eLearning 101: Lesson 10 – how to take your elearning skills to the next level (option 3)

10 Things you could create instead of an elearning course

1. Quick skills-based scenario
2. Short self-study exercises
3. “Best of…” tips video
4. Interactive tour of a form
5. Job-aid or tool
6. Podcasts
7. Interactive Infographic
8. “How to…” videos
9. Decision-making tool
10. Online repository

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This was a helpful reminder that you don’t always have to create an all-encompassing elearning object. And in fact on reflection I also do many of these things – as I think it can be helpful to learners to learn in small-bites. Most of my learning activities are presented to learners via our Information Skills for Health blog.

eLearning 101: Lesson 10 – how to take your elearning skills to the next level (option 2)

Improve your questions to create more effective assessments

Here are some hints & tips:

1. Align quiz questions with course objectives
2. Use a variety of quiz question types. Try scenario-based questions and case studies to mimic realistic situations
3. Be clear and concise; give clear directions
4. Create feedback – keep it short and try to reinforce the lesson

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This is a handy checklist of things to keep in mind when you are developing your quiz ideas. I am definitely trying to make questions more relevant to students by making them scenario-based.

eLearning 101: Lesson 10 – how to take your elearning skills to the next level (option 1)

The final lesson presented various options to select to carry on learning. I looked at:

How to measure the satisfaction of learners taking your online course.

Here are some suggested questions:

1. How would you rate the overall difficulty of this course?
2. What are the 3 most relevant things you learnt in this course?
3. How confident are you that you can apply the new skill on the job?
4. What’s the most useful thing you learned on this course?
5. Is there anything the course didn’t cover that would’ve been helpful to know?

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Again this is something that I need to improve on. We do have a feedback form. I have tried to make it as easy as possible for the users to complete but I think we need to gather more qualitative data.

eLearning 101: Lesson 9 – how to measure the effectiveness of your elearning course

This lesson posed the questions:

• How can you tell if your course is successful?
• Does it change learner behaviour?
• What can you measure?

Different types of courses may have different performance metrics. Articulate suggest the following:

Type 1 Performance Improvement Courses

Participants learn a new skill or are given information to help them do their jobs or study better. Recommended measurement – consider pre vrs post course assessments, or improvement in a particular task.

Type 2 Organisational Compliance Courses

Recommended measurement – pre vrs post course assessment

Type 3 Sharing Information

Recommended measurement – could track access to the information source, eg download of a file or direction to a web page.

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This is an area that I need to improve on, in order to make any feedback to the user relevant. There have been various discussions on the forums within Articulate about this topic which have been interesting.

eLearning 101: Lesson 8 – how to share your elearning course with learners

This lesson looked at different ways to publish your learning online.

Via a web server

Suggested external web hosting options:

• Tempshare – for temporary sharing content. This might allow you to share content for review
• Amazon S3 – free and fee-based hosting packages

Via a Learning Management Service (LMS)

In this scenario you need to include protocols that allow the learning object to “talk” to the LMS, such as Tin Can API, Scorm or AICC

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We deliver our courses via the university web server. This is something that I sorted out early on in our project so that we had some proof that we could get a workable system.

eLearning 101: Lesson 7 – how to create great-looking elearning

This lesson included a number of hints and tips on what to do or consider in order to deliver good elearning elements. I’ll list the ones that I picked out.

Apply Branding Guidelines

Decide on what your corporate look and feel will be; use a consistent tone and voice; use the logo; use branding fonts if available; decide on a colour-scheme to match / complement the corporate scheme.

Identify the Course Theme

The course theme would be dictated by the subject matter and audience, directing how the course could be presented. This might include considering professional, corporate, fun or casual presentation.

Header and Body Fonts

The advice given is to consider the subject and theme; decide whether to use decorative or simple fonts; above be consistent and obviously make it legible.

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Our courses have to appeal to a number of different user groups, from students learning something for new to healthcare professionals refreshing their skill-set. We have chosen to take a slightly professional tone, although with a theme that “we are learning this together”. I use the Articulate photo-characters, using one character as the help avatar and the others as the learner avatar. The exception to this is the “Check Your Skills” tutorial – here it is more lighter in tone and we use “cartoon” characters. This is to present a non-threatening, more fun tone as students are asked to assess their skills and we didn’t want it to appear like a test.

We are appealing to users from both Keele University and the NHS, so tend to take the corporate theme as “the Health Library”.

In terms of fonts – this is not something I get really excited about. I have chosen to use open sans which is clear and readable. I use font-size and bold to provide emphasis and headers.

eLearning 101: Lesson 6 – storyboarding, creating a blueprint for an elearning course

I was always mystified a bit by storyboarding – it seemed like something of an art-form. This lesson laid out what you needed to do.

Identify the stakeholders and participants, identify their roles – this will be the audience for the storyboard and will help to determine the format of your storyboard and the detail of the content.

Instructional Design – what learning activities are needed and how will they be sequenced?

Format – various formats could be used eg MS Word, Ms Powerpoint, authoring software. Whichever tool is used it must be made available to the stakeholders. Articulate offer a number of templates that could be used to create a storyboard.

Building your Storyboard - Items that should be included: navigation, links, media, text, interactions, on-screen elements, programming notes. Consider including a visual map to represent complex branching or dynamic content. Use reference labels to map the storyboard slide to an actual storyline slide.

Using your Storyboard – the storyboard should act as a living document, and followed during the lifetime of the project. It can act as a place to consolidate feedback and be used as a review checkpoint.

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So this is something that I am really bad at. At the start of our elearning project we were quite meticulous in creating scripts (which in essence were storyboards). During our upgrade phase these were really useful as a starting point for the upgrade. Since then I have been a bit lax. Sometimes I create lots of scribbled “boards” in a notebook to help me to work out how I am going to do something. However since I have no audience, other than myself, there doesn’t feel like any incentive to do anything extravagant.

I wonder if investigating the proposed templates will help me to find something that will suit my style and way of working.