E-Learning Examples: 10 Formats and 6 Full Scripts
Ten e-learning formats with a real example of each, six complete module scripts you can copy, and where to study free government courses.
E-Learning Examples
Ten formats with a real module named for each, six complete examples written out screen by screen rather than left as blanks, the free government courses worth studying, and the two details every published example leaves out
My first e-learning course was our employee handbook pasted across 22 slides with a next button on each one. It had a completion bar, it lived in a browser, and by every definition in the industry it was e-learning. Nobody learned anything from it, and I could not have told you what a single person who finished it was supposed to be able to do afterward.
The problem was that every example I had studied first was a screenshot. A polished course selection screen from a company with an instructional design team, a badge wall, a beautifully illustrated character pointing at a chart. None of them showed me the thing I actually needed, which was the words on the screens.
So this article is the other kind of example. Ten formats, each with a real module named rather than described in the abstract, and then six complete examples written out screen by screen, script and all: a branching scenario, a screencast lesson, a gamified series, a five-day microlearning run, an interactive compliance module, and a practice task with its rubric. I build the training modules and completion records inside FirstHR, so I spend most of my week looking at what small employers actually assign, and almost none of it looks like the screenshots.
What Separates a Good E-Learning Example From a Bad One
A good e-learning example has four parts: one objective written as something the learner can do, a decision the learner has to make, a check tied to that objective, and a record that survives the year. Format is the last decision, not the first.
The reason this test matters is that most published examples fail it quietly. A gallery of screenshots shows you the interface and hides the objective, the decision, and the record, which are the three things you have to build yourself and the three things nobody can sell you.
Ten E-Learning Formats and a Real Example of Each
Ten formats cover almost everything a small employer will ever build, and the build times below are realistic for one non-specialist with the tools already on their laptop. The example column names a specific module rather than describing a category.
| Format | A real module in that format | Length | Build time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Screencast walkthrough | Processing a refund, recorded on the real terminal during a real transaction | 4 min | 45 min |
| Talking-head video | Why we call every customer back within 24 hours, filmed by the owner on a phone | 3 min | 30 min |
| Branching scenario | The 6:55 return: two decisions, three consequence screens, and a debrief | 7 min | 3 hours |
| Gamified series | Product knowledge ladder: 6 modules, 60 points, three tiers, one badge | 30 min total | 4 hours |
| Microlearning run | Allergen week: one 3-minute lesson a day for five days | 15 min total | 2 hours |
| Scenario quiz | Ten cash-handling situations, with feedback written for every wrong answer | 8 min | 1 hour |
| Digital job aid | The closing checklist, opened at the terminal at 9 p.m. rather than read in week 1 | 2 min | 20 min |
| Practice task with rubric | Write the reply to a real customer email, scored against four criteria | 20 min | 40 min plus review |
| Narrated slide course | Supervisor harassment prevention: 6 parts, scenario checks throughout | 2 hours | Buy it or budget days |
| Recorded live session | The monthly product update, recorded once and assigned to whoever missed it | 30 min | 30 min |
Two patterns run through that table. The cheapest formats are the ones recorded from work that was happening anyway, and the expensive ones are the ones that require somebody to invent a situation. That is the whole cost structure of building your own online employee training, and it explains why the first course most businesses finish is a screencast.
The second pattern is device. Seven of the ten work on a phone held at a counter, and the three that do not are the ones needing a keyboard or a scheduled block: the practice task, the narrated slide course, and the recorded live session. If your team is on a floor, in a van, or behind a line, that is not a detail to fix later.
Six Complete E-Learning Examples
Each of these is a finished example rather than a template with blanks in it. The businesses are composites and the products are invented. The screen order, the wording, the scoring, and the records are the parts worth copying.
Example 1: A Branching Scenario
This one teaches judgment under time pressure, which is the only thing branching is worth building for. Notice that the wrong answers do not end the module. They show the consequence and send the learner back to the same decision, which is the mechanic that makes a scenario feel like practice rather than a test.
The design decision that does the most work here is that both wrong options are reasonable. Quoting the policy and fetching the manager are things a careful employee would genuinely do, and a scenario whose wrong answers are obviously wrong teaches nothing except how to spot the trick.
Example 2: A Screencast Lesson
This is the format to build first, because the content already exists and you are only recording it. The shot list and burned-in text below are what turn a screen recording into a lesson someone can follow at 1.5 speed six months later.
