Hands On with Course Building Tools

Quick reference

• 00:04 Up till now, you've listened to me talk about some of the theory behind course
• 00:09 building or instructional design, as we call it.
• 00:12 And in recent lessons, I've talked about the techniques I use for
• 00:15 preparing course materials from outlines and learning objectives to the wide array
• 00:20 of choices you have for creating course content.
• 00:23 Well, now in this lesson, I'm going to do something a little bit different.
• 00:26 I'm going to show you how all these things come together within a learning management
• 00:31 system, and more specifically, a course-building platform.
• 00:35 What I'm going to show you now is a screen recording of me creating a brand new
• 00:40 course within the award-winning course builder that we use at GoSkills.
• 00:44 Not all course-building platforms have the exact same features or functionality,
• 00:49 but most of the time you can find an alternate way of doing things.
• 00:53 So follow along and you'll see a lot of this is quite straightforward.
• 00:59 I'm going to start here at the dashboard after I've logged into GoSkills where I
• 01:03 can create a course.
• 01:04 I got a button right here next to some of the previous courses I've built.
• 01:08 Click the button, and I'm given a choice, what kind of course do I want?
• 01:14 This is about the course structure.
• 01:16 So some platforms allow you to import a SCORM course,
• 01:20 if you're familiar with that.
• 01:22 You can see the choices here, but what I want to focus on are the middle two,
• 01:26 a single-lesson course and a multi-lesson course.
• 01:30 Remember how in an earlier lesson I said some topics require multiple lessons,
• 01:36 and other times you don't need much training at all?
• 01:40 If you have a simple thing, one simple thing you want to communicate through
• 01:44 a single lesson, there is a solution for that.
• 01:47 Quick and easy right to the point, a wesome for bite-sized learning.
• 01:52 What I'm going to choose is the multi-lesson course because I think many
• 01:56 of you out there have the same needs I usually do.
• 01:58 We need to cover multiple sections of content in
• 02:02 order to properly train our learners on the particular subject.
• 02:06 So I'm going to choose multi-lesson course.
• 02:09 Now, before I show you the traditional way of assembling a course,
• 02:14 I do want to point out a cool feature that GoSkills has added to the course builder,
• 02:19 an AI-powered assistant which we call Genie.
• 02:22 If you want to speedrun the process of course building,
• 02:26 the AI Content Assistant will help you create pieces you need for the course.
• 02:31 You answer a few questions about the course.
• 02:35 What industry are you in?
• 02:36 Who is taking the course?
• 02:38 That's an important question.
• 02:39 What skill level are you looking for?
• 02:42 And then offer a quick description of what you want from the course and
• 02:47 with the click of a button, Genie will generate a title and course description.
• 02:52 It happens within seconds.
• 02:54 It's really really cool.
• 02:56 Not only that but if you like what you see, Genie can also generate the course
• 03:02 outline and text for the inside of the lesson for the lesson content.
• 03:07 It's really an amazing time saver.
• 03:10 And combined with the theory that I've shared with you in previous lessons,
• 03:14 you can absolutely put together a course in a fraction of the time.
• 03:18 But let's back up.
• 03:20 Let's assume we're approaching our new course in a more traditional way.
• 03:25 We've done our research and we've created our own details.
• 03:28 The course title, description, an outline, and all the lesson content.
• 03:34 We can begin to put that information in our course builder here
• 03:39 on the Course Overview page.
• 03:41 Now jumping into the Lessons tab on our course builder,
• 03:45 you can see that we have the option to, AI Generate an outline.
• 03:50 But again, let's back up, let's assume that we have created
• 03:55 something specifically for the course or even we have a pre-existing
• 04:00 course that maybe we want to import into this platform.
• 04:05 Well, manually creating your course outline usually requires that you add in
• 04:10 sections and lessons, which will become the placeholders for your course content.
• 04:15 Since I created my own outline,
• 04:17 I'm going to switch over to the document where I have that information.
• 04:24 And at this point, I'm just going to do some copying and pasting.
• 04:27 That's pretty much the process here.
• 04:29 I'll speed up the video, but you can get the idea of what this looks like.
• 04:38 Now creating the individual lessons can be kind of fun, I have to admit,
• 04:42 depending on the course builder that you're using.
• 04:45 Some platforms will give you nothing more than a place to put text,
• 04:49 while other course builders like the GoSkills course builder,
• 04:53 offers a variety of content formats you can use.
• 04:57 You can see here in this first lesson, it's asking us to add a content block.
• 05:02 And this is kind of standard for many course builders now, using a block type
• 05:07 of system so that you can add pieces to the less than one block at a time.
• 05:12 And if you don't know what I mean, follow along this will be clear in a moment.
• 05:17 I'm going to start by adding a video block that I've created for this lesson.
• 05:22 The video is a file that I've edited.
• 05:25 I'll click this button, I browse out, find that file, and
• 05:30 the platform will begin to upload it.
• 05:32 And most platforms also do some video processing, so
• 05:36 that it will play properly within whatever system you use.
• 05:41 And this may take a little bit, video files can be quite large at times, so
• 05:46 just be patient and it will eventually finish uploading and processing.
• 05:51 Other content blocks you can add, almost always include text, this is usually
• 05:56 as easy as copying and pasting text that you've got in another document somewhere,
• 06:01 stuff you've already prepared, or you can start typing right inside the block.
• 06:07 And many course builders also offer the option of adding images,
• 06:12 file downloads code blocks if you're teaching people how to do code,
• 06:17 quizzes even links out to YouTube videos.
• 06:20 As you assemble these lesson pages, you may also have the option of
• 06:24 reordering content and this is where the blocks come into play.
• 06:28 You can move each one of them up and down as needed to change the order.
• 06:34 This is a great advantage of content blocks it just makes assembling
• 06:38 the lessons much easier.
• 06:40 So you've seen me put together a lesson right here, and
• 06:44 it doesn't really take that much time if you've already created all the pieces and
• 06:51 you just going to import them or copy and paste them into the course builder.
• 06:57 So what you do here is repeat the process for each lesson.
• 07:01 You add the content, you copy and paste, upload videos or images or
• 07:06 other files, whatever is required.
• 07:08 And when all is said and done, you have a completed course.
• 07:13 The final steps may include some round of review by colleagues or
• 07:18 an approval process, all depends on your organization.
• 07:22 But once you publish your course and make it live for your learners,
• 07:26 then you'll begin to see the results of all your hard work.
• 07:30 So we'll talk more about what happens after you launch your
• 07:35 course in the next lesson.
• 07:37 I'll see you then.

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