When creating an e-Learning course, there are different steps that need to be taken to improve the effectiveness of the course and gain retention. Therefore, do not start with creating the content of the course, which most authors will do. First, you need to think about your goals and the purpose of the course. Why do you make an e-Learning course? What do you want your learners to achieve? What knowledge and competencies do you want them to acquire? There are a lot of question that must be asked.

WHAT?

At first, start to formulate the overall goal of the course. This means a broad and overall statement of what will be achieved. Never lose sight of this goal and create your course around it. If you don’t do this, there is no point in setting these goals in the first place. Most of the time, this goal arises from a concrete, specific, practical problem. For example, in your company you experience a lack of knowledge about the norms and values of the company among your employees. The goal of the course will be to provide clear information about the norms and values of the course.

Some would say this goal is a little vague and too difficult to create an e-Learning course out of it. That’s why there is an important second step. The overall goal needs to be divided in concrete, measurable, assessable learning objectives (sub goals). Keep the learning outcomes that you want to achieve in your mind after reaching the sub goals, these two should always match.

The next step will be building the structure of your e-Learning course. Start with creating the questions that will assess the learning objectives. This will tell you what the learner needs to be able to do or know. The final step is adding content that is directly connected to the questions. Less is better!

WHY?

 But why should you put any effort in creating the goals and outcomes? Learning development starts with creating the goals.  The design and development strategy needs to be based on these goals. As a preceptor it is important to get some insight into how to provide meaningful, interactive and informative learning experiences, which should focus on achieving those goals. This way you will create the best possible learning environment for your learners. When you teach your learners something, it needs to have value for the learners, they want to achieve something when taking a course. It’s your goal to meet these needs and increase the motivation. Create e-Learning experiences that motivate and engage the learners. Knowing the desired outcome will enable you to create a strategy that encompasses necessary information, tools, and activities and not deluge you with an overload on cognitive information. The fact that you don’t have a predetermined goal of what you want to achieve will prevent you from achieving it effectively.

HOW?

After knowing what learning goals and outcomes are and why you should create them for your e-Learning course, I’ll explain exactly how you can make them. Here are four questions you should ask yourself which will help you develop the objectives of your e-Learning course; who are the learners completing this course; what do you want them to be able to do after completing the course; what do they need to know to do this, and what must the learner understand to be able to do it?

Another important aspect to keep in mind is knowing how to communicate the objectives. Clearly communicating your goals is just as important as developing them. Be as specific as possible and tell your audience precisely what your e-Learning course is going to offer them. Remember to always think about the learners’ perspective. Easygenerator has developed a tool for this: The learning objective maker.

The learning objective maker in Easygenerator is an easy tool to create the sub goals of your e-Learning course. While creating the goals and objectives, you have to think about what the learners should be able to do at the end of your e-Learning course. This tool guides you through the formulation of the sub goals. First you need to decide who the learner is. The next step is to decide what you want your learners to be able to do. The tool is based on Bloom’s taxonomy, this will allow you to choose the learning level and the right verbs to clarify the goal. After choosing the verbs, you need to define what the task is. The final step is describing the learning conditions. After following these steps, the learning objective or sub goal is created. Then you can start again and create another one, three or four objectives will be enough.

Next step: Structure your course

Once you’ve carefully formulated the learning goal(s) of your e-Learning course, all of the other aspects of your e-Learning design and development strategy will fall into place. It helps you organize the material in a proper way so learning becomes as effortless as possible and thus more immersive. First, decide (based on the learning objectives you set) what and how you want to assess your learners. This is important because the learning goals needs to be adapted to the learning outcomes. These outcomes be achieved by setting the right assessment. Based on the assessment you will use, make the content. This content should be made after setting the assessment, in this way you won’t give too much unnecessary information to the students, which will make the course specific and to the point. This kind of courses make it more efficient and interesting for the learner.

One last thing to remember: Always keep an eye on the learning objectives, never lose sight of what you want the learners get out the experience!

Blended learning is a concept that a lot of people have heard of, but actually using it in an educational setting doesn’t happen a lot. Aside from the overall concept of blended learning, we will take a look into the role that e-Learning plays in this matter. On the 22^nd of November and the 13^th of December Kasper and I organize a webinar on these topics.

First of all, blended learning is the combination of face-to-face education and electronical- and computer assisted learning. The advantages of this concept and the use of the online element of learning, improve the quality of learning of the students, they will be able to do more in-depth learning. Secondly, they learn more efficient. Students learn at their own pace and take extra time to study or repeat the subjects they have more difficulties with. This gives them more autonomy in the learning process, which will lead to more motivation. The following topics will be discussed in the webinar in relation to the use of blended learning in an educational setting.

