8 Advanced eLearning Development Skills You Can Master Today

The eLearning technology is advancing rapidly, and skills that were competitive even a few years ago are quickly becoming obsolete. To stay current in the field of learning experience design and development, instructional designers and eLearning developers should constantly keep up with the new trends and technologies.

Here are 8 things you should learn to do today in order to produce advanced eLearning courses for your organization and your clients.

See the list below or download this handout as a PDF file.

1. Add a leaderboard to make courses engaging and fun.
   A leaderboard can make the learning process fun, introduce competition, and motivate the learners to pay attention in order to score more points. Fortunately, it’s easy to add a leaderboard to your Articulate Storyline or Adobe Captivate course. All you need to do is the Leaderboard Widget that you can style to match the course design and then add to your course as a web object that will display on the slide.
   
   
2. Personalize content based on learner’s geolocation.
   A personalized content instantly draws the attention of the learner. You should use personalization to make each learner feel as if the training content was designed specifically with them in mind. Examples of personalization can vary from a simple greeting that mentions the learner’s location to displaying only the knowledge base relevant to a particular place. This also comes in handy in companies whose learners are located in different states or even countries. Not all learning content may apply to all locations, so you should be able to produce courses that detect the learner’s location and provide different learning experiences based on geography and geolocation. If you use Storyline or Captivate, you can use a simple JavaScript trigger/action to detect the learner’s location and save it to module variables which you can then use to customize what’s displayed to the learner. And it’s up to you whether you want to personalize the content based on country, state, city, zip code, or all of the above.
   
   
3. Display courses in full screen.
   Sometimes you need as much screen real estate as possible in order to make the learning feel truly immersive. This means being able to hide the browser panel, address bar, taskbar, etc. to ensure unparallell learning experience. While the HTML output that both Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate produce can be scalable and can fill the space inside the browser window, it will still leave you with the extra panels. The solution is switching to full screen using JavaScript. You can either switch back and forth between the full-screen and regular modes or keep the presentation in full screen for the entire duration of the course. As a learning experience designer, you will find the full-screen capability to be an invaluable tool in your toolbox.
   
   
4. Collect advanced learning data with or without an LMS.
   In addition to the standard data typically shown in the course reports, such as completion and score, it is often necessary to capture more information about the learning interaction. Examples of such additional data include the answers the learner selects, the buttons she clicks, the slides she visits, the duration of time it takes to get through a particular section, etc. And while a typical SCORM package won’t provide this information, most eLearning developers don’t realize that they can use the data cloud tool to capture the additional learning data in both Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate. The elearning developer or project manager can work the client or project stakeholders to determine what additional metrics need to be captured and then implement this feature in the eLearning module. The ability to capture detailed learning data is particularly valuable on the projects that don’t have a learning management system to host the modules. In this situation, SCORM reporting becomes unavailable, however, you are still able to use the Data Cloud widget to record any learning data you need and save them to the cloud.
   
   
5. Improve user experience with interactive helpdesk-style assistants.
   The “agent,” “assistant,” or “answer bot” UX feature has become a staple of a modern well-functioning website. And because a typical web-based eLearning course often resembles Internet content in the look and functionality, it only makes sense to use smart assistants in the eLearning modules in order to provide better user experience and allow for more options to interact with the course. This approach will allow you to build natural dialogs and provide a unique way for the learner to interact with the course. The assistant can function as a guide through the course, provide help with course navigation features, offer hints and encouragement when the learner is struggling with the content, offer additional training content–and these are just a few examples. In addition to providing a text-based response, the assistant is capable to run JavaScript code and update course variables. Together, these features can create a unique and supportive learning environment resulting in positive user experience and outstanding learning outcomes.
   
   
6. Draw dynamic charts and graphs.
   If the course deals with numerical data, you can offer the learners to generate custom charts based on the inputs they provide. This is an excellent visual learning tool and a great engagement point for those learners who need a bit of help with visualizing values, trends, and processes. In many cases, the eLearning developer working on the course cannot predict all the combinations of data values and is therefore unable to create all possible variations of the chart. Fortunately, with the dynamic charts, you don’t need to know the values upfront. Instead, the chart will generate on-the-fly as the data become available.
   
   
7. Add custom progress bars.
   Most eLearning courses include a default rigid progress bar that cannot be truly customized. As a learning experience designer, you will often need to add custom progress bars that you can place anywhere on the slide and control them with course variables. While neither Articulate Storyline nor Adobe Captivate have customizable freestanding progress bar objects, you can use the tool hyperlinked above to create your own progress bars and use them as you wish in the learning courses.
   
   
8. Offer PDFs that include the learner’s inputs.
   A PDF job aid is nothing new in eLearning. But what if you need to take the learner’s inputs (such as typed answers, selections, points, etc.) and use them to generate a downloadable PDF file? You can use this tool in both Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate to build PDF documents that include learner’s answers, reflections, responses, and any other course data. If the learners have the ability to save the course data as PDF, they are more likely to use this data as well as retain the knowledge taught in the course.

Next step: explore all advanced eLearning development tools and start using them today.