Making your own: creating and adapting content

Introduction

In many ways, developing new materials to deliver online is not very different from preparing materials for face-to-face training. The same educational principles apply.

As you design a new session or course you will be thinking along familiar lines of deciding what the learning outcomes should be, how can they be achieved, what resources will you need, and so on. Rather than being a constraint, online delivery can open up new possibilities that you may not have considered before.

With online training comes the potential to use a variety of media and to use content creation tools to package them all together into a coherent learning experience. As well as providing interesting ways to use audio and video in training, if you want to explore further, there are online tools available to produce graphs and infographics, animations, storyboards and more.

You can turn static documents featuring text and images into online exploration tools, linking to websites, animations, videos and so on to enrich and enliven the learning experience.

There are so many technologies available that could be used for content creation and adaptation we could not give full details here. Instead, this section provides an overview of the kinds of tools available to improve online learning experience and some tips for things you should be aware of when using them.

Writing text for online learning