The Development Phase

In the development stage, the authoring of the training program is made in accordance with the approved course outline and course design plan. Development phase mainly deals with writing storyboard, visualizing graphics, and creating assessments.

A storyboard is a series of illustrations showing everything that will be covered in a course. It helps to visualize the content, graphics, and audio of the course. It acts as a guide for graphic designers and developers while developing the e-learning course.

The advantages of storyboarding are:

• Used as a visualization of the course.
• Helps in estimating costs of the course development.
• Shows the feasibility of the course.
• Highlights the scope to improve the content to evoke stronger reaction.
• Acts as a common point of reference for designers and developers.

The Design Phase

Design phase is driven by the products of the analysis phase. It basically deals with collecting and organizing data. Design phase involves planning the instructional strategy, writing the course outline and the instructional design document.

An instructional strategy is a plan for systematically exposing learners to experiences that will help them to learn and understand the course based on their knowledge, skills, and aptitude. For example, using read only pop ups (ROPs), Nice to Know, animations, etc.

Course outline (CO) is a way to organize your thoughts and present information in a sequential way. You must now be wondering how to write a content outline? It involves the following steps:

1. Begin by brainstorming and analyzing the subject matter to be covered.
2. Now chunk the raw content into major divisions or modules.
3. Under each module, group the related item as lessons and topics.
4. When you have created the draft outline, consider if the sequence of units is logical.

Also check for correlation among topics and easy flow from one topic to the next.

For example, CO for Microsoft Word Course:

Module 1:

• Introduction
• What is MS Word?
• Opening Documents
• Saving and Editing MS Word
• Templates
• Check Your Understanding
• Summary
  
  Module 2:
• Introduction
• Page Views
• Printing
• Headers and Footers
• Styles
• Check Your Understanding
• Summary

After creating the course outline design the course based on ARCS, Gagne or Walker’s model. I’ll discuss these models in detail in my later posts.