Rapid eLearning Production Script

By Chitti Babu Talluri, Digital Solution Architect, Professional Practice & Interprofessional Collaboration - District Heti

Chitti Babu Talluri, Digital Solution Architect, Professional Practice & Interprofessional Collaboration - District Heti

The Health Education and Training Institute, a Pillar of NSW Health, is a leading provider of high quality training and education to support more than 110,000 clinical and non-clinical staff, trainers, managers and leaders across the NSW health system. A significant component of this is the provision of online educational resources to reach the geographically and demographically vast audience. HETI employs a wide range of authoring tools for developing eLearning content, including Storyline 360, Captivate 9/2019 and Adapt. Of course, each of these tools have limitations such as accessibility, managing multiple outputs, scalability and dependency on external plug-ins (Flash etc). It was these limitations, combined with a high and costly workload, which led the team to develop a Rapid.

Development Script.

Approach: The key factor required for the success of rapid eLearning development was determined as a faster turn-around time with less manpower.

The approach required usage by non-eLearning practitioners as per the nature of the work required. The approach can utilised predominantly by Subject Matter Experts, minimising the requirement of expensive resources such as Instructional Designers, Visual Designers and Developers.

Solution:

Page layout templates (Phase #1): The team collaborated to develop basic page layout templates for HTML 5 eLearning modules. The basic templates include the common confirmable elements such as branding, menu, content placeholders and any navigable elements on the page. Each page template consists of containers for elements. The positioning of the containers are controlled through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The page templates are fully configurable, responsive and accessible. Once determined, the templates were developed and implemented to use m for building HTML 5 eLearning modules.

Build Interactions Library (Phase #2): As part of the phase we have built library of interactions with openly available technologies like Bootstrap, JQuery…etc. An initial library of 8 different element types (video, audio, image, text, tabs, accordion, button and flip element) has been finalised for usage. These elements are integrated into the templates developed in Phase#1. The developers now have the ability to embed these elements into the HTML 5 build without writing excessive code.

Rapid development (Phase #3): As part of the phase 3 we have created an automated Java program to automate the eLearning build process. The script processes an Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) based module storyboard where page layout and elements are configured and defined in the XML. The script process the storyboard, validates the content, assets and publishes SCORM eLearning modules package. The script can build an eLearning module in less than 5 minutes.