How do you build eLearning courses

I ran into an interesting situation this week. We brought in two eLearning contractors at work to help us with a large project. Upon giving them a tour of our LMS and our existing eLearning courses, the contractors were both stunned to see that I have built our courses using a custom template created using HTML and JavaScript. They couldn’t believe I wasn’t using Lectora or another similar authoring product. They stressed that my courses would be difficult to maintain over time (in case I leave the company). My point of view was a little different: I chose this method because I have greater ability to customize courses as I please, and I can control every little detail of the course. I can easily embed Captivate movies, Flash movies, and anything else I please. I have a background in web development, so it was very easy for me to lean in this direction, too. And I think it’ll be just as easy to find somebody with HTML and JavaScript experience compared to Lectora or other authoring tools. But that’s just my opinion - I could be wrong.

The Perfect Learning Management System (LMS)

I often find myself daydreaming when dealing with LMS problems. I say to myself, "If I built an LMS, it would…….." Ah, if only it were that easy. This line of thinking leads me to these questions: How would you design your perfect LMS? What features would you include (or exclude)? How would it differ from current LMS products on the market?

I’ll start this off, but I really would love to hear your thoughts. Who knows, maybe (if we’re lucky) some LMS vendors are listening!

My perfect LMS would…

• Support the AICC, SCORM 1.2, and SCORM 2004 specifications 100% accurately. I don’t want to deal with the "Oh….we chose not to implement that particular part of the spec."
• Work great in all modern web browsers (ex. IE 6 / 7, Firefox 2 / 3, and Safari).
• Support single sign-on (LDAP or otherwise), so learners could use an already existing username and password.
• Have an open API, in case I wanted to integrate it with my intranet or develop add-on modules.
• Be extraordinarily easy to use. Common tasks should take no more than a couple mouse clicks. I should be able to teach my grandma how to use the LMS in 5 minutes or less.
• Be affordable and accessible to any organization, no matter their size or industry. I don’t mind if the price scales up based on the number of users, but the baseline shouldn’t start at $80,000.
• Have excellent 24/7 support, by phone and email. Crazy, I know.

Using Adobe Captivate for eLearning: A Love/Hate Relationship

I’ve been using Adobe Captivate (formerly Macromedia Captivate) for over 2 years and I think it’s a great authoring tool that can help you create powerful simulations and demonstrations for eLearning. However, there are a number of issues (bugs) that can drive you completely insane during the development process. Luckily, many of the bugs found in Captivate v1.0 were resolved in v2.0. However, there are still some problems in v2.0. I recently attended a “Stump the Captivate 2 Experts” session at The eLearning Guild’s 2007 Annual Gathering, and it was not a pretty sight. Two Captivate experts were on the receiving end of about 40 Captivate users venting their frustrations about the product. Of course, we all still love the product, and it is the best value screen capturing/simulation tool on the market in my opinion.

Here are a few of the issues with Captivate 2.0 that were discussed:

• When previewing or playing a Captivate movie, if your audio sounds distorted (ex. your narration sounds like you are underwater), delete the audio and re-add it to the Captivate file. That should fix the problem.
• If you have issues with text captions showing up blurry or unnecessarily bolded when using a transparent background, try reinstalling Captivate (especially if you upgraded to version 2.0 from version 1.0).
• When inserting audio for a slide, make sure you pad the audio with 0.1 seconds of silence at the beginning and end of the slide. If you have audio too close to the beginning or end of a slide, it may not play correctly when previewing or publishing the file.
• Try to keep Captivate demonstrations and simulations to less than 100 slides. Break up content into smaller modules. Captivate will be much more stable and less likely to do strange things. Some people, including myself, reported that the thumbnail images in Edit mode start getting flaky when you try to edit movies that have over 100 slides. We also noticed slides randomly disappearing and changing places. It is believed that this is simply a “memory issue.”

