How to create a mobile-ready online course
The last couple of years have made online learning commonplace and appreciated even by those companies who had kept using offline training to develop their employees up until now. Given the pandemic, there is no need to explain what distance learning is, why it is so popular, and how businesses can benefit from implementing it.
One of the biggest claims against online training nowadays is its absolute mobility. We no longer want to be bound to any physical place or device. We strive to be as mobile as possible, doing nearly everything on the go: we read ebooks on the subway, listen to podcasts in the car on our way to work, and connect with our friends online from the seashore during vacation. The same level of freedom and mobility is expected from online training programs.
As a rule, modern learning management systems (LMSs) have mobile apps that make it easy for you to provide learners with a remarkable mobile learning experience. With a mobile LMS application, users can download learning content to their smartphones and tablets, and take courses anytime and anywhere – even when there is no internet connection. Yet there are some technical requirements for a mobile course that you need to keep in mind while creating it.
Walkthrough of an online course creation
Below, we’ll show you how to create an effective online course that works great with mobile devices.
Step 1. Define your audience, goals, and needs
Before you start creating your online course, you need to perform a detailed investigation. This will help you set up your goals and define criteria to understand if they will eventually be achieved.
Here are some questions you need to find answers to.
1. What is your target audience?
Before you start creating content, find out what is special about your trainees. This will help you understand their needs and motivation for learning, choose the right communication style, and even decide on a course design.
Here are some facts about your audience you need to get to know:
How many learners will you have?
What are their job positions?
What are their average ages, educational levels, geographic locations, and tech-savviness?
Will they have an opportunity to have long-term breaks in their workflow to take your training or will they study during short breaks on the go?
Where and on what devices are your learners going to take your course? Are they office workers with PCs at their disposal or do they work in the fields and are equipped only with smartphones or tablets?
2. What are your training objectives?
Setting training goals is never about describing what your team will know after the training, it’s about what they will be able to do. Compare these two goals; which one seems to be more profitable for the business?
Trainees should know how to sell the product.
Trainees should double their sales within 2 weeks after finishing the course.
No need to explain that your employees’ theoretical knowledge will never help you increase market share, while doubled sales can help this a lot.
3. What are employees’ knowledge gaps you need to fill?
Now, when you've specified your training goals, you can understand what knowledge and practical skills your trainees need to boost. The good news is that, in most cases, you don’t need to start from the very beginning, as your team already knows a lot about the topic that you’re going to cover. To avoid wasting their time teaching things they already know, it’s best to find out what information they lack.
The best way to assess your trainees’ knowledge is to offer them a quiz for a start. Its results will show what topics should be included in your course. It’s a good idea to finish your course with another quiz to check employees’ progress and find out if the knowledge gaps have been closed.
Step 2. Set up communication with subject matter experts
Subject matter experts (SME) are a major source of information for your online course. The better that communication is established between you and SMEs, the easier it will be for you to involve them in all steps of course creation: from gathering useful content to validating and refining the course’s materials.
Here are two rules that might be helpful for making communications clear and effective:
Respect each other's time and effort. Make sure that your requests are detailed enough and SMEs can understand your expectations clearly. Be patient and give SMEs enough time to collect the information for you; keep in mind that your training project is not the principal or only task on their plate.
Agree on your roles and responsibilities. Your SMEs are high-level experts in their field and their role in the project is to be a source of information you can trust with certainty. Your task is to create the right program that will help your trainees master new skills or digest new information easily. And it’s you who will decide what information is to be included in the course and what is the most effective way to present it to the audience.
Step 3. Prepare content for the course
Creating learning content is an engaging creative process that includes scriptwriting, recording video and audio content, preparing quizzes, designing slides, and so much more.
Plot your online course
The first thing you need to do is make a detailed plan of the entire eLearning journey to make sure you’ll lead your trainees to the right destination.
In this step, you'll divide training material into portions or modules and determine what format is best suited for each of them, e.g., what information is best presented as text slides, which needs to be visualized in infographics, and what knowledge needs to be turned into a video.
Note: If you want your course to be mobile friendly, make training modules short (up to 5 minutes) and each one dedicated to a specific topic. This way, it’ll be easy for learners to take them during short breaks on the go.
Create a course storyboard
A storyboard is a visualization of the course plot. You can use a whiteboard in your office to draw it or make it digital using standard computer programs like Word or PowerPoint (or Page and Keynote, if you are a Mac user).
There are plenty of reasons why it’s worth spending some time to make a storyboard before you start creating an online course.
It helps you visualise how your course will look and function, as well as define beforehand what elements (images, texts, interactions, etc.) you will need.
A storyboard guarantees that all people involved in the process (SMEs, designers, copywriters) are on the same page and clearly understand the result they are expected to achieve.
