Building Dynamic Multimedia Courses - Part 1

Have you ever wanted to build a simple training course, or maybe even a complex one? As we watched our customers go digital, we realized that you might be of great assistance by teaching you a little more about building training courseware. Do you want to build a website, blog, webinar or maybe even a training course? Here are a few tips and tricks that the professionals use for instructional design concepts.

Stage 1 – Planning & Preparation

First and foremost, what is the intended outcome of the course or information? Determine your objectives – what is the purpose? Decide who your audience is and what the main factors are that will influence the use and adoption of the information we are looking to build. For example, in what format will the information be presented?

Once you understand the outcome you wish to accomplish, work on the objectives you listed to make sure you cover what is expected. Sometimes the objectives are broad, but they are always forefront in the project layout and are a foundation document.

Next, decide who will deliver this information. Base your decision on the talent, energy, communication, and expertise level this person brings. If you are not planning to use video in your project, you still must find the best talent or information source on the subject you’re teaching. This is true whether you’re building a blog, podcast or training course. If you struggle with the content, find a better resource to build from. There’s nothing worse than spending the time and energy on a project than realize in quality control and editing that the content isn’t holding true or lacks the meat to make the information engaging.

This is the information age, so make the information worthy of the time involved to consume it, let alone build it. “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t always hold true. Now that you’ve picked some great content and have a good message, you just start building the information, right? Wrong. You need to decide how the information gets presented graphically. Some things work well with slides – like bullet points, lists, or steps, but some things do not. This is typically decided in what’s called a storyboard; minimum information that lets you decide up front what content is presented with graphics, bullets, audio, video, and/or flash animation.

Next, decide on the background. If your presentation is built in PowerPoint or a similar product, pick the slide background you want to use now before you do anything else. You will save a lot of time in the long run by determining the design and layout now. The color combinations you choose really make a difference. Fonts, styles, and even how you’re planning to make the transitions from one bit of information to the next also need to be decided on at this point. These small decisions will affect the entire project because the layout of information needs to be consistent to the eye as well as the message.

Use LearnKey Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver courses as a foundation to learn how to design and build great digital information to communicate your message clearly.

Let us know through the LearnKey blog – www.learnkey.com/blog – if you are looking for more information on this subject and we will consider sharing tips and tricks we use to make our training courses in future newsletters or articles.

Stay tuned for Building Dynamic Multimedia Courses - Part 2. Look for it in the July LearnKey Newsletter.