I have been using this new technology for a few weeks now. It is amazing!
Are you also tired of standard pictures that do NOT fully represent what you need to express in your training and presentation?
I used to either hire an expensive designer or settle for an image that didn’t fully represent the message I was trying to convey.
With this new free AI website you can design landscapes yourself just the way you want it.
Soon you will even be able to design photos of office spaces, or people acting out your key messages.
To create this landscape, all I had to do is position the shapes, such as mountains, clouds, and a lake and then…
AI does the magic all by itself!
This technology is going to make individualized graphic design accessible for everyone. Just like YouTube made posting videos online accessible for everyone.
The following video shows the evolution of 3D animation technologies over 25 years at Pixar, which is the reference in the field (ex: Toy Story). See Movie Insider’s video
In this article, I will write about the basic conditions that every online course should meet.
Although there are various forms of knowledge transfer via the Internet, online courses are only one type of online learning.
When creating them, every instructional designer should keep in mind the following items, which will be described below. Of course, these are just the key points. Perhaps with the development of technology and newlearning theories, these key points will go down in history or will be contextually expanded.
1. Simple workenvironment
For a participