eLearning development

The speedy guide to eLearning

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The speedy guide to eLearning

Let’s face it, sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day. You rush around from one meeting to another, frantically replying to emails in between and by the end of the day you realise you haven’t done any actual work.

In an ideal world you’d have several weeks to consult with your SME’s and develop an amazing eLearning course, or you’d have the budget to outsource to professional developers. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen often.

Many of my clients are busy and developing eLearning isn’t their primary role, so here are a few thrifty suggestions that can help you to build quality content in a fraction of the time and on a budget:

  1. Use what you’ve got

    Do you have a PowerPoint for the course? If so great! A huge amount of time is spent on instructional design and most authoring tools will enable you to import or work directly with PowerPoint. If your PowerPoint for the classroom version of the course has a good structure, the hard part of the work has been done for you.

  1. Get your Marketing team on side

    You could have the most interesting course ever written but if it looks terrible people will be put off. One thing I recommend to all my clients is that they create some branded templates that they can use with a professional looking design. Once you have your templates saved you can re-use these for when you need to build your courses in a hurry and all you have to do is copy and paste your content in, making it super quick. You can get your marketing team to help with these or we can build your templates for you.

  1. Know your tool

    Take time to get trained on your authoring tool of choiceIt may take longer initially but it will pay off in the long run. There is nothing more frustrating than spending 3 hours trying to make something work only to discover a shortcut after training that makes it a 5 minute job.

  1. It’s not cheating….

    Buying a ready-made course is cheaper than using custom built content (and faster). You can then change the branding and wording to suit your company and brand.

  1. Get someone to build your course with you

    Having a consultant spend a couple of days with you can be a great way to help you build a course and learn more about the process and your authoring tool at the same time. It’s cheaper than outsourcing all the work and you’ll end up with a course you’re proud of and a little extra knowledge. Click here for more information.

  1. Look out for free resources

    There are plenty of free resources online if you know where to look. You can download some free templates here:

    http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/free-e-learning-templates-speed-course-design/

    http://www.pinterest.com/elearning/elearning-templates/

    Many course assets are also available including backgrounds, graphics and icons:

    http://community.articulate.com/downloads/