Show Us How You Create Online Courses #82

E-Learning Challenge #82: Challenge | Recap

As course designers, you know there’s a lot that has to happen to build and implement e-learning courses. Whether you work on a large team or fly solo, you likely have a process for taking projects from initiation to implementation.

One of the most common mistakes designers make is assuming their customers are equally familiar with instructional design, technology, and the course development process. If your customers are new to e-learning, it’s worth investing a little time to educate customers before you think about their learners.

Educating Your Customers

We recently published this really helpful article how to create an online course.

It's a basic overview and the steps will be familiar to most of you. But the article does a great job explaining the high-level steps for creating courses. It reminded me of something I used to help educate my customers.

When I worked at the bank, I designed a short course that walked our internal clients and stakeholders through the design and development process our team used to build e-learning courses. The course ran about 15 minutes and we shared it during our kickoff meetings. A course about building courses is so meta, right?

Anyway, the course  really helped clarify a lot of the terms and milestones we used in our project plans. And it’s also a great starting point for this week’s challenge!

Challenge of the Week

This week your challenge is to build a short module or interaction to show us how you build online courses. You can use or modify the content in the How to Create an Online Course in 7 Simple Steps article, or you can go with your process and workflow. It’s up to you.

This is a bigger challenge than the others but I think the deliverable is worth it.

• E-Learning Newbies: Here’s your chance to build a course. Use the article as your starting material. Then design practice activities to support each step in the process.
• E-Learning Freelancers: This could be a great tool to include on your websites to educate clients and help them get to know you.  You can even combine some of the objectives from the Webcam Video Challenge into this project to add an even more personal overview.
• Articulate Guru Contest: We’re announcing the 2015 Articulate Guru contest next week. This week’s challenge is deep enough that it could be fleshed out into a Guru submission. I’m just putting that out there.

Share Your E-Learning Work

• Comments: Use the comments section below to share a link to your published example and blog post.
• Forums: Start  your own thread and share a link to your published example..
• Personal blog:  If you have a blog, please consider writing about your challenges. We’ll link back to your posts so the great work you’re sharing gets even more exposure.
• Twitter: If you share your demos on Twitter, try using #ELHChallenge so your tweeps can track your e-learning coolness.
• Facebook: Share your work on our Facebook page by replying to this Facebook post with a link to your example.

Last Week’s Challenge:

Before you map out your course design process, check out last week's ergonomically correct e-learning examples:

E-Learning Challenge #81: Challenge | Recap

Wishing you a great week, E-Learning Heroes!

New to E-Learning Challenges?

The weekly challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.