It allows you to put yourself in your trainees’ shoes and estimate what their user experience is going to be. It’s the right time to think about how you can improve your course and make it even better and more effective.
It saves you time, as it helps avoid misunderstandings between your team members and the need to make major changes after development starts.
There is no canonical form of a storyboard that fits everyone's needs; we suggest that you follow common sense when creating yours. Still, there are some components that will help you to make it clear and useful:
Slide title
Text, media and graphic elements, and animations
Navigation elements
Branching plan description
Audio narration script
Here’s how a course storyboard might look:
Prepare on-screen text for the course
This includes all of the text elements a learner will see during the training. To make it easy to digest for both PC and mobile device users, follow these simple rules:
Make the text short and clear. Mobile learners don't have much time to dive into unnecessary details and long explanations. Each word you put on your slide should deserve to be there.
One slide – one thought. Don’t overwhelm your learners with information on a slide. Illustrate each idea with appropriate images to help learners memorize them easier.
Record audio and video
Use audio narration or videos to provide your trainees with additional information, examples, and comprehensive explanations of your ideas. Though this type of content is extremely useful, you need to keep in mind that while taking your course on mobile devices, your trainees might have certain technical restrictions.
Here are some rules to follow when creating multimedia resources for mobile courses:
Divide video content into short episodes, so the trainees can watch the entire video in one sitting, even if they only have a short break between their work tasks. This will also help learners find the information they need easily when needed and refresh their knowledge quickly.
Optimise video files. Make sure they’re not too large and can be downloaded quickly – even via mobile internet connection or Wi-Fi network.
Don’t use audio as the only or principal source of information. Some of your users might not have headphones available while taking the course, so you need to provide them with alternative sources of information (slide text or subtitles.)
Step 4. Design your course
Enhancing your course with professional-looking pictures and images helps you humanize your training, make it more engaging, and appeal to learners’ visual memory.
To design your course, you can pick up some suitable images on the internet, involve a professional designer, or choose an authoring tool that offers its own unique royalty-free collection of images. Needless to say, this last option will save you tons of time and effort. So, when deciding on an authoring tool, be sure to add this criterion to your checklist.
If you want your course to be appropriate for mobile devices, make sure that it:
has a vertical orientation, as most users hold their devices vertically, so your course has to display correctly in this mode.
is fat-finger friendly. Avoid small interactive elements (navigation, buttons, drop-down lists, clickable texts).
contains important things in the centre. While looking at the screen, we usually focus on its centre, and objects placed at the sides of the screen are likely to go unnoticed.
Step 5. Put it all together
After you have collected all the necessary information, recorded videos and audios, it’s time to build your course. For this, you’ll need an authoring tool that will help you unite all the content items and set up the rules on how they should interact with each other.
The final result will depend greatly on the authoring tool you're going to use. It’s easy to find a multitude of solutions in today’s market. Each tool has its unique set of options, some of which can be essential for creating high-quality content, while others just provide a lot of trumperies to get you to pay more.
To avoid unnecessary expenses, start with a free trial period that almost every eLearning software vendor offers. This will allow you to compare different solutions and make a deliberate decision. Among the most popular solutions are tools like iSpring Suite Max, Articulate 360, Adobe Captivate, and Lectora Online.
Step 6. Humanize and personalize your content
Here are some important things you need to consider when creating a course:
Start tour and hints
A great way to show your trainees from the start that you appreciate their time and effort is to begin your mobile course with a quick tour, explaining general principles, navigation rules, and button options. Another way to guide learners through the course is to add short hints right into the flow of the course (e.g., when a new button or element appears in the training.)
Create branching scenarios
To personalise your training, use the branching-scenario option provided by many authoring tools. This allows you to create non-linear scenarios where the next step depends on the result achieved on the previous one. For example, if a trainee got a high score on a quiz, they can skip the next chapter with theoretical information. And for those who failed it, you can offer an additional block of information to help them fill their knowledge gap.
Allow users to see their course progress
To make your trainees’ mobile learning experience more enjoyable, add a progress bar to your course. It will show learners how far they have progressed and how much time they still need to finish the course. This will help them plan their time better.
Make it easy for the learners to come back to the training by providing them with a “Save progress” option. This will allow them to resume training quickly and easily without spending time on taking courses from the very beginning (the longer the course, the more annoying this situation will be for the learners.)
Final Thoughts
We hope these tips will help you start creating professional-looking and effective online courses. We believe that all of them can help you achieve great results. Still, the most important advice we can give is to think about your learners, their needs, and motivation. Your sincere desire to take care of your trainees and provide them with the best user experience will help you generate your own fresh ideas on how to make your training content even better.
Thanks to Helen Colman for this guest article. She is a Content Editor and Strategist at iSpring. She enjoys combining rigorous research with her expertise in the eLearning industry.
