Introduction
Introduction
Welcome to Building Better Courses tutorials. In this series of tutorials what I'm going to do is walk you through the process of building an elearning course. We'll start with an existing course that for many people is "good enough" and make it something better.
What do we mean by better? Let me explain. For many people their elearning development has evolved this way:
- Get it online. The organization has existing content and they want to put it online. So they buy some software and quickly convert the courses and make them available online.
- Make it look better. Once it's online they begin to focus on making it look better. That usually means, "How do we make it NOT look like PowerPoint slides?"
- Make it engaging and interactive. Eventually the focus shifts towards engaging the learner and making the courses more interactive.
We like to call this the "Rapid E-Learning Story." It's what seems to be the typical evolution for many people. It also makes a great framework for starting with elearning courses. So this series of tutorials is built around the Rapid E-Learning Story.
- How Do I Create My First Course? In the first section, we'll focus on what it takes to create the first course. This will help you design a consistent product and learn some basic production techniques.
- How Do I Get the Right Look & Feel for This Course? In this section, we'll explore some graphic and visual design ideas that will help you build nice looking courses that look like they belong to the subject matter.
- How Do I make This Course More Interactive? The last section looks at ways to make the course more meaningful to the learner through interactivity.
While that's a very broad overview of how the tutorials are organized, here's a little more detail on some of the topics that are covered:
- Designing custom themes for your course
- Using PowerPoint as a graphic design tool to create your visual and navigational elements
- Working with external audio editors for recording and editing audio
- Branching techniques for video and scenarios
- Building creative and interactive quizzes
- Elearning production, workflow and development best practices
- And a whole lot more!
Getting the Most Out of the Tutorials
Who is this course for?
This course is for anyone looking for practical, real-world training around the elearning production process. We'll build everything from the ground up, but we won't go into a lot of detailed, technical explanations of the tools. Instead, we designed the lessons around how experienced designers approach course building. We move quickly, but you're supported through written and video tutorials for every lesson.
Download the assets and practice, practice, practice!
We've added all of the practice files to the download section. In each section, you'll find a link to the appropriate downloads. If you really want to learn, download the assets and practice going through the tutorials.
Leverage the Articulate product tutorials.
If you ever need more detailed support around a feature or concept, you can jump over to the Articulate Tutorials. In those tutorials, we take you through every feature, preference and best practice for getting the most from the tools.
Before getting started, let's learn how to use the lesson files.