Online learning – different strokes for different folks
By Angela Bensemann, Director Halo Communications
It’s well known that we all have different learning styles and we all like to consume information in different ways. Me, I’m a real reader and I like to take notes but give me an instruction manual and I can’t cope, I have to put the manual aside and wing it. That’s where the instructional video wins hands down for me – I can watch something for a few minutes, pause it when I need to and that piece of shelving or tricky tech problem is sorted in a flash.
Some people like diagrams, or audio instructions and others just want someone else to do it for them – and there’s a lot to be said for that too.
A year ago, I collaborated with web strategist Iona Elwood-Smith and graphic design guru Jane Comben to produce a book – The Perfect Recipe for Creating AWESOME Web Content. We created both a hard copy real book and an e-book and I thought that was us done.
But the beauty of collaboration means someone else comes up with another bright idea and here we are launching the online course.
This makes perfect sense when you go back to learning styles. The course will appeal to those who can’t be bothered reading a book, they want to watch a video and be told how to do things, they like to dip in and out of the modules that interest them and they’re happy to use the worksheets to put the theory into practice.
But when you’ve never created an online course and don’t know where to start it can be daunting and more than a little overwhelming.
That’s where three heads are better than one, and Iona takes the lead on our tech development. She made us an instructional video on how to film an online course and away we went. It was a perfect example of how a video can help demystify the whole process and makes learning seem easy. There could be something in that!
Embarking on a project like this can be just hard work when you do it yourself. Collaborating with others makes it fun and makes the most of playing to each other’s strengths. Filming and creating the collateral to support the online course is one thing –there’s also the tech required to embed it in the website and set up all the magic automation behind the buying process. And that’s before you start marketing it so people know what it is and that they have to have it.
Lucky we’ve got the wordsmith, the designer and the tech ninja to get things get done.
