associated exam. This is one of the distinguishing features of LearningZen. Obviously a certificate is no more valuable than the certifying body. However, if your company or teacher recognizes the certification and places a duly earned certificate in your personnel folder or your report card, that is true value and will encourage you to continue with the course to completion. 
The second way that we have addressed this concern is by providing the educators with a plethora of tools to make your courses as rich as possible. Courses that have been published on LearningZen are not just plain HTML text that you might see on Wikipedia or other repositories of information. Rather the educators have been creative in using multiple fonts, text sizes and styles. In addition, courses contain images, audio, video, flash and many other documents. There is really no limitation to the quality and interest that a course can have outside of the educator’s ability and willingness to be creative. Like the farmer in the fable at the beginning of the blog, I say “There is gold in them there hills!” And we hope our students will diligently search for it. Have fun designing great classes.
See more at http://www.learningzen.com/
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