Elearning. Where to start?

When you first investigate elearning it can be overwhelming. There are so many different ways of of providing courses online. You'll come across Terms such as “ LMS ”, “SCORM” and “authoring tool”. But don’t despair! E-learning is not as complex as it seems.

This is a simple guide to providing e-learning. It is written for people who are new to it.

Adminstrative Considerations – the “Learning Management System”

Think of a “Learning Management System” LMS as a website that does two things.

• It displays your course materials (web pages, videos, text, pictures, etc).
• It keeps records of courses, students and what students have done.

You'll note the LMS just “manages” your student data and displays course materials to students. It is essentially an administrative system. Hence the “management” part of “Learning Management System”.

You already know what you need to know to work out if an LMS suits you. To work out what you need from an LMS , just take your current way of recording student scores, handing out certificates, distributing course materials, and so on, and ask yourself: how would this translate into an online, electronic form?
Some things to consider:

• What is the process for enrolling new students?
• Do you organise students into groups?
• Do you need to relate course results to “competencies”? That is, if someone passes a particular course, do you need to record not only the “pass”, but also that the person is qualified in something?
• If a student passes a course should the student get a certificate? If so, what should it look like?
• Think about what data you will want from the system and in what format you need it. Will you need a list of the all the students that have a passed a given course? Will you track when students have logged in to do a course? What information will you need?
  
• Will you need to do things such as adjust student's scores? Do you need to delegate these tasks to other people? For instance, do you want to have teachers login and carry out administrative tasks on the courses they are running? If so, what administrative tasks?

On this basis, what do you need need from an LMS ? Make a list of all features of the LMS that are vital. Make a list of those it would be nice to have. This will help you select an LMS .

Remember the LMS just “manages” your student records and so on. It doesn't actually contain any courses. The next question you should ask is: how am I going to get my courses into a my LMS ?

Course Materials

You can have text, pictures, video, audio and animation in your elearning courses. The first step is to gather the text, pictures video, audio and animation together. Organised however you usually organise your courses.

Next, write down the types of materials you have. Do you have any audio files? What about word processing documents or powerpoint presentations? What about graphics? Video?

Course Interactivity

The great thing about elearning is that students can interact with the course as they do it.  Tests, quizzes, forums, uploads, downloads, and assessments are all forms of “interactivity”. It's worth writing down what sort of interactivity you require.

• Will students need to able to complete multiple choice tests?
• Will students add messages to forums?
• Will students need to upload documents to be assessed by teachers?
• What sort of tracking of student activity do you need? Scores for individual tests? Results for individual questions? Groups of questions?

Course “flow”

Now imagine a course that has a test. If the student passes the test you want to student to go the next part of the course. Otherwise you want the student to repeat the test. Consider how your course “flows” like this. Write down what sort of “flow” you have in mind.

Try to keep things as simple as possible.

Now you have written down the materials you have, the interactivity involved and the way the course flows , you have a good idea of what your course involves.

How do you create it and it into your LMS ?

Creating Elearning Content for Your LMS

Sorry, we have to mention one more piece of elearning jargon now.

The SCORM format standardises the way courses are organised. How scores are passed to the LMS , and so on.

SCORM allows you to organise a given course and its associated files into a single “package”. Then you can upload this “package” to any LMS that supports the SCORM standard. Just like Microsoft Word can open any Microsoft Word “document”, a good LMS can “open” any SCORM course.

There are also plenty of “authoring tools” that will create SCORM content for you. This is a piece of software that creates elearning content in much the same way you create text documents in a word processor or images in Photoshop. Indeed, for the most part, you will be able to ignore the “SCORM” standard using this sort of software.

Before selecting an “authoring tool”, though, ask yourself these three questions:

• can the “authoring tool” “import” your course materials; text, video, audio, pictures?
  
• can it create the level of interactivity your require?
  Will it let you create all the quizzes, and so on, you have in mind?
  Will it support the sort of “flow” you had in mind?
  
• Does it produce SCORM packages that work with the LMS you have chosen?
  

If all this is too complicated for you, don't worry. A good elearning company should be able to prepare your content as a SCORM package and then upload it to your chosen LMS . Indeed, they should provide the LMS too; providing a complete way of producing, managing  and delivering elearning.