eLearning 101: Lesson 4 – how the course creation process works

This lesson described the steps which make up the workflow and design process.

Step 1 – discuss with the client

You should discuss the requirements of the proposer or sponsor (client) or the course to determine: why the course is needed, what the objectives are, what the performance gap is that needs filling. This will help you to identify: high level objectives, budget, tools, timeline, review process, branding requirements and where the course can be accessed from. You may also need to meet with a subject matter expert (SME) who has content specific knowledge.

Step 2 – gather and organise content

Identify what information is “need to know” and what is “nice to know”; identify task-based content. You may need to breakdown the content into smaller chunks, and work out how to organise the different elements into an order that makes sense.

Step 3 - storyboard

Use storyboard techniques to identify:

The text that will be used

Places for multimedia, images and video

Navigation

The level of detail required here depends on who the audience for the storyboard is – client, developer, you.

Step 4 – review and edit

Present the storyboard to someone else for review – this may be a colleague or the client. This is an iterative process – make changes as required.

Step 5 – develop the course

Use the authoring tool of your choice to create your course. Here are some visual design basics:

• Leave white space
• Avoid clutter
• Restrict use of fonts to 1 or 2
• Restrict the colour palette to use
• Be consistent – with buttons, links and other navigation tools
• Align items and text
• Use relevant and meaningful images
• Be consistent in use of types of images

Step 6 – quality assurance testing

Review and test to pick up problems.

Step 7 – publish and deploy

Make the learning object available to users.

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This process sounds very familiar to me – dredging up years of working on computing projects, lots of, basically, specifications of differing detail depending on who it was aimed at.

As I work with librarians now I find that this kind of language can be alienating, so although I follow the process it can be called different things. As the client is really us, I also probably don’t record things in sufficient detail.