1. Preparation work: Brainstorming will help troubleshoot problems before it happens to your users.
Here are some essential ideas you will need to start:
Outline the training goals and objectives
Think: What do you want your users to achieve after finishing the training program. Would it be an sales rep increasing their sale profits? An employee is able to identify a medical device?
2. Targeted audience
Before you start brainstorming ideas, take a close look at your prospective learners.
Think:
What is their position? (department, customer service, IT service, HRs)
What are their demographic and characteristics? (schedule availability, age, technology friendly, personality - likes to read more, more engaging? role in the company
What is their level of training in this area of expertise? Just started on the job, intermediate experience, expert
How well do they know the topic?
accessibility
Target devices
3. Collaborate with subject matter experts (SMEs)
The SMEs are the people in the company who are the experts in the topic such as the VP of sales, distributor manager, product developer, etc. You will need to collaborate with them to decide on the content together and to meet the company's requirements. Sometimes, the company will provide you with the content materials so you don't need to meet with the SMEs.
4. Learning management system platform (LMS)
Think: The way you will distribute the elearning course.
Choice a format for your course such as video, powerpoint or scorm, etc., and the type of LMS you want to train your employees in.
LMS will give you the ability to keep track of your employees progress with the eLearning course such as assignments, training modules, test results, etc automatically.
It will also centralize all the information in one area making it easier to see an overview of all the employees.
5. Make a course outline
Create a general plan to organize your topics in the training course. So split your topics into modules and subtopics.
For example: Electrical Hazards (topic)
Electric shock (subtopics)
Electrical Arc Flash (subtopics)
Electrical Arc Blast (subtopics)
Health Care Facilities (topic)
Damp or wet Areas (subtopics)
Health care Equipment (subtopics)
Electrical safety program (subtopics)
4. Create a Course Storyboard
Now we finished making the course outline, now we need to make a storyboard for the course. Now this stage can be done with step 5. The storyboard is a master document of all your content assets but it displays what and where the information goes on the course. This way we can visually see everything together. There is no storyboard that is no-one-size-fits-all, all courses have different needs and assets so please customize your columns to your course needs. But this can create a foundation to start your course.
The information can include:
Slide number/title
Content: written information
Reference: internet sources, paper citations, downloadable attachments such as pdf or word documents
Media: Image, video, graphics, charts
Audio: It will depend on how you want to present your content, with a narration voiceover or a character's speech. Another alternative way is you can rename your audio files to slide numbers. Example. I make a master copy of all the courses
5. Gather all your content assets into one area
Prepare all the necessary assets in one area. Centralize one folder for each course project you do, then make subfolders within. The subfolders can be based on how you divide your courses such as topics or slide numbers. Naming your individual files is a helpful tool to organize your content in the course. For example, I named my audio files to coordinate the slide numbers in my course.
Please look at the examples below: Folder: course name > subfolders: training module topics > sub folder:
Media: photos,videos
video - you can rename each individual file to the assigned slide number
Audio: file names are slide numbers
OR
you can name your folders by slide numbers: s1,s2,s3
subfolders would have the contents within the slide number
s1 - photo1, video1
s2- photo2,pdf2
etc
6. Putting the content together
Simply populate the slides with the text, images, audio and videos by following your storyboard.
7. Add assessments and knowledge check
Quizzes and tests are tools for checking the user's knowledge. They are great tools to let us know what has been learned and what had not based on the employees' progress. Sometimes people will build a course based on pre assessment quizzes to answer those questions. Pre-assessment quizzes are quizzes before the course to test the employee's knowledge level then based on the user's result, it will start at different parts of the training course.
Think: how interactive do you want the quiz to be (do you want them to be actively engaged)?Do you want it more simple (like multiple choice, matching)?
There are many different quiz formats, here are some examples:
Question type:
Interactive drag and drop
Multiple choice
Matching
Short answers
True and false
Role playing scenarios
Gamification
8. Apply an easy and simple UI/UX experience Many employees who start your eLearning course will have issues navigating through if you aren't clear on the direction flow especially when you get fancy with the animations.
You can add on-screen instructions like click play to start, click the icon for more information
Have your navigation button the same area in your course: submit, next, back. Always bottom right or bottom middle.
How should your users read the text: left to right? top down?
Use common icons like arrows to show as next buttons
Colouration: check your client's colour palaette
9. Feedback
This step is critical, you need to test your eLearning course before sending it off to your LMS and assigning it to your employees. When you are the author of the course, it is easy to miss mistakes and have everything make sense to you. Gather a group of users to simply go through your eLearning course and they can fill out an experience survey at the end. The survey could be about what they learned or didn't understand or they couldn't proceed with parts of the course. How is doing the feedback round helpful?
Troubleshoot issues before it happens to your users
Find common mistakes such as broken triggers, spelling mistakes, audio isn't playing
Redesign the layout (maybe the user didn't know where to go after, colouration)
Fix the written text (some of the text is illegible, font style)
Being able to resolve these issues will save you time and headaches in the long run.
10. eLearning Authoring tool: iSpring, Adobe, Articulate suite
Decide on an authoring tool that covers the variety of skills you want to accomplish in your courses.
Each program has its pros and cons, check which authoring tool best fits your needs
Think: do you want it to be simple? High Interaction? how much information will be on it? what type of information, text and images?
For instance, if you want to create an interactive course with quizzes, videos, and dialogue simulations, you need authoring software that is capable to offer you the tools.
11. Make sure your course is accessible and mobile-friendly
Some authoring programs have accessibility functions and will do text-to-speech. Also, make sure your course is functional and displays perfectly on each device type. You can preview your course in the preview mode to see how the learners will see your courses before publishing your course.
12. Publish your course
The format you’ll publish your course in will depend on your goals and the platform from which you’re going to distribute it. Find out the eLearning formats the LMS supports (SCORM, xAPI, etc.).
Here is an example of the publishing setting options in LMS:
