Designing E-learning

Just a couple of additional resources following directly on from the longish post on thinking a bit outside of the box with your PowerPoint presentations. If you spend a couple of coffee breaks looking into the tutorials, you will soon find that PowerPoint can actually be quite powerful as a development software. This link is another resource from the Rapid E-learning Blog on 3 things to consider when developing your course:

• Focus on meaning not information
• The e-learning course is just one part of a complex process
• Instructional designers are intentional

A few months ago, Cathy Moore gave a presentation on designing e-learning, and after discussing her Action Mapping approach, the last section of her talk illustrates this quite effectively, especially the sense of what can you remove from the course/course content:

Coming back to Tom, here’s a great resource on how you can use powerpoint to create non-powerpoint-looking resource which exemplifies an activity rather than presented info – and there are free little people if you can use them too. Almost as good as free coffee!

A great planning resource I met years ago is the Swedish Kummel project, which has been in Swedish only for years, which is fine for me, but not so fine for most. Now there is a translated version, which makes it a very interesting proposition and one that (needs a bit more translating) could be really helpful for thinking about setting up new online distance or work-based courses. Watch this space.