By Steve Lee, Co-Founder/ Strategic Relationship Manager 

Why can’t e-learning be as easy to create as a website?

These days, creating and maintaining a website is a breeze—once you understand your audience, your message, your content and the best way to treat all of them. 

After doing a great site design you can either acquire or have great templates built that are tailored to fit your needs. Once you have the template, you can simply use a web-based form to maintain, change and add content—you don't need to be a programmer in HTML or JavaScript. So, after the design phase, why can’t e-learning be that easy? 

If you use or are familiar with the Allen Interactions SAM approach, you may ask yourself, why can't Iterative Development be done outside of an authoring tool? Why can’t the interactions be stored in a repository and reused? Why can’t changes to a template, model or style sheet propagate to every lesson/course/module automatically? Why can’t textual and media changes happen near instantaneously?

Well it can and it should! How you ask? By designing and creating engaging interactions using HTML5 that tie directly into Wiki content objects like Google Docs and Google Sheets. If your company doesn’t allow Wiki development, then simply using a spreadsheet or database to store all your content should work just as well.

At Allen Interactions we have found a way to create reusable learning objects in HTML5 that incorporate responsive design, making them adaptive to all forms of devices. These learning objects can be as simple as on-line reference, media casting or performance support systems, or as complex as dynamic role plays, games and simulations. We have also found a way to enable those learning objects to point directly to external media sources that can be edited in a Wiki or in a simple office document. By using this approach, we have been able to maximize the effectiveness of SAM while allowing our clients to gain full control of their own content. Our clients are now able to make changes on the fly as well as use the learning object to create new solutions without needing to do any work in an authoring language.

This approach also streamlines the localization process by allowing the external content to be sent directly to translation companies. By using HTML5, we can create screen layouts that can adapt fonts, spacing, scrolling and other screen components as necessary. We can also create user experiences that take full advantage of mobile interfaces by allowing both paging and scrolling.

To learn more about this approach and examples in action, please join my one hour SABA webinar, Creating a Mobile Learning Library With Modern Technologies. For details and to register, click here.