Being a top eLearning company in New York we are passionate about sharing our expertise with the educational technology community and we strongly believe that the entire learning and development ecosystem will benefit if we all start sharing best practices, tips, tricks, unique solutions, and interesting challenges we overcome for the clients on a daily basis.
That is why we decided to start this posting that we will keep updating as we come across new challenges and come up with interesting solutions to these challenges. So please come back often to read about new elearning tips and tricks as well as best practices that will help you to develop advanced learning products, digital courses, and other various online training content.
So let’s dive into this. Here are some examples of challenges we recently solved and tips and tricks you can learn from our experience that you can use when developing your own elearning courses.
A client asked to add a custom background image to the browser page of a course built in Articulate Storyline.
Even though the modern player in Storyline currently offers only two options for browser page background color and no options for background images, we were still able to add a custom background to the published module. The need for custom design elements does come up often with custom elearning development. In this particular situation, we pasted the image into the module folder and added the CSS background-image property to the HTML files in the package.
We were asked to develop quick infomercial-style training modules for busy learners who only have a few minutes to spare and don’t have time to bother with LMS logins, tests, interactions, etc.
We knew that we needed to minimize the number of clicks it would take to launch and complete the module. So we ended up developing elearning videos in mp4 format that can be posted on YouTube, Sharepoint, corporate website, or any online server. The ease of access minimizes the time and clicks needed to get to and complete the learning modules.
A client wanted to make sure the learner spends a certain amount of time in the course before the course could be marked as completed.
We used a timer for Storyline to track the time in the elearning course and unlocked the final slide only after the timer variable reached the number we needed. Unlike what’s shown in the timer example, the actual timer value does not need to be displayed, you can use in the backend without ever revealing it to the learner.
We were tasked with building an elearning course that could understand voice commands and respond to the learner.
We used Google Cloud Speech to Text to recognize the voice commands, then parsed the text in the background, and used triggers in Storyline to provide a response. We opted to have a voice artist record the responses because in this case, we needed only a few options, but Google also has a Text to Speech service that we could have used to generate the voice responses on the fly.
We needed to record the answers submitted by the learners, but the client did not have an LMS that could support this.
We set up a table using Data Cloud and saved the answers in the cloud without having to rely on the LMS. While the elearning course itself is hosted on the LMS, the answers are exported to the cloud as the learners complete the course.
A client ordered a course for a nationwide sales force located in multiple states, but the legislation taught in the course varied from state to state.
We used triggers in Storyline to capture the learner’s location automatically at the start of the course without having to ask, then built internal logic to display only applicable content based on the location and hide the slides that are irrelevant to this particular learner.
We had a course that needed to offer additional reading materials on topics the learner did not do well with. An added challenge was the requirement to ensure that the learners have the content days or weeks after the training session.
On the final slide of the course, we added an option to email the learning resources to the learners directly from the course. The list of resources was compiled with Storyline triggers based on how the learner did with the content. And the email was sent out directly from the course with just one push of a button. This ensured that the learners had the needed content in their inboxes even after they’ve exited the training module.
We are just getting started! Please come back soon for more tips, tricks, and best practices for elearning design and development.
On this page, we will be sharing more tips, tricks, and best practices for elearning design and development that will help you to produce advanced digital courses, unique elearning solutions, and award-winning online classes.
We used a timer for Storyline to track the time in the elearning course and unlocked the final slide only after the timer variable reached the number we needed.
We used Google Cloud Speech to Text to recognize the voice commands, then parsed the text in the background, and used triggers in Storyline to provide a response.
We set up a table using Data Cloud and saved the answers in the cloud without having to rely on the LMS. The course could be hosted both in and outside of an LMS, the answers were exported to the Cloud in either situation.
We used triggers in Storyline to capture the learner’s location automatically at the start of the course without having to ask, then built internal logic to display only applicable content based on that location.
We added an option to email the learning resources to the learners directly from the course. The list of resources was compiled with Storyline triggers, and the email was sent out directly from the course with just one push of a button.
To add a custom background image to the browser page, after publishing the Storyline project, paste the image into the module folder and add the CSS background-image property to the HTML files in the package.
Consider developing elearning videos in mp4 format that can be posted on YouTube, Sharepoint, corporate website, or any online server. The ease of access minimizes the time and clicks needed to get to and complete the learning modules.
