When developing an eLearning program, you’re probably anxious to deliver the content straight to the learners. Moving too quickly could mean sacrificing quality – and moving too slowly could mean missing deadlines and losing interest. The trick to streamlined development is to plan your timeline before you ever start creating slides, programs and quizzes. That way, everyone on your team is also on board as to when and how concerning overall development.
The Starting Point for Your eLearning
The source content refers to the starting point for your eLearning course – the facts, information, studies, media and SME input that will eventually make its way from your messy notes into a sleek program. Without the amount and quality of source content you need from day one, your project could be sidetracked as you go hunting for new information to fill out your program. Allow plenty of time for source content retrieval to save yourself from roadblocks later.
Team Schedules between SMEs and Instructional Designers
Developing an eLearning course takes a ton of coordination between multiple parties, from a busy SME to the instructional designerand overall supervisor. Because of this, you’ll need to respect individual schedules when planning your eLearning development timeline. Regularly scheduled meetings and allowing wait time between correspondence will save you the headache and frustration of juggling multiple schedules concurrently.
All Topics are Not Created Equal
Let’s face it: A course about office safety probably isn’t as complex as the one detailing the results of the latest study. Take the complexity of the material into consideration when creating a timeline and remember that all topics are not created equally. If you’re creating a course on a complex topic which requires media, discussion and learner participation, you’ll need more time to develop and insert the components you want. If it’s a fairly straightforward topic, you might be able to shave a few days off of the completion time.
