Best Practices

 

 Course Outline / Story-boarding
  • 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.

 

 

 

Archives