Best Practices
|
Course Outline / Storyboarding |
- Know the audience
- Find good SMEs
- Always create an outline of the course
- Allows you to structure flow
- Decide what knowledge/skills need to come first
- Gives SMEs a glance at the flow and content
- Helps your create course more quickly. (it’s faster than creating content and then starting over)
|
Text |
- Learners scan, they don’t read
- Keep it simple
- Don’t introduce too much at once (chunks)
- Use bullets/lists
- Avoid font color
- Use bold and italics sparingly
- Talk to learners or not (choose a style)
Example: Bad
These are challenging times for the financial services industry.
Increased competition, recent uncertainty in the markets, and increasing expectations are just a few of the challenges we face as we seek to strengthen relationships with our clients.
Example: Good
These are challenging times for the financial services industry.
As we seek to strengthen relationships with our clients, we face:
- Increased competition
- Market uncertainty
- Increased expectations
|
Consistency |
- Font (Headers, body)
- Colors (text, images)
- Grammar (tense, spelling, etc.)
- Bullets
- Image placement
- Introduction pages, end of lesson, test launch, evaluation, etc)
- Interface and navigation
- Job Aids and reference material
- Formatting of list of steps
|
Images |
- Learners scan text and often look at images first
- Can learners understand your page by only looking at the image?
- Make them meaningful. (not gratuitous images)
- Explain the process
- Import the .png, jpg, gif into PowerPoint for best quality
- Can part of the text on the page be in the image?
|
Tests/Assessments |
- Ensure that the question is answered.
- Decide an appropriate number of questions based on the needed score to pass.
- Will you have a pool of questions?
- Should the questions be randomized?
- Submit after each question vs. submit all at once
- Quizzes vs. Tests
|
Quality Review |
- Always click through the finished course before and after the final upload.
- Have someone outside of your area click through the course.
Related Information
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Tool to Create Free Web-based Simulations
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New Interactive Flash Templates for eLearning!
July 7, 2010 · 2 Comments
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How to Plan for Text Translation
July 7, 2010 · 1 Comment
I never thought about text expansion/contraction until I needed to have a course translated. Headings, titles, and buttons that worked fine in English suddenly ran out of space when getting translated. When creating a course that will be in multiple languages... [Read the full story]