Building a Learning Portal

We implemented a learning portal at work several months back, and it has turned out to be one of the best things I could recommend to an organization for improving access to learning materials. In the past, I’ve worked at organizations where we would tell learners, “Look in the LMS” to find materials and information. I’ve realized that learning portal creates a self-service environment for users that can’t be beat. They can go, search, find what they need, and move on. It’s a Google-like experience, for what has generally become an information-on-demand culture. Let’s take a closer look at learning portals…

What is a learning portal?

A learning portal is a web site that contains links to all different types of learning and training materials for employees at an organization. It may display upcoming classes, online courses, job aids, programs, links to web sites, etc. It may also include search functionality, a rating system, bookmarking ability, and more. The content displayed on the portal may be general to all employees at an organization, or it may be customized for that individual and the role they play. In a perfect world, the learning portal would be able to analyze the person’s department, role, and previous training history. It would then automagically determine learning resources that may be most valuable to that person. It may take a little while, but we’ll get there.

How to build a learning portal (in a nutshell)

First, analyze your users. Interview power-users and find out what resources they access on a regular basis for learning and looking up information. Find out what information is most important to them and find out how you can aggregate it in a way that is simple, clean, and useful. Look at your HR/training systems (ex. your LMS). Find out what key information should be displayed in the portal. You may want to show the learner information on their upcoming classes (if they have already signed up). You may also want to show them all upcoming classes that could be relevant to them based on their job role or specialty. Contact vendors or systems specialists at your organization to find out if this information can be extracted and displayed on a web site, such as a learning portal. (Beware that vendors may charge you for this extra work.)

Build it. Test it. Improve it.

Start small with the first version of your learning portal. Aggregate some useful resources and slowly add features and functionality based on users’ feedback. Interview users and put a poll on the portal. Get as much feedback as you can. It will improve naturally over time if you listen and respond.

More portals are coming

Some LMS vendors are introducing portals of their own, so keep an eye out. Your LMS vendor may have one coming out soon. These may be rigid at first, but I’m sure they’ll get better with time. I’d recommend you analyze the needs of your users, and then determine if it’s best to build your own or use a vendor solution. Either way, it will probably be an extremely helpful resource for your learners.

eLearning Design Documents

I haven’t seen many resources that dive into the workflow of eLearning development, especially for folks like me who build courses mainly from scratch. I thought I’d write about some of the methods I’ve used, hoping that others may chime in or that I may come to new realizations through my own reflection. Here it goes…

The Design Document

eLearning development requires collaboration from multiple people with unique skillsets, including instructional designers, subject matter experts, software/web/eLearning developers, graphic designers, and more. I’ve found that a design document is one of the best tools to help you keep a project on track and keep everybody in-the-loop. (This may seem like common sense, but I’m surprised I haven’t seen more written about the advantages of using design documents.)

The design document serves as the central source of information for the project, which 99% of the time is an eLearning course (for me). The document contains metadata including the course’s name, description, timeline (including due dates), notes from the client, and a storyboard section that outlines each page or interaction in the course. The document should also note when/where sign-off must be received by the client (ex. after each major step or phase of development).

Getting into more detail, each page of the course is outlined in the design document. For each page, the document should have a placeholder for the page title, description, content (or where the content can be found), desired interactions / exercises, multimedia (ex. audio, video), notes, and a time estimate (in hours).

Workflow

Our workflow usually goes in the order below. Although it looks linear, it is an iterative process with several reviews along the way. Some reviews are formal, others are informal.

1. A business need is identified.
2. A decision is made to build an eLearning course. (This isn’t always the case; eLearning is not a magic solution for everything. But in this case, we’ll assume it is.)
3. Business owners are interviewed. We ask them to define the business need and identify what they would consider to be a successful outcome. Everything from this point forward is added to the design document.
4. Subject matter experts are interviewed. They explain what information needs to be taught in order to successfully cover the material. We add this information to the design document.
5. An instructional designer takes all of the information gathered so far and does their magic. Their notes and decisions are tracked in the document (along with the content that is generated from their work).
6. The eLearning Developer takes the document and interprets it, along with a graphic designer, and builds the course.

Critical information comes out of each of these steps, and it is important to track this information in the design document. This makes it easy to track why decisions were made - and who made them.