One of my favorite parts of designing elearning courses is coming up with some treatments or ideas that we can present to the client. I’m always playing around with ideas. Most of them are kind of goofy and not always appropriate for the client’s project. However, it’s okay to come up with dumb ideas. The process of playing around and thinking about different ways to approach the course will ultimately help you come up with some pretty cool ideas. Besides there are enough boring elearning courses to provide balance to the occasional dumb idea. :) At ...
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This post is in response to some conversations I had during the last ASTD conference in Washington, DC. There were some people who suggested that rapid elearning was only good for basic linear courses and they lamented that they couldn’t build interactive scenarios.
I’ve built hundreds of rapid elearning courses and I can tell you that building branched scenarios with your rapid elearning tools is not only possible, but it’s actually pretty easy to do.
In today’s post, I’ll start by showing you the three-step model I use to build ...
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It seems that the last few weeks I’ve previewed a lot of courses that had charts or graphs. Most of the slides kind of looked like the chart below. You end up with a lot of information and not quite sure what to do with it. Today, we’ll look at three sure-fire ways to make your charts and data more memorable. The chart below tells me to look at the growth, but what growth am I to look at? Each group has improved from the first quarter to the fourth. Some more than others. What ...
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Last week was a tough one. I’d been feeling a bit sluggish since getting back from the ASTD conference in Washington Dc, but figured it was just old fashioned fatigue. However last Saturday everything came to a head with a full blown kidney infection. I started to feel a bit queasy and by Sunday was lying in a pool of sweat, shivering with an extremely high fever. I’m not quick to go to the doctor because I don’t have the patience for sitting in the waiting room for an hour and then sitting in an empty ...
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I was working with a student intern the other day. We reviewed his first attempt at a rapid elearning course. For this review, we focused on the course’s visual design.
Overall, he did a great job, especially for someone just starting out. However, he made some mistakes that are common to many of the courses I see. I thought I’d do a quick rundown of what they are and provide some tips on how to prevent them.
1. Not Considering the Impact of the Visual Design
Good elearning design is as much about visual communication as it instructional design and learning ...
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You don’t need to be a professional audio engineer to record narration. However, you do want to pay attention to what you’re doing and do the best job possible. Last week, we looked at some basic tips to record high-quality audio. Those tips leaned more on the technology. Today we’ll look at what you can do to get the best narration. I also added some tips from last week’s comments section. ...
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Good audio is critical to your elearning success. You might be a great instructional designer and create the most engaging courses possible. But it all falls apart if the audio quality in your course is not very good.
In an earlier post we looked at when it makes sense to consider paying for professional narration. If you have the money, this is a viable option. However, many of you are like Old Mother Hubbard and your cupboard is bare. If you do have a limited budget (or you want to do the narration ...
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In a previous post, we looked at how you can make your elearning courses more effective and engaging by getting your learners to pull the course content rather than you just pushing it out to them. A great way to create a pull-type course is build it around problem-solving scenarios. A scenario can put the course content into a context that is relevant to the learners because they can use the information in a real world setting. Even if you don’t create a pull-type course, scenarios are still effective in helping your learners. ...
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Here’s the challenge for many of us. We want to make our courses engaging and interactive, yet sometimes the content or the time pressures of work don’t make that easy.
The default position for many elearning courses is to merely push the information out to the learners. The end result is that the course is heavy on information and light on interaction. By changing the way you structure the information, you can quickly build the framework for more engaging and interactive courses. It’s just a matter of rethinking how you approach the course design.
Let’s assume you do all of ...
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People already use their computers for things like checking email, surfing the web, and sharing the latest news on Facebook. Since that’s the case, why not design a course structure that mimics how they already use their computers? I see a lot of elearning courses and I’d say that most of them are linear and almost exclusively focused on sharing information. They are also usually light on interactivity. I’m not going to stand on my soapbox and tell you that these courses are the worst thing since not slicing bread. Because sometimes it’s all you need, or ...
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I get a lot of questions from blog readers who are on a limited budget. They want to know about free tools that they can use to build their elearning courses. In this economy, the question probably means more than it did a couple of years ago.
I’m a junky for all of the free stuff online. If there’s a beta program or new software application, I’m quick to sign up and play around with it. However, just because an application is free or can do something cool doesn’t mean that it’s really practical. There are many free applications ...
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At a recent conference, I was talking to someone about rapid elearning strategies and how to best use the tools they had. My approach is to start with a rapid elearning tool and the build from there. It allows me to speed up production and allocate my resources to get the most bang for the buck. It’s something I outlined in this post on saving time and money when building courses. ...
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