Improve quality

Flipped classroom

The flipped classroom is a form of blended learning which improves the learning quality of the students. When flipping the classroom, you change the normal educational structure where the homework will be done in class and the lesson will be followed at home. This way the teacher will able to focus more on helping the students apply the content and focus more on the higher level learning skills. Following the lesson at home via an e-Learning course provides the students to means to learn at their own pace, repeat or fast forward through the lesson.

Pre-teaching

A second application of blended learning to improve quality is pre-teaching. This consists of repeating the lesson for students who need more guidance and support to understand the content of the lesson. Teachers will be able to use e-Learning to facilitate the guidance.

Retention

To improve the quality of the learning of your students, you need to make sure there is retention. What the students learn fades away in a short period of time. To retain what they have learned there is needed repetition. E-Learning is an easy solution to deal with this issue. To check and guarantee the retention, creat an online course or test.

More efficient

Automatic grading

To increase the efficiency of learning, automatic grading is a handy tool in eLearning courses. In tools like Easygenerator, it is possible to track the scores of the progress of the students.

Co-authoring

Another advantage of blended learning, to gain more efficiency, is the possibility to add co-authors in an e-learning course. Teachers create courses together via the web, which increases the interdisciplinarity. This involves creating better courses which can be checked and guarantee the quality.

Motivation

When working with blended learning and e-Learning courses, the motivation of your students will also increase. Students will have more space to fill in their own personal learning. It offers more flexibility and more autonomy and students will be responsible for their own development. So as a result, learners will be more intrinsically motivated to achieve the learning goals. Another advantage is the learning process will be more personalized. Weaknesses and strengths will be clear and anticipated. With this new educational software, the learner will evaluate and record their performance results. Thus, providing the option to view the progress rate at any time of the day.

Would you like to learn more, sign up for the webinar on 22nd of November and 13th of december

When you make an e-Learning course, there are many things to consider for ensuring the quality and effectiveness of the course. For the next step in my internship at Easygenerator, I started looking at some important points that improve the didactics of the courses. I created a kind of didactical flow to illustrate the various steps in making an e-Learning course. There is a division in two main lines in the flow, namely the “what” and “how”.

Defining “what” you want to achieve with an e-Learning course

Step 1: Clarifying the problem: Why do I make this e-Learning course? What is the problem?

Step 2: Set the goal: It is important to keep in mind both the authors’ perspective and the learners’ perspective. What do I want to achieve with this e-Learning course? What do the learners want to achieve when taking this course? Do I want to teach or test? Do the learners want to learn something or actually be tested? (e.g. they need to pass a test about the norms and values of the company, OR they need to learn something and accomplish personal development). When do I want my learners to achieve this, over what period of time, and in which context? These are important questions that need to be asked. The answer to the question why a course should be taken and the initial goal of the course, needs to be clear to keep your learners motivated.

Step 3: Setting the context: Who are the learners? Their interests, their current skill sets, and their level of experience is the key to determining your learning goals. Where should the e-learning take place, in which context (e.g. at home, at work…).

Step 4: Creating learning objectives: Creating subgoals in the shape of learning objectives is the fourth step. What specifically do I want my learners to learn? Here the author needs to focus on specific skills. These learning objectives provide the input of the course. Here it is interesting to use Blooms’ taxonomy to organize objectives and make a distinction between higher order and lower order skills. Both learner and preceptor need to understand the purpose of the course and that is why it is important that the learning objectives are available.

Step 5: Defining learning outcomes: Connect these learning objectives to specific learning outcomes of the e-Learning course. They refer to the concrete products of the course. These outcomes present the evidence of the achieved learning goals and make clear what the student will be able to do. Clear and measurable criteria should be drafted, for guiding the teaching, learning and assessment process.

 

The second line in the didactical flow: “how” you construct an e-Learning course

Step 1: Structure of the course: You need to build the main structure of your e-Learning course. What is the story I want to tell? Create different sections of chapters and connect them to the learning objectives.

Step 2: Assessment: Decide how you want to assess your students’ e-Learning in the different sections. How are you going to measure the outcomes you set for the course? How will you prove the goals are achieved? These types of assessment also need to be connected to the learning objectives.

Step 3: Presentation of the content: Now you start creating the content of the e-Learning course. Here it is important to keep in mind, not to give more information than your assessment requires. Also consider different types of presenting the content to the learners (video, voice-over, text…). Not every student learns in the same way.

Step 4: Feedback: Provide the learners with decent feedback. Positive feedback stimulates them to learn more and keep them motivated. Negative feedback stimulates correction of their errors in relation to the original learning. So this is an important aspect of a course when you want to improve learning at all times.

Step 5: Reflection: In conclusion, you let your learners reflect upon the learning process. Based on the learning objectives, did they achieve the goals? Did they learn what they expected?

Easygenerator is growing and that reflects in the Jane Hart Top 200 of this year. Not only are we listed for the third time in a row. We went up 39 places from number 87 to number 52. This years list is a bit different. It went from a top100 to a top200 and has now three categories. Easygenerator is on position 55 for educational tools and on position 43 for workplace learning. We are on position 52 overall. You can see the complete list on Jane Harts website.

I want to thank all the users that voted for Easygenerator, and I want to thank you for the great feedback that our users/voters left with Jane Hart.

Some quotes on Easygenerator:

• “this is the most user-friendly e-learning tool I have tried, and as a busy professor, I can’t afford to spend a lot of time on online course development.” Chris Wildermuth, University/College teacher, USA
• “Easy to use, flexible pricing, and many users supported Powerful training can now done over the internet and for a very reasonable cost.” Steven Guzelimian, USA
• “We use Easygenerator to produce attractive, effective learning material. Our eLearning developers like its ease of use, while our subject matter experts like the ability to leave feedback as they review a course. It allows for a very collaborative process.” Stephen Naso, L&D Manager, USA
• “This has a bit more of a cookie-cutter feel out of the box, but the ways that pretests and post tests can tie in directly to topic areas in the training make it a great tool for selectively/dynamically marking mastered content in the course as complete based on the user’s pretest results.” Kimball Larsen, e-learning developer, USA
• “very easy to use, responsive eLearning authoring tool. We’ve deployed it across our entire organization so anyone can create effective learning!” L&D Manager, USA

We will definitely be in the top 50 next year.

Kasper Spiro

Easygenerator is an eLearning authoring tool with a big plus. We will host your courses for you (if you want) and we can even track and trace your results. We have various options:

• Track and trace results inside Easygenerator
• Track and trace results in your own Learning record store
• Track and trace results in your LMS

In this post I would like to go over all three options.

Track and trace results in Easygenerator

For this option you do not have to do anything, it works by default. We will track and trace all the results of the learners. You will see them on the result tab of your course. You can even download these results. We created a video with some extra details.

Track and trace results in your LRS

If you have an LRS of your own, you can use that. Just add your credentials to the course settings and that is it. This video shows you how it is done.

Track and trace results in your LMS

Of course we are also able to report results to your LMS. Just use the publish option ‘To your LMS’ and upload the course in your LMS. That is all. The results will be reported automatically. If you do not disable result trackling in your setting the results will be stored in your LMS and in Easygenerator or your custom LRS at the same time.

 

Any questions left? Please checkout the help page or contact us via [email protected]

At easygenerator we add features and improvements every week. This week I want to draw your attention to a cool new feature: The HotSpot

What is a hotspot?

A hotspot is basically a hyperlink on an image. A hotspot can link to a text with explanation, another image, a web page or a document. In our first implementation we only have a text option.

Why should I want to use a hotspot?

With the text hotspot that we implemented you can add text or explanations to an image. The advantage is that the user will only see the image, and will get the extra info in the context (if he or she hovers over the hotspot with the mouse).

How do I add a hotspot in easygenerator?

I will show you in a few simple steps. I also recorded a video showing the process in which I added some nice easygenerator tips as a bonus!

You can add hotspots to all content and question items in easygenerator. If you want to add content in a topic or question just click button:

 

After that you will see two buttons. Press ‘Add hotspot on an image’.

 

A dialog will be show where you can select the image to place the hotspots on:

Drag the hotspot, fill in the text you want to appear and press save.

The learner will see this hotspot on hover over:

 

To see this in action check out the video, including some extra tips.

Energy shortage forces Ukrainian schools to close during winter period, Easygenerator provides its software for free!

Rotterdam, The Netherlands. 8 January 2015. – The Ukraine is going through tumultuous times; economic setbacks, war in the east and political instability. Schools and universities will be closed in the winter for a period of three months to save gas and money. Teachers are trying to teach from home, a challenging task given the lack of resources.

Easygenerator, a provider of eLearning authoring software, decided to make its software available free of charge to everybody in the Ukraine as of today. Easygenerator is closely connected to the Ukraine, it’s software development team of 17 developers is based in Zhytomyr (Ukraine). The software is available free of charge for a period of 3 months till the 1^st of April. Easygenerator wants to make a contribution to the Ukraine and hopes to facilitate online learning for all Ukrainian teachers and students. “We strongly believe in supporting online learning globally. Given our special relationship with the Ukraine it is our pleasure to make a small contribution to the country in these challenging times”, says Kasper Spiro (CEO Easygenerator).

How does it work?

It’s easy, go to www.easygenerator.com and sign up. Your account will be automatically upgraded to a premium account if you are from the Ukraine till the 1^st of April. The premium account allows users to create, design and publish courses. All accounts will be transferred into free accounts by April first, and all courses will remain available for the students!

About Easygenerator

Easygenerator provides cloud-based eLearning authoring software. Easygenerator enables instructional designers and subject matter experts to rapidly create the most engaging courses that have the highest learning impact. Easygenerator is affordable, easy to use, and future proof. Simply create, design, publish courses, and track your learner’s results with Easygenerator. Used and loved by 8000+ users in more than 150 countries. Easygenerator’s headquarter is located in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Are you ready to develop an e-Learning course? Watch out!  It can get complicated very quickly because you need to:

• Buy and install an authoring environment and be trained on it.
• Buy, install and customize a LMS.
• Provide course hosting and access for learners.
• Have knowledge of SCORM and XAPI (TinCan).
• Have instructional design knowledge.
• Design course look and feel.

All that has changed now! Easygenerator offers all this and more with unique pricing that includes a free monthly plan, $19 (starter Plan) and $39 (Plus Plan). This post reviews all this information and explains how easygenerator revolutionizes the world of e-Learning, making it accessible to everyone.

Buy and install an authoring environment and be trained on it

Easygenerator is designed with you in mind – someone with little or no experience in e-Learning. Easygenerator is so easy you can start developing courses without any training! Also, you don’t need to install anything, just go to www.easygenerator.com and sign up. Everything is in the cloud. You will be up and running in seconds.

You can buy easygenerator but you can also use it for free and still use all of its features. And you can switch between Plans every month, based on your needs.

Buy and install a LMS

Don’t bother. Do you need an authoring tool that provides course accessibility to learners and lets you check their learning results? Easygenerator offers all that.

Provide course hosting and access for learners

No need for any of that. Use easygenerator servers at no additional cost and with a single click you can host your courses. Hosting is included in the price for an unlimited number of learners.

Must have knowledge of SCORM and XAPI (TinCan)

What do all these strange abbreviations mean? Don’t worry – you don’t need to try and figure it out. With easygenerator, all you need is included in a simple and intuitive interface. SCORM and XAPI are integrated in easygenerator software giving you the flexibility for easy authoring, easy publishing and the ability to track results.

Design a course look and feel

Easygenerator is template based. Choose your template, choose your theme, upload your logo and you’ve just customized the course look and feel.

Need to have instructional design knowledge

Our goal is to help you create instructionally sound and effective e-Learning courses. Easygenerator is more than a tool, because it supports course development with a didactical approach built into it, ready for you to use. Easygenerator offers support through additional free tools (such as the learning objective maker, blogs, courses, webinars and Q&A sessions) in order to enable you to reach your goal.

 

Is Easy is too simple?

You may think if we want to keep it that easy there can’t be a lot of options. Think again.  We offer, for example, 8 different question types that provide unique interactions for learners, all of them are easy to use. All this and more (such as PowerPoint import) is available for you to discover. Go to www.easygenerator.com right now, signup and test it out. All functionality is free for 14 days.

 

 

 

There are more than 6000 easygenerator users in 144 countries.  As a result, we’ve had frequent requests in the last few months to enable the translation of the default text in easygenerator.

I’m pleased to announce this functionality is now developed.

Now, in the Simple Course template, you can translate all default text elements from English to any language. This is how it works:

1. Open the course in easygenerator.
2. Go to the design tab
3. Choose the template “Simple course’. (For now, the Simple Course template is the only one enabled with the translation option, the other templates will follow.)
4. Scroll down and on the right side of the design tab you will find a table (interface language):
5. Click on a pencil in the column value and you can change the text.
6. Go to the top of the page and press the ‘apply’ button.

A short example

The default language is English. If, for example, I want to change it to Dutch, I just type in the Dutch translation. The second entry is ‘Start Course’. It will be shown in the introduction page of the course.

 

I type in the Dutch translation (Start cursus), press the apply button and run the course. The button is translated to Dutch. This means you can now translate the course template to any language..

Help us with translation and earn a free one-month subscription! 

We are looking for easygenerator users who want to help us create default translations. If you translate the Simple template to your language, we will give you a free subscription to the Plus Edition. Since we only need each language once, we will award this to the first person who responds for each language. We already have English, Dutch, Ukrainian and Chinese (mandarin). All other languages are welcome!

The next step is to make this feature available for the other templates. Then, we will add several default languages from which you’ll be able to choose the language you want, and you won’t need to complete the translation.

DevLearn 2014 is fast approaching; in just less than three weeks it will start. our CEO Kasper Spiro will present two sessions at DevLearn. One concurrent session titled “Trends Leading to the End of the LMS” and one morning buzz session called “The Death of WYSIWYG Authoring?”

These titles make it seem that he is projecting doom for eLearning. But that’s not the case.  What it means is that we, in elearning, are in a period of fundamental change. All changes offer new opportunities but also create a downside with victims.  Kasper believes the LMS and WYSIWYG authoring will be the victims of some of these changes. Read more »