Developing e-learning courses with LearnSmartz Course Builder

How developing courses with the LearnSmartz Course Builder saves you time, effort and money
The Development Methodology we use is centered around the LearnSmartz Course Builder. The LearnSmartz Course Builder is a proprietary tool we built that allows us to save at least 60% of our execution time and costs which we further pass on to our clients.

The LearnSmartz Course Builder was created on the back of certain observations:

• A lot of execution time was being taken up by successive iterations and changes especially after implementation in Flash had been started, adding onto the timeline and costs.


• Most corporate clients had a basic shell design and template functionality that they rarely deviated from in successive courses.


• If our clients could view beforehand their whole course, set in various templates with relevant images and edit that storyboard before final implementation was started, it would save a lot of time and money.

LearnSmartz Course Builder has slashed costs by 60%

Through the LearnSmartz Course Builder, we can give access to our clients to view various templates and select the ones they want, they can directly key in text and images into the Course Builder framework itself if needed. They can view the text and images in the templates and make whatever changes they want before the implementation. This saves on reworking later resulting in a huge savings of effort, time and cost.


Steps in the Development Methodology


• Requirement Gathering
  
Our Project Manager sits across the table with you and your team to ascertain the requirements and objectives of your e-learning course at the end of which a high level document detailing out information is generated.


• Sitemap and keying in content
  
With your inputs, we generate a course sitemap detailing out the modules and topics involved.


• Admin and Users are defined
  
The LearnSmartz Course Builder allows for multiple users to work concurrently so some kind of overall, supervisory control is required. The Project Manager normally is defined as the ‘Admin’ while the ID people, designers etc. are the ‘users’. The Admin can add courses; sets access rights, change status of screens, view reports and approve or reject changes.


• Defining Templates for the course
  
The LearnSmartz Course Builder has a bank of templates that demonstrate varied animation functionalities like ‘Click to Reveal’, ‘Drag and Drop Image’, Match One to One’ which basically illustrate the interactive functionality of the template. You can select from these which you would like to use in the course. Since the animation is predefined and the coding already exists, implementation time is highly reduced. The template has predefined areas where a user may key in the heading, images, text and links to be used in the screens. The Course Builder behaves like a WYSIWYG editor for e-learning course development.


• Content and images are keyed in
  
The ID people draft out the course content and key in text into the screens based on the selected templates. The designers select images for the templates. These images can be edited through the Course Builder’s inbuilt Image Editor for cropping, resizing etc. The text and image keying in can happen concurrently too, saving on development time. Versioning control has been provided in the Course Builder which makes accountability easy to establish.



• Course is published as a Word Document before approval

After content and images have been keyed in, the Project Manager (Admin) can publish the course as a Word doc. which will be sent to you for viewing. If required, you or your ID staff can make changes in the text or suggest image changes. Once we have your approval, the implementation can begin.

Implementation stage
After the final approval, the Project Manager publishes the whole course from the Course Builder as a single ZIP file. It contains all the XML, audio files and screens of the course. Since the programming already exists in various templates, only a small amount of tweaking is required at this level. The course is now published as a SWF and is ready for use.


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