Elearning - Building an absborb activity

This week I desgined and built my first e-learning self study in the form of an absorb activity. The goal of an absorb activity is to have the learner read, listen or watch the information to learn. The student is passive and the teacher or learning tool is the source of the information. The design process began with the needs assessment, which was vital to understanding what needed to be solved and taught. After determining the needs I began building the list of objectives for the elearning course. Using the book, E-Learning Design by William Horton as a guideline, I used his techniques on building specific primary objectives supported by secondary objectives to create my purpose for the activity. From the outside it seems "easy" to create a slideshow program to teach a topic, yet designing the elearning is much more in depth. The concept that became clear to me is that elearning is layering. No longer to you think in a linear pattern, you need to design in layers to create a seemless flow for the learning as they click through the e learning. Building Hyperlink, back and next functions and then creating the Knowledge Review were all opportunities to design directional components. In this case I gave the learner some control with the directions through the learning, but removed them in the Knowledge Review to require all 10 questions be answered. Also I created hyperlinks at the beginning based on topics so that expert learners could jump directly to their specific topic, instead of requiring they go through the entire learning if it was not relevant. The audience for the learning will mostly be medium to expert knowledge, and it will be rare to have a novice learner complete this particular learning. One challenge that was a huge time drain was the formatting of PowerPoint's hyperlinks in my Review. The only way to change them from the underlink was to create a rectangle shape over, change the color, reinsert text and then build the hyperlink on the box, not the text. I searched several help sites and found the same instructions. Fixing that formatting took numerous hours that I had not planned. What I learned from this process, is that the design is key! Now that I have completed the process I will design the next one very carefully before ever coming to the computer. Using sheets of paper that can easily be moved, layering them so that I can see the flow. Build only once can be the timesaver to any professional.

Have you built an Elearning program? Or other teaching program? What challenges did you face and how did you overcome?

Brooke