From the course: Elearning Tips

How to create a functional prototype of your elearning course

From the course: Elearning Tips

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How to create a functional prototype of your elearning course

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- Once you've finalized your learning content and the look and feel of your e-learning course, it's important that you regularly send it off to your stakeholder and subject matter experts to get their review and feedback. Now personally, I don't recommend waiting until you've developed your entire course before you do this. In my experience, it's best to send your course out for review as you develop it. Now one way to do this is by creating and iterating on a functional prototype. And unlike the other kinds of prototypes, a functional prototype is a fully developed and working sample of your e-learning course. Let's take a look at an example that I need to send off for review. So I have this course here on customer service and I've created this functional prototype to send off for my stakeholders and subject matter experts to review. Now, whenever I create a functional prototype, there are a few things I like to include. First, you can see here that I have the title slide for my course, which is pretty straightforward. Now if I click here to start the course, you'll see that I've gone ahead and created the course menu. Now I should mention, not all of these menu items work since I've yet to create them, so I've disabled these items here so that my reviewers don't try to view the parts of my prototype that aren't yet developed. All right, so if I click this first menu item, I've built this first section here which, as you'll see, is a presentation slide which will eventually include some audio narration to go along with these animations. Okay, so that looks pretty good. If I proceed to the next slide, you'll also see that I've included a simple click-to-reveal interaction which will give my reviewers a sense of how the interactivity will work within my course. In this case, my learners will click on each of these pulsing icons to reveal information about the customer journey. And finally, you'll see that I've built out a sample decision-based interaction where my learners will need to select the correct response to a customer's question. If I select one of these options, I'm provided feedback on my selection. All right, so that's an example of a functional prototype which includes samples of the many different types of slides that I'll be including in my fully developed e-learning course. By taking the time to develop a functional prototype, you'll have something that you can send off to your stakeholders and subject matter experts to review and iterate on until you've developed the entire course.

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