Fundamentals of course creation
The Course Creator is where you can assemble your narrative content, your digital assets, and your interactive widgets into a compelling and engaging learning experience! All content added and edited within a course is automatically stored and organized within the Content Manager so that it can be reused within other eLearning objects or courses, or published separately from a course. The course editor allows any user, except reviewers, to edit course content in a responsive, mobile-friendly, HTML5 format, which can then be published to any common digital learning or web-based output.
Our simple editing tools allow you to quickly customize the content, layout and design with ease. Use our detailed settings allow you to adjust any individual component of the learning experience. You can easily copy your courses to create different versions or test out different approaches.
To get started, select “Open” on an existing course, or click the “+” sign to the left to create a new course. Give your new course a name and optional cover art to create it.
When you open your course, you will see the starting navigation screen. This shows the Start buttons and your course navigation. If this is a new course, it will begin with one default lesson, “The Pursuit of Knowledge” created for you. You can now begin to edit and test your course. To add additional content, just hover above or beneath an existing block and click the “+” sign to add new content.
NAVIGATION
To add new navigation, click the navigation icon on the far left side of the toolbar.
Click “Edit” to add new navigation. Now hover above or below existing sections to add new navigation. You can add, in any combination:
MODULE: high level grouping of one or more lessons. Modules do NOT contain learning content, they are for grouping and navigation.
LESSON: a single page of learning content with an unlimited number and combination of text, assets, and interactives.
ACTIVITY: a single widget for users to practice.
ASSESSMENT: a single widget to assess users.
You can also expand, move, copy, and delete any navigation elements using the buttons to the left of the element.
AUTHORING
You can move between lessons by clicking the navigation icon and selecting a lesson. Each lesson is composed of one or more “blocks” of content. These blocks can be text, tables, media assets, or interactive widgets. Once you have selected the lesson to edit, hover the mouse above or below an existing block to add a new block. On the left you will be able to choose what type of blocks to enter - a single column block with one type of content, or two blocks side by side with a variety of content (these can also be major/minor blocks where one block is takes up more width than the other). Depending on the type of block selected, you can add assets from the Content Manager or import new content at this stage. If you have chosen a text block, you will have the full range of text editing tools available in the toolbar (note you can include external links, images, and math equations in text blocks as well).
You can adjust a variety of settings to custom the individual style of a block, delete, or move it by hovering over the block and choosing from the settings that appear.
Of course you don’t have to style each block individually - use our template editor to create a theme you can add to the entire course via the Themes icon on the left side of the toolbar.
When you are ready to review your course, you can toggle between Preview and Edit mode on the right side of the toolbar. In Preview mode you can select between desktop, tablet, or mobile views (horizontal or vertical orientation) to test out how your course will play on various formats.
PUBLISHING
When you are ready to introduce your course to the world, return to the course dashboard and click the “...” icon in the upper right of any course. This will give you options to delete, copy, or publish the course.
Choose the arrow icon for publishing. You have several options to publish:
- SCORM - 1.2 or 2004, to send your course to any LMS that can import SCORM.
- Web Standard - a zip file of all the HTML, CSS, and Javascript for the complete course. These files are yours for life and can be modified as you wish.
We hope that gets you started created your awesome course! Please review our other articles for more details on course creation.