Forum Discussion
Anyone built e-learning courses for trade industries like property maintenance?
We run a damp proofing and timber treatment company and we're looking into creating internal training modules for our surveyors and technicians. At the moment, all of our training is delivered in person on site, which works but makes it difficult to keep things consistent as the team grows.
The kind of content we'd need to cover includes identifying different types of damp and timber decay, understanding building regulations around damp proof courses, safe use of treatment chemicals, and proper survey report writing. A lot of it is very visual; recognising the difference between dry rot and wet rot, spotting rising damp signs on walls, identifying active woodworm; so we'd need something that handles images and scenario-based learning well.
We've been looking at Articulate tools but we're completely new to e-learning development. Has anyone here created training content for trades, construction, or property services? We'd love to hear how you approached it and whether Storyline or Rise worked better for that kind of hands-on, visual training material.
Any advice on where to start would be really appreciated. Cheers.
2 Replies
I work for a gas and electric utility, which is not totally different. Personally, I've build a course that helps our gas workers recognize different types and levels of corrosion in steel pipe, which is presumably comparable to your different types of rot and other infestations of wood.
We used Storyline, primarily because it's quite easy to convert existing PowerPoint materials to Storyline (which was consciously built to work as much as possible like PP).
Visual recognition tasks aren't that hard to change: a few slides showing examples of, say, shallow rust requiring only a wire brush and coat of paint to fix, a few slides showing rust requiring more dramatic remediation, and a few showing rust requiring replacement of that length of pipe. Follow that with challenge slides, just a picture and ask the student, "Is this: (A)Uncorroded, (B)Slight corrosion requiring repainting within 12 months, (C)Serious corrosion requiring immediate remediation?"
You might ask whether wood damage is woodworm, dry rot, mold, or water damage, of course. The basic idea would be the same.Both Rise and Storyline have their strengths. Articulate put together some examples here: Rise 360 or Storyline 360: Which One Should You Use for Your Project? | E-Learning Heroes
Having used both, I'd be curious how you see the content being completed by your audience/learners.
Storyline has timelines we can manipulate and ways to block user interaction (e.g., mouse clicks.) The effect can be like Storyline producing interactive movies. Objects can move around the screen and we determine whether the user or the course goes to the next slide and when. That last point is important because it lets you setup scenarios where clicking a "positive" button on slide 1 takes the learner to slide 2 while clicking a "negative" button on slide 1 takes the learner to slide 3. That can let us show different outcomes from choices.
Storyline also features robust text-to-speech so you can create a course that speaks to the learner as they go through it--basically the content designer becomes the teacher.
Rise does not have timelines in the same way Storyline does. Rise could more be thought of as an interactive library. Content is broken up into sequences of lessons, and you cannot control when voiced narration automatically plays. Learners have to click a button to play the narration, which I feel can give content created in Rise a museum-type feel, as opposed to the more complex Storyline, which can simulate websites and software and more.
Storyline has very robust quizzing capabilities--more than a dozen kinds of question slide. There's a "Freeform Interaction" slide type called Pick One, and it gives you a bunch of buttons rigged to a quiz results slide. You replace the image of each button with an example of decay (or non-decay) and delete the unused buttons. The images become your buttons. Add in the text of the question on screen, and text-to-speech a voice to read it to them. Badabing.
Rise has similar but narrower functionality. There are only four kinds of questions and each one can show one video, image, or audio file, and it goes where Rise puts it. And there's not as controllable an audio situation. Someone would need to combine the correct and incorrect images of decay into one single image, probably labeled with A, B, C, and D, and then that saved as one single image to upload to Rise. Then the question would just need to be setup for its A, B, C, and D options to align with whichever one is correct in the image.
