Single project or multiple modules?
Aug 23, 2012
Hi Everyone,
I am about to build a course for my Subject Matter Experts(which are working in Articulate Studio) on how to... 'design an elearning course'. Basically I am trying to learn them to go through the proper phases: Study phase, Definition phase, Realization phase, Testing phase and Deployment phase. Along the way I want them to learn about setting learning objectives, writing for screen, creating meaningful interactions etc. At the end of each lesson I want them to step away and work on their projects, creating their own course objectives document, Define their course concept, create the Storyboard and asset lists. Everything they need leading up to the realization phase basically
As I am going through the same phases as mentioned above to set this up I have quite the task ahead of me. My initial plan was to build one SL project but now I am wondering if it is the right way to go... especially if I ask students to step away and go create document X and Y. I know SL has that 'do you want to resume where you left off' function but if they accidentally click no they're back at the beginning and I was actually thinking of making this a linear process, unlocking the next chapter as a 'reward' on completion.
Now I am conflicted on how to proceed. Should I just open up navigation and build a single (massive) module or should I simply break it down into smaller modules which I let the LMS enable on completion of the previous chapter?
What would you do?
5 Replies
My own personal preference would be to break this up into its individual pieces since you said that they are supposed to leave at the end of each section. One simple reason is that if you break it up, you are kind of forcing them to step away which it sounds like that is what you want.
Smaller chunks are often best, if you want to use a single project you could set it to force resume and build a reset button!
This sounds like a great project! I would also recommend building separate, stand-alone modules for each topic/phase. First of all, if your SMEs are doing this training while still working in their regular job, they can segment their time better. Also, if you find you need to update or change something later based upon feedback, you only have to revise and re-publish an individual module versus a great big module.
Thank you for the feedback everyone! I will indeed be breaking it up... it just makes so much more sense...
Something no one's mentioned is how big, i.e. how many slides, would it be as a single course. I have a course that was originally in PPT in 4 languages with 6 QM quizzes for each language; a total of about 260 slides including the Engage and Quizmaker elements. I thought it would be interesting to bring it over into SL to see what would happen. Because of the way SL deals with Quizmaker conversions the SL file ballooned up to more than 620 slides (each question in QM becomes an individual slide in SL). The .story file became more than 100 megabytes. Now the machine I'm working with is Windows XP and limited to just 4 GB of RAM. The SL file became very sluggish and I started getting error messages about not being able to save the file because the machine was low on memory, please close open applications, etc. Luckily this was just an experiment for me but I suppose it is one more reason for breaking up your content into smaller bits if that is an option for you.
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