One take, on the real terminal, during a real transaction. A rehearsed recording on a demo account produces a video where the fields are empty and the edge cases never appear, and the edge cases are the entire reason anyone opens the module.
Example 3: A Gamified Series
Gamification fails when the points are decorative, so this example spells out the scoring rules and what the top tier is actually worth before it names a single badge.
The deliberate omission is the leaderboard. On a small team it ranks people who already know who is fastest, and the person at the bottom disengages in the second week. The mechanics that survive at this size are progress against your own last score and a tier that unlocks something real, both of which are covered further in gamification in training.
Example 4: A Microlearning Run
Five short lessons on five consecutive days beat one long lesson on the same subject, because the content lands five separate times immediately before the shift where it gets used.
The Monday lesson is written out in full because the specificity is the point. Nine allergens is generic knowledge available anywhere. Sesame is in our bun and our house dressing, and the house dressing goes with seven entrees, is the sentence that changes what someone does at the table.
Example 5: An Interactive Compliance Module
Compliance is where the design stops being a matter of taste, because a statute or a regulation sets the length, the interactivity, and the records. This example is built against a real specification rather than a preference.
The scenario in part 4 is the one I would keep if I could keep only one screen. Supervisors rarely get the polished complaint the training slides describe. They get a sentence in a parking lot with a request to keep it quiet attached, and the correct response is the one that nobody finds comfortable.
Example 6: A Practice Task With a Rubric
Some skills have no multiple-choice version. When the thing you need is a piece of writing, a phone call, or a demonstration, the module is a submission and the assessment is a rubric the learner sees before they start.
Showing the rubric first feels like giving away the answers, and it is not. A rubric is a description of what good looks like, and hiding it only guarantees that the first submission misses the target for reasons the learner could not have known.
What a Full Course Looks Like, by Topic
A course is a sequence of modules with a completion rule, and the shape changes a lot by subject. These six are full courses rather than the single modules above, with the seat time, the assessment, and the record named for each.
| Course topic | Modules | Total seat time | How it is checked | What gets recorded |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New hire orientation | 7 | 45 min | One check per module plus a policy acknowledgment | Completion date and signed acknowledgment |
| Food safety and allergens | 5 | 15 min | A one-question check daily, then a 5-question Friday test | Per-employee log, passing standard 4 of 5 |
| Supervisor harassment prevention | 6 | 2 hours | Scenario questions throughout, no final exam | Date, module version, and written questions with their responses |
| Product knowledge | 6 | 30 min | 5 scored questions per module, tiers at 40, 55, and 68 points | Points, retakes used, and tier reached |
| Equipment and lockout | 4 | 25 min | Written check plus a supervised demonstration | Trainer sign-off with date and equipment listed |
| Customer situations | 6 | 50 min | Branching scenario results plus one scored submission | Rubric scores, reviewer name, and submission text |
Two of those six are checked by a human rather than by the system, and that is not a failure of the software. A lockout demonstration and a written customer reply are the two places where a passing score in a browser would be meaningless, so the module produces a sign-off sheet instead. A training matrix is where those sign-offs stop living in somebody's inbox.
Seat time is also the number people inflate. A 45-minute orientation split across seven short modules gets finished in the first week. The same content sold as a three-hour session gets deferred, then rescheduled, then completed at double speed on the last day of the month with the tab in the background.
The Same Module, Written Badly and Written Well
Most bad e-learning is not badly produced. It is badly aimed. Here is one module on a single subject, cash handling, written both ways, with the change stated for each line.
| Element | The version most businesses build | The version worth building | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Objective | Understand our cash handling policy | Count a drawer at close and correctly report a variance over $5 | An observable action replaced a state of mind |
| Opening screen | A title slide with the course name and the company logo | A photo of a drawer that is $18 short, and the question of what you do now | The learner has a problem before they have a policy |
| Body | 11 slides restating the policy document in a smaller font | Three screens: the count sequence, the two mistakes that cause most variances, and the escalation rule | Content organized by what goes wrong rather than by the policy structure |
| Interaction | None, or a next button described as self-paced | Two scenario questions with feedback written for each wrong option | The learner decides something and finds out what follows |
| Assessment | Five recall questions on policy wording | One scenario: you are $18 short at 9:40 p.m. and the manager has left | The check now tests the situation the training exists for |
| Length | 35 minutes, because the policy is long | 6 minutes, because the objective is one thing | Length set by the objective rather than by the source document |
| Record | A completion checkmark | Name, version, date, scenario answer, and pass or fail | Evidence rather than attendance |
The most valuable row is the first one. Almost every weak module in a small business can be traced back to an objective that started with the word understand, because an objective nobody can observe produces a course nobody can assess and a record nobody can use.
