Creating E-Content Faster With Rapid E-Learning Development

Training and Learning is a continuous process in the corporate environment, considering the immense pressure to be at par with the latest developments across all industries. Most companies have adopted various developing tools for creating online learning courses. But, we have an excellent tool for creating e-courses that most of us are comfortable with, and can utilize for effective content creation – PowerPoint. PowerPoint is often utilized to create presentations with common elements, such as bullet points and stock graphics, yet it is much more helpful.

• Subject Matter Experts, or SMEs, can themselves create e-courses, cutting the development time by considerable measures. In addition to converting the entire content with ease, rapid authoring tools also help build interactivity into courses. Attractive graphics, audio, and video can be added to the course to make it multimedia rich and hence, more impactful. And all this at a fraction of time, compared to traditional e-learning development cycle.
• While creating online learning courses, do not focus on sharing information alone, instead focus on offering opportunities for exploration. Include stories, anecdotes and word problems instead of the text approach to allow employees to make decisions about their learning, such as what they will explore next.
• Images and graphics can easily be added to Powerpoint and it is often a temptation to just take what is available. But it is a good idea to think beyond just ClipArt and incorporate image grabs that make more sense to the learners, even simple animations can increase the content appeal by large proportions.
• External Links are a useful resource within a learning course and can provide a sense of exploration for the learners. Many people are unaware about this feature of PowerPoint, but it can function like a webpage and can provide links to the external resources. Developers can utilize this feature to create an environment for learning, offering both external resources and internally linking them. By providing links to other pages, you can also include links which allow them to read and download resources for further study or to refresh, whenever they feel the need.
• Instead of linear navigation, include choices that offer user control when the learners engage with the learning content. This provides the feeling of self-led learning and many adult learners prefer it over the strictly structured learning. For many learners, it may also suit their learning styles better when they have a free access to the material and can refer to certain sections as per need. After a few main slides, the learner can be allowed to choose where to go next and then go back to the main page.

Most e-learning developers are pressed for time and PowerPoint provides a host of interesting options that can be utilized to create effective eLearning courses.

Creating Responsive Web Design For Mobile Learning Content

As training and learning is becoming more mobile-enabled, mlearning is also becoming more sophisticated. All modern learners now want a mobile version of the e-learning course, so that they can access it anywhere and anytime – as per need.

To take into account practical concerns, the mlearning design should be aligned with all major devices that the users use and be compatible with varying screen resolutions as well. In the field of Web design and development, creating a separate mobile version of every training is impossible keeping in mind with the endless new resolutions and devices. So what is the solution?

Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries. As the user switches devices, the e-learning content should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities. In other words, responsive learning is the technology that automatically responds to the user’s preferences and eliminates the need for a different design and development phase for varying user devices.

To create e-learning content with responsive web design, there are three key technical features to be considered:

• Media queries and media query listeners: Media queries allow the web page to use different CSS style rules based on the characteristics of the device on which the site is being displayed, the width of the browser being the most common one.
• A flexible grid-based layout: The fluid grid concept calls for page element sizing to be in relative units, such as percentages or ems, rather than absolute units, such as pixels or points.
• Flexible images and media: Through dynamic resizing or CSS, flexible images are sized in relative units — up to 100% — to prevent them from being displayed outside their containing element. A full image is downloaded on the device of a user and then resized to fit the screen.

The advent and popularity of mobile devices has affected the e-Learning industry as well. Mobile learning was just a concept till a few years ago, but is now being embraced by all. For developers though, mobile learning has always posed the problem of creating mobile content that is compatible across all user devices. In addition to PCs, tablets and mobile phones, developers had to create different versions of the content for Windows, Android and the Apple systems!

With HTML, mobile content can be created and displayed across all devices, such as PCs, tablets and mobile phones, and is compatible with different OSs. HTML supports responsive design features to create e-content that can be accessed across multiple devices, with equal ease and effective visual impact.

Responsive web design is poised to the change that new-age learners want to see in mobile content. We are looking forward to employing the new technology and continue sharing our experiences!