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Last month we discussed how to create the best materials for the classroom. Now the time has come for you to create an online course from your instructor-led classroom training materials. While it takes years of experience to get the essence of online training development down to a science, there are several failsafe steps you can go though in order to make sure you create the best, most interactive online course possible. Here are my recommendations for the necessary steps to take your materials from the classroom to the Internet.
Digest the material
The first step when converting your classroom materials to the online environment is to review the content from top to bottom. This includes an interview with the instructor or subject matter expert (SME). Too often this step is glossed over or eliminated altogether and the instructional designer tries to go directly to the step of outlining the course content. However, without making yourself completely comfortable with all of the materials you have available, it is easy to become overwhelmed with the topic. It is common that the instructor does not have organized, detailed content to give you. Many times they have the details of the course they teach in their heads. Rarely will you find the structure of the course ready to go for an online environment. This can pose a multitude of challenges.
Become knowledgeable
Next you should learn the subject matter yourself to the best of your ability. The more you know about the subject you are creating the online course for, the better you will be able to not only organize the materials from the instructor-led course but also create exercises, develop test questions and build interactivities that are all necessary for the online course.
Define learning objectives
Once the content has been thoroughly reviewed and you have a great handle on the knowledge base, it is time to define the learning objectives for the course. These objectives list what the student is expected to learn in the course. These are typically one sentence in length and succinctly identify each main goal for the student based on the primary expected outcomes.
Identifying learning objectives is very important for any training course, but is especially critical when converting an instructor-led course to an online medium. Content must be tied directly to learning objectives for an online course. There is only limited space in an online course, both on each page and throughout the entire lesson. The learning objectives identify what content will be taught to the student online.
Distill the Content
After the learning objectives have identified the primary content to be taught to the students, you may find that there is still secondary content that needs to be shared. This is where it is important to distill what content will be taught online versus what content can be taught offline. There are a variety of ways that content can be taught offline such as through e-mail communications, PDF downloads or even chapter downloads from companion workbooks.
Keep in mind that this secondary content should be used only to extend and enhance the content that is taught online. The online content should match essentially one-on-one with the learning objectives. This ensures that any course you deliver does not try to teach topics which are not pertinent to the learning goals for this course. If you find that you have a lot of content that you want to deliver beyond the learning objectives then perhaps it is time to consider a second course.
Assemble the course
It is up to the instructional designer to be both creative and logical when assembling the online content. Content must be assembled logically to match the flow of the learning objectives into what is called a story board. The story board does not contain the complete course content, but instead defines all of the text for the course and then lays out the selection of interactive media that the course designer wants the media team to develop.
It is in this step that you will identify what activities were used in the classroom training and determine which ones can be transferred to the online course. These will need to be converted to online exercises and interactivities. There are a variety of online interactivities that students can do that can be used to fill in for activities that were used in the classroom. These could be online puzzles, drag-and-drop exercises, software simulations, audio exercises, animated 3D characters that simulate group dynamics and many more.
It is also important at this stage of the game to determine what type of multimedia you are going to use. For instance, don't make the mistake of converting all of your lectures to video and posting them in an online course. It is much easier for students to refer to written text than to video talking heads. Also, you have to consider the bandwidth video will take. Video has its place, but you have to consider the course, the company, the users and the computer systems before you use it. This is just one of the dozens of considerations you will have to make when converting your classroom materials to an online environment.
Other considerations for online training
Before you jump into an eLearning project there are countless other considerations to keep in mind. Here are just a few:
- Can you provide a means for student collaboration from within your course?
- Do your learners have continuous access to the Web?
- Are you prepared to provide technical support to your online users?
These and many other items should be considered as part of the preparatory process. They should not scare you away from the project, rather they should just make you more prepared to take on the project with both eyes wide open.
Final steps
Once you have defined your story board with your media outlined, the final step is to actually develop the online course. The best multimedia development team should be employed at this stage of the game to ensure you have a highly interactive online training course. Stay far away from eReading and be sure to build eLearning. You do this by making sure that your course has interactivities, exercises and test questions sprinkled liberally throughout. Remember that clicking the "next" button does not qualify as true interactivity.
After the course is developed it must go through at least two, and I recommend three, proofing cycles. This should be done by people outside the immediate development team that worked to generate the course. We all know it is very difficult to proof our own work and this applies to our eLearning projects as well.
If you follow these steps you should be able to convert your classroom materials to an online medium. One final note about converting classroom materials — simply posting PowerPoint's to the Internet does count as creating online training. Web-hosted PowerPoint's lack all of the core qualities that true eLearning must have including interactivity, testing, metrics and feedback. Be sure to go the extra mile by taking the time to create online courses with the features that will keep your students engaged and coming back for more.
Connie Moorhead is the President of The CMOOR Group and founder of SecurityCEU.com based in Louisville, Ky.
author: By Connie Moorhead