Continued from January 2008 Newsletter

2 - Tips for Design and Development Teams

Apply these design tips - continued...

• If your content is Power Point slides, include the notes — better yet— enriched notes. Otherwise they are useless
• Include asynchronous, self-paced opportunities to practice (review) in downloaded workshop content
• Don’t think that more animations and heavy images necessarily make courses of better quality
• Prepare your Power Point slides very thoughtfully
• Use relevant documents in addition to Power Point, to augment the subject matter
• Assess student skills and tailor the course to accommodate the broad range of skills
• Don’t forget to personalize the last slide
• Design, design, design! Redesign your course from the beginning with the target number of students in mind. It’s much more difficult trying to add on or change approaches once the course has started
• Always inter-space learning with testing and summaries
• Review materials for spelling, grammar, and flow
• Tailor the training to the trainee and the company’s profile
• Keep all subject matter precise
• Know the desired outcome of your training
• Outline your work before you begin
• Open your mind to creative ideas that may enter in the process of material development
• Read your own copy as though you know nothing about the subject
• Get a lot of external input, proofreading and editing
• Remember always that your audience is giving up time from their busy lives to participate in this course, so put thought into every word, keep it direct and empowering, and at the same time make it fun
• Always view your programs through the eyes of the end customer
• Gauge the class size to the subject matter involved
• In your design, build in ways to actively engage the learners. Otherwise, you might just as well make a video and send it out for people to watch
• Chunk your material
• Don’t assume stand-up Power Point slides equal online training
• Do not let the aesthetics of screen design compete with the message of the learning event
• Don’t create replacement books
• Don’t get carried away by fancy plug-in routines, the main focus is the delivery of information not how fancy the site appears
• Don’t overlook email as an effective teaching aide
• Easy navigation is the most critical
• Do not get too caught up with static Power Point slides. There needs to be motion and action to maintain attention
• Establish good design practices so that the course is broken up into learning modules or content chunks that are easy to absorb, but challenging Prepare materials very differently — leverage what this mode can offer. Discard the stuff that might work very well in a classroom but which has no way of working in this mode
• Make online sessions one tool in your blended delivery approach — not the only tool
• From the management point of view it’s critical to establish common guidelines and approaches for all the online classes. You don’t want each instructor delivering in a totally different way when each class is part of a curriculum. Consistency can appear boring to the designers but is critical for the student Pilot every new course before delivering to students
• Have a good design on paper before you start actually committing your materials to the learning platform / virtual learning environment. This design, if done properly, will certainly allow you see which tools you will need to use from the learning platform / VLE to get the best possible solution for your students and your company’s requirements
• Increase your instructional integrity over classroom material through tight ISD concepts aimed at the medium
• The design of the learning is most crucial
• Distance education instructional design is not a re-format of traditional classroom delivery: recognize the differences and embrace them
  
  Excerpt from "834 Tips for Successful Online Instruction" ebook - submitted by industry experts.
  Published by the ELearning Guild.

To view the complete article or entire ebook, download your free copy from the ELearning Guild website.