Free Finished Courses Worth Studying
Federal and state agencies publish complete e-learning courses you can take for free, and they are the best examples available to a small employer because you get the finished product rather than a screenshot of it. Take two or three for the structure rather than the subject.
The FEMA Independent Study Program is the catalog to start with. Its self-paced courses are open to the general public as well as to people with emergency management responsibilities, they are offered free of charge, they issue downloadable completion certificates, and they are awarded continuing education units in accordance with standards established by the International Association of Continuing Education and Training. What is worth studying there is pacing: how a mandated course breaks a long subject into units, and where it places its checks.
OSHA publishes eTools, which are interactive web-based training tools on safety and health topics. Several are built as expert systems that ask you questions about your own site and return specific guidance, which is the closest thing on the free web to a branching scenario built for employers. The lockout-tagout and respiratory protection eTools are the two I would look at first if you are building anything for employee safety training.
For a course with a legal specification attached, the California Civil Rights Department publishes free online harassment prevention training for both supervisory and nonsupervisory employees, available in six languages with closed captioning and image alt text. Taking the supervisory version is the fastest way to see how a two-hour mandated course paces its scenario questions, and the accessibility features are a reasonable floor to copy even where no rule requires them of you.
Two Details Every Published Example Leaves Out
Two things decide whether an e-learning example is legal to run, and neither appears in the galleries: whether the time is paid, and whether the interactivity meets a standard someone else wrote.
The pay question comes first because it applies to everyone. Under federal wage and hour rules, attendance at lectures, meetings, and training programs is not counted as working time only when four conditions are all met: attendance is outside regular working hours, attendance is in fact voluntary, the course is not directly related to the employee's job, and the employee performs no productive work during it (29 CFR 785.27). Assigned, job-related e-learning fails at least two of those, which makes it hours worked no matter how self-paced the platform calls it.
The interactivity question is narrower and more instructive. California regulations define e-learning training for harassment prevention as individualized, interactive, computer-based training created by a trainer and an instructional designer, and require it to provide a link or directions for contacting a trainer who answers questions within a reasonable time and no more than two business days, with those written questions and responses kept for two years after the response (2 CCR 11024). Whether or not that rule reaches you, it is the clearest published definition of what separates interactive e-learning from a video, and it is a sound floor for any module you intend to rely on.
The other half of that specification is the schedule. In California, employers with five or more employees owe one hour of harassment prevention training to nonsupervisory employees and two hours to supervisory employees every two years, and the state publishes courses that satisfy it at no cost. Requirements differ by state, so confirm the ones that apply to you before you build or buy anything, and treat this as general information rather than legal advice.
Which Example to Copy First
Copy the screencast first, every time. It has the shortest path from nothing to a finished module, the content already exists inside a task somebody performs anyway, and it produces a usable record on day one.
After that the order is set by what is breaking. If the same question keeps arriving in your inbox, build the job aid. If a mistake keeps happening under pressure, build the branching scenario, because judgment is the only thing worth three hours of authoring. If knowledge is fading between refreshers, build the microlearning run. If a state or federal requirement is unmet, buy or take the mandated course rather than writing one, since the specification is the product.
What I would not do first is buy an off-the-shelf library. Generic content is at its weakest exactly where a small business is different, and the first time a course describes a process you do not follow, employees stop believing the rest of it.
Whatever you build first, decide where completion is recorded before you record a single screen. In our own FirstHR setup the module sits in the same place as the new hire's tasks, documents, and signatures, so a training record is part of the employee file rather than a spreadsheet somebody maintains until they leave.
Where These Go Wrong
Six failures account for most of the e-learning I see abandoned inside small companies.
Starting with the format is first. The question is never whether to make a video. It is what this person should be able to do afterward, and the format falls out of that answer within about a minute.
Writing an objective around understanding is second. Nothing observable follows from it, so the assessment turns into recall questions about wording and the record turns into a checkmark that proves nothing.
Building the expensive format first is third. A branching scenario is a genuinely good tool and it is the wrong place to spend your first three hours, because the screencast you did not record would have solved a problem this week.
Designing for a desk when the team is not at one is fourth. If the work happens at a counter, on a floor, or in a van, a module that needs a wide screen and a quiet half hour will be marked complete without being opened.
