Online Course Development allows teachers and professionals to create their own training materials in their own time. Using online tools to craft lesson materials helps teachers create lessons more quickly and distribute training materials more easily, which is especially handy if students or employees are located miles apart.
Many organizations are taking online course development a step further and involving entire teams in the production of digital lessons. Instead of only one manager or teacher crafting the materials based on individual knowledge, lesson projects are growing more collaborative, with many experts weighing in with their own decisions and ideas. This lesson collaboration offers several benefits for organizations willing to assemble a team.
1. Everyone is a Specialist
When a team is created to put together an online lesson, quality increases. Each team member in the collaboration can offer valuable feedback on particular sections of the lesson, contributing to overall improvement. For more complex lessons involving multiple subjects or topics, the advantages are clear. But widespread collaboration proves useful even for more simple lessons. External lesson planners can see points of confusion more easily than internal workers, and correct for clarity. Web designers and media specialists can choose the strongest multimedia content to improve the message. Employee representatives can offer input on which functions need more improvement. Organization leaders can spot-check for quality of message and goal-fulfillment…the list goes on.
The end result is a more complete, effective lesson that looks great while passing along key information. Collaboration in cloud-based development is especially easy to achieve, because participants do not need to download any special software or meet in person to contribute. Experts can come together based on their own schedules.
2. Course-Building Tools Help Instead of Hinder
One of the difficulties of collaboration is that everyone needs to be on the same page – often literally. Each expert needs to master the content creation system, the goals of the lesson, and the general tone that the company wants to take. Online course-building tools make this process much easier for companies, compared to traditional ground-up creation processes.
The new wave of online course development software supports easy learning, allowing experts to quickly grasp the basics of the system and move on to creating their content. Not everyone needs to learn how to code Flash animation or build quiz questions in the proper format. Instead, simple cloud-based tools let the team log on, pick the right tools, and type aware. This provides maximum lesson input for minimum effort from contributors, saving on time and frustration. The ease of the system also means that more experts may be willing to take part in the project.
3. Localization is Less of a Headache
Localization refers to any practice where content is changed to make it more applicable to a specific group. For example, employees in one state may not need the same guideline reviews as employees in another state with different laws. Or students in one region may benefit more from history connected with their own area than from generalized history.
Localization is frequently a headache, but online collaboration makes the process much easier. Rather than sending completed lessons to a single person for localization revision, team members can be assignment to the project who specializes in localization. This flexible approach allows organizations to localize when and how they need to. A single localizer can help the team create adjustable content, or a whole team of localizers can complete a second project phase, developing several lesson versions for different regions at the same time.
4. Users Can Easily Connect to the Finished Product
One the collaboration team has finished, the lesson plan can swiftly move through the final stages of the process, allowing the organization to deliver content to students in record time. Often, one or two of the experts can stay connected to the project to answer any questions new students may have. If additional students or employees need to access the lesson, they can find it online without the need to download new software or jump through too many hoops.
Sameer Bhatia is the founder of ProProfs.com, which provides a popular software to create survey http://www.proprofs.com/survey/ .
