Thanks for posting your comment here in the community. What an exciting time for you!! I wrote an article called 4 Skills Every E-Learning Developer Needs to Have and I think it would be a good read for you! It focuses on...
Instructional design: this is super important to be able to organize information, separate need to know from nice to know, write learning objectives, choose learning activities, create quizzes, write feedback. Those are all important parts of e-learning and if you want to create courses from scratch would be really wise to take some kind of certification or course or just learn as much as you can about ID (this would including getting to know the ADDIE model, which is the most commonly used - but not only - model for designing training/elearning) Here's some links about ID:
Graphic design skills: this is important to be able to choose nice layouts, good looking fonts, colour schemes, great imagery, etc. Knowing how to do basic stuff in photoshop, crop, remove backgrounds, edit colours, etc. will go a long way in helping you design good looking courses. Here's some links:
Writing skills: A lot of content in e-learning is text. Hopefully you're mixing in some audio, video, and images, but still, there tends to be text. So its important to write text is clear, concise, easy to read and easy to understand. This comes with practice (like everything!!)
Organizational skills: This is hard to teach, comes with practice and experience and ties into the instructional design side of things. But being able to organize your information and course content in a way that makes most sense, is very clear and easy to comprehend, is crucial. Here's an article on that topic:
And there's way more articles on all these topics in the community, in my article archives, and you can find tons of examples of completed courses here in the e-learning examples hub. You might also want to look into audio and video editing, javascript coding, LMS administration... understanding and having skills in all those areas is an asset as well to an e-learning developer.
If you want to start building your skills I suggest you start building sample courses and start creating a portfolio for yourself so you can start applying to jobs and be able to show that you are able to design e-learning. Here's an article about why you need an e-learning portfolio and one about what to include in it. If you're looking for a topic or don't know what to build, jump into one of our weekly e-learning challenges. We'll give you a topic, and you can share what you create with others in our community and get feedback and critique (if you want it!). This community is a great place to be to grow your skills and learn more about e-learning and instructional design. Hope this helps and gives you a good starting point!! :) Best of luck on this fun new journey!
2 Replies
Welcome to the elearning world. I read through a lot of Tom's blog when I first started in this field also:
http://blogs.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/rapid-e-learning-101/
http://blogs.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/designing-the-right-course/
http://blogs.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/instructional-design/
http://blogs.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/building-scenarios-for-e-learning/
http://blogs.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/managing-e-learning-projects/
https://community.articulate.com/hubs/e-learning-101?utm_source=www-referral&utm_medium=internal&utm_campaign=resources
E-books by Articulate: https://community.articulate.com/e-books
I read pretty much every thing from these and with the help of other heroes and staff, you will be able to get start really soon.
Hi Alex!!
Thanks for posting your comment here in the community. What an exciting time for you!! I wrote an article called 4 Skills Every E-Learning Developer Needs to Have and I think it would be a good read for you! It focuses on...
Instructional design: this is super important to be able to organize information, separate need to know from nice to know, write learning objectives, choose learning activities, create quizzes, write feedback. Those are all important parts of e-learning and if you want to create courses from scratch would be really wise to take some kind of certification or course or just learn as much as you can about ID (this would including getting to know the ADDIE model, which is the most commonly used - but not only - model for designing training/elearning) Here's some links about ID:
Graphic design skills: this is important to be able to choose nice layouts, good looking fonts, colour schemes, great imagery, etc. Knowing how to do basic stuff in photoshop, crop, remove backgrounds, edit colours, etc. will go a long way in helping you design good looking courses. Here's some links:
Writing skills: A lot of content in e-learning is text. Hopefully you're mixing in some audio, video, and images, but still, there tends to be text. So its important to write text is clear, concise, easy to read and easy to understand. This comes with practice (like everything!!)
Organizational skills: This is hard to teach, comes with practice and experience and ties into the instructional design side of things. But being able to organize your information and course content in a way that makes most sense, is very clear and easy to comprehend, is crucial. Here's an article on that topic:
And there's way more articles on all these topics in the community, in my article archives, and you can find tons of examples of completed courses here in the e-learning examples hub. You might also want to look into audio and video editing, javascript coding, LMS administration... understanding and having skills in all those areas is an asset as well to an e-learning developer.
If you want to start building your skills I suggest you start building sample courses and start creating a portfolio for yourself so you can start applying to jobs and be able to show that you are able to design e-learning. Here's an article about why you need an e-learning portfolio and one about what to include in it. If you're looking for a topic or don't know what to build, jump into one of our weekly e-learning challenges. We'll give you a topic, and you can share what you create with others in our community and get feedback and critique (if you want it!). This community is a great place to be to grow your skills and learn more about e-learning and instructional design. Hope this helps and gives you a good starting point!! :) Best of luck on this fun new journey!
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