Online learning and sharing knowledge and support via E-Learning is now almost here to stay. Setting up a course does require a lot from the person who is going to do this. In this article, we'll discuss how to set up such an online course, what tools you can use, and what to look out for.
Course content, your content
Of course, it starts with your content. The first thing you do is gather information for your course. First, determine your end goal, so what do you want your students to learn. Then consider what information is needed to achieve that end result. The next step is to divide your content into bite-sized chunks and divide these chunks into activities. Think carefully about the activities because you want to make your course as attractive and interactive as possible. In a subsequent article, we will discuss various activities in more detail. In any case, what you want is for each lesson to be short. Preferably a maximum of 5 minutes so that the student can take a lesson at any time.
Branding your e-learning course
The next step is to think about your branding. What does your course look like? You want it to match your corporate identity and identity. But depending on the purpose of your course, you will place different accents in your layout. You don't want to design a course focused on preventing something, such as a casino course aimed at preventing gambling addiction, too exuberant, even though you want to see that the course comes from the casino. Create a style guide for this. Then you have a handy guide for when you are busy with the layout or you have something in your hands to instruct someone else.
SCORM and xAPI
There are a number of good course formatting tools on the market. If you are going to use these, make sure that the LMS, the Learning Management System, where you will eventually host the course and where you will give your students access to the course supports SCORM or xAPI. These are file formats suitable for e-learning. A good authoring tool can export the file to SCORM or xAPI. A good LMS can import that file into a course and thus take over all the layout including images, animations, videos, 1 on 1.
Good formatting tools or authoring tools as they are called
A layout tool for e-learning is called an authoring tool. If you are looking for a tool on the web, you may also be able to search for the English term Authoring Tool. Good tools include Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, and Gomo. However, there are also more and more good LMS platforms that have an ingrained Authoring Tool. TheLearning LAB is one such solution. In the platform, you can create a course and directly use the editor to easily create a course via the slidebuilder. Of course, there are more Learning Management Systems such as TheLearning LAB that can do this, but what TheLearning LAB has in store for other tools is that you can perfectly combine the slide builder with external authoring tools and import SCORM files into a lesson. This way, you get the best of both worlds.
Offering the e-learning course in multiple languages
An important point of attention for using external authoring tools is offering courses in multiple languages. The so-called multilingual function. In general, a good authoring tool allows you to export the content to an XLIFF file. This is a text file that a good translation agency can read, translate and return so that you can format the course in another language and import the text. With most elearning platforms, it is necessary to set up a separate course per language and then upload your content by language. So if you use an authoring tool like Captivate, you'll first export your course to Scorm there. Then you import it back into the LMS. This way, you can easily design and offer your course in multiple languages.
But it can be even easier if you have an advanced LMS like TheLearning LAB. TheLearning LAB has an integration with Deepl. The advanced machine translator. Well, you might say, yes, but that translation is never 100% correct. That's true, but it does make your life a lot easier. If you use Deepl in combination with the internal authoring tool, your course content is automatically translated into the language in which you want to publish. You can then open the course in the internal authoring tool in the translated version and modify your text so that it is 100% accurate. In other words: first make your course perfect with the internal authoring tool, click translate, open the other language, check and edit, done... Bit of an exaggeration, of course, but it's doable. Right?
