Sometimes you need to work on a course with multiple subject matter experts or instructional designers. But, like with any group project, it can be a challenge for everyone to work together effectively. Luckily, the collaboration features available to Articulate 360 Teams subscribers in Rise 360 make it easy to build lessons simultaneously, so you can finish your courses faster.
If you’ve never co-authored a course before, you might be wondering if there are any best practices to follow to get everyone on the same page. After co-authoring a few courses, I came up with the following tips to help ensure the success of future collaborative projects.
Go Over Collaborative Parameters at a Kick-Off Meeting
As with any e-learning project, I start by inviting everyone involved to a kick-off meeting to go over all the project parameters. In addition to standard kick-off meeting questions, I cover things like:
- Who will create which lesson? How do you want to split up the course? By section? By lesson? Who will write the conclusion? Who will create the quiz?
- Who will apply changes requested in the review process? Will I apply all the changes? Or will each course author be responsible for the changes that impact their lesson?
- What style of images should authors use? Photographic or illustrated? Black and white or color?
- What writing style should authors adopt? Formal or conversational? Should they write in the first or second person? In order for the lessons to feel cohesive, it’s important for the writing style to be fairly similar throughout.
If I’m working with a large group of people or with people who don’t usually create courses, I typically make these decisions myself and lay them out in a document prior to the meeting. If people have questions or suggestions, we can always make changes to the document, but it’s easier to have a jumping-off point than to start from scratch in these instances.
If I’m working with a small group of experienced instructional designers, however, the kick-off meeting often takes the form of a brainstorming session where we define these things together.
Either way, after the meeting I clean up the document and share it with everyone via a shared document app like Google Docs in a view-only format. This way everyone can reference it as needed.
Write the Author’s Name Next to the Lesson Title
After the kick-off meeting, I start pulling together my outline in Rise 360. As I do that, I add the name of the author after the lesson title. That way, everyone can easily see which course they’re responsible for creating.
I like to leave the names in place until the course is 100 percent finalized. Even if I plan to apply all the requested changes myself, it’s nice to be able to refer back to the person who originally created the course in case I’m unsure about something.
Share Course with Collaborators
When I’m ready to share my course with my collaborators, I simply go up to the Share tab, click on View Collaborators, enter the relevant e-mail addresses in the box one by one, and click Invite.
Then, assign each collaborator a role. For collaborators who just need to be able to add and edit content, choose Course collaborator. For collaborators who might need to adjust course settings and publish to Review 360, for example, choose Course manager.
Now my collaborators can go in and edit the course. If someone else is working on a lesson, Rise 360 will notify me with a pop-up to prevent us from overwriting each other’s edits.
Create Block Templates
Sometimes I need to create custom lessons, but want others to be able to use the same general format. That’s where block templates are really handy. For example, in this course on working across cultures, each lesson is structured the same way. And, instead of rebuilding each lesson from scratch, I simply saved my blocks as a template, inserted it into a new lesson, and updated my content.
Check out the GIF below to see how I created my block template:
Block templates are also a great way to ensure consistency when working with others. Once I’ve created my template, everyone on my team can access it, allowing them to replicate the structure of my lesson.
Share Course with Reviewers
When my course is ready to go, I publish it to Review 360 and send the link to anyone involved in the review process.
If my reviewers don’t have an Articulate ID, it’s no biggie. They just need to enter an email address to leave comments.
As they view the course, they can add any questions or suggestions they have in the box on the right-hand side, making it super quick and easy for reviewers, who are often pressed for time.
Review 360 also makes it easier for me and my co-authors to interpret reviewer comments, since it takes a screenshot of what the person was looking at when they left their comment.
If any comments are ambiguous or I need more information, I can simply respond to their comment inline. I can even tag my co-authors when comments pertain to their lesson, so they can respond directly.
The Bottom Line
With the collaboration features in Rise 360 and the tips I’ve outlined in this article, you’ve got everything you need to make sure your next collaborative project goes off without a hitch.
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Published 7 years ago
Version 1.0