Letting the content go stale is fifth. A course describing a terminal you replaced or naming a manager who left does more damage than no course, because it tells every learner that the training is decoration. Version the module and give it a review date, the same way you would with a learning path.
And measuring completion instead of capability is last. A completion rate tells you people clicked. Whether anyone can do the thing afterward is a separate question, answered by the check inside the module and by watching the work, which is where the evaluation levels in the Kirkpatrick model earn their keep.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are examples of e-learning?
Common workplace examples include a 4-minute screen recording showing how to process a refund on the actual terminal, a branching scenario where the learner picks a response to a difficult customer and sees what follows from each choice, a scored series of product knowledge modules with tiers attached to something real, a five-day allergen series delivered to a phone before each shift, a narrated compliance course with a scenario question every 10 minutes, and a practice task where the learner writes a real customer reply and is scored against a rubric. The format matters less than the structure underneath it: one objective, a decision the learner makes, a check tied to that objective, and a record that outlives the person who set it up.
What is an example of a good e-learning module?
A good module has a one-sentence objective naming something the learner can do afterward, and it does not need the word and to finish that sentence. The 6:55 return scenario in this article is a working example: it puts an employee in front of a real closing-time decision, gives three plausible options, shows the consequence of each rather than marking two of them wrong, and ends in a debrief with three rules and a single check question. It runs seven minutes, it works on a phone, and it produces a record with a name, a date, and the answer chosen. Everything in it comes from a situation that actually happens in the business, which is the part no purchased library can supply.
What is a branching scenario in e-learning?
A branching scenario is a module where the learner makes a choice and the next screen changes because of it. Rather than reading a policy and answering a question about it, the learner is placed in a situation, given two or three realistic options, and shown the consequence of the one they picked. Wrong paths return them to the decision rather than ending the module. Branching scenarios are the most expensive format in this article to build, usually a few hours for a good one, and they earn that time only on high-stakes situations that repeat: safety calls, escalation, refunds at closing time, or a first report of harassment.
What is an example of gamified e-learning?
The product knowledge ladder in this article is one: six weekly modules, five questions each, two points per correct answer for a series total of 60, three bonus points for finishing a module in the week it opens, and three tiers at 40, 55, and 68 points. The design decisions matter more than the points. Retakes are allowed but capped, so the door stays open without inflating scores. There is no public leaderboard, because on a small team a leaderboard ranks people who already know where they stand, and the person in last place stops trying by week two. The top tier carries something real, in that case first pick of supplier training days.
Where can I find free e-learning examples to look at?
Government agencies publish finished courses you can take for free and study as design examples. The FEMA Independent Study Program offers self-paced online courses free of charge to the general public, with downloadable completion certificates and continuing education units awarded under recognized standards. OSHA publishes eTools, which are interactive web-based training tools on safety topics, several of which are built as expert systems that ask questions and return guidance. The California Civil Rights Department publishes free online harassment prevention courses in six languages, with closed captioning and image alt text. All three are worth taking for the structure rather than the subject: they show how a mandated course paces itself, where it puts its checks, and what it records.
Do employees have to be paid for time spent on e-learning?
Usually yes. Under federal wage and hour rules, attendance at lectures, meetings, and training programs does not count as working time only when all four of the following are true: attendance is outside regular working hours, attendance is in fact voluntary, the course is not directly related to the employee’s job, and the employee performs no productive work during it. Self-paced e-learning assigned by an employer on a job-related topic fails at least two of those tests, which makes it compensable time even when the learner completes it on a couch at 9 p.m. Set the expectation with the assignment, because the alternative is discovering the hours later.
What makes e-learning interactive rather than just a video?
Interactivity means the learner does something and the module responds to it. That can be a scenario choice with feedback per option, a knowledge check that gates the next section, a practice submission scored against a rubric, or a question the learner can send to a real person. California regulations are unusually specific on this point for harassment prevention training, describing e-learning as individualized, interactive, computer-based training built by a trainer and an instructional designer, and requiring a link or directions for contacting a trainer who answers questions within two business days. That is a useful design floor even where the rule itself does not apply to you.
How long should an e-learning module be?
Three to seven minutes for a single-objective module, and longer only when a legal requirement sets the clock. The practical test is whether it can be completed in a natural break in the working day. If the learner needs to book a room and set aside an hour, the content has stopped being a module and become a course, which is a different thing to build and a different thing to schedule. The examples in this article run from two minutes for a digital job aid to two hours for a supervisor compliance course, and the long one is long because a state statute says so rather than because the topic needs it.