Why use ECB at all? If you have some learning that you want to get out to a lot of people in your organisation in a quick, consistent and measurable way, then Easy Course Builder (ECB) is for you.
It’s possible to get knowledge and skills distributed throughout your whole business in as little as 15 minutes. It’s quicker than making a brew for the office! And learners can access these courses on most devices, so aren’t limited to when and where they can learn. It’s an easy and simple to use tool to create courses, but can also be a really powerful tool if approached and used in a creative way. And this creativity stems from having a well-designed course.
As well as these guides, throughout ECB, there are online help buttons if you need to double check anything along the way.
The most important thing to think about when creating courses is good design. What do we mean by good design? That’s a very good question! You want to make sure that your courses are designed in a way that leads to the best possible learning and upskilling. This means before you even go into ECB, really sitting down and thinking about:
- How are you going to approach the subject? What are the learning objectives of the course?
- How is it going to be structured? How long will the course be?
- Who is the audience? How do your learners take in information?
- What kind of learning materials will you be using – images, videos, text?
- How are you going to keep learners motivated and engaged with the content? Have you included interactive and emotional elements?
- How will you then measure the learning objectives or ‘success’ of the course?
These are just some of the questions you need to think about when it comes to creating courses. The actual creation of courses in ECB is easy, but the research phase beforehand requires a bit more thought and planning.
It’s also worth mentioning that a blended approach to your learning is always a good idea. This means not just creating online ECB courses, but also incorporating other elements such as face-to-face learning or webinars. Or maybe looking at your previous learning materials and trying to re-use parts from that. But don’t just copy and paste! You might think duplicating an offline workshop or presentation will work in an online format, but that’s not always the case. People learn differently with different formats, so you need to make sure that any learning is geared to a given format.
And the Upskill People platform lets you input any offline learning, so that you can track and measure it all in one centralised place. We’ve thought of everything.
It’s important to start with a script. What’s a script we hear you ask? Well, it’s basically the ins and outs of the course you’re looking to build and put together. The script shows exactly how the learning will be written and conveyed to the learners.
And before you jump in to using ECB, it’s important you think about how you structure and write your script. Why? So that you can produce a top-quality course which gets the message across to your learners. But also, getting the script right before producing and deploying the course will save you a lot of time (and money!) later in the process. You don’t want to create a wealth of learning materials to then find out that there’s a mistake and it all needs to be either tweaked or re-done.
Starting with your learning objectives, documenting your course script is a major part of the effort when writing great learning. Scripts are your learning library, as well as your intellectual property.
Note: writing a script will also help when you want to get it signed off collaboratively – just switch on ‘tracked changes’ and send it around the team, or better still, work off a shared drive!
Of course, you can try it by ‘just creating the course’ and then seeing how long it takes to get it live after everyone’s said their bit - the choice is completely yours.
The next guide in this section is Writing a great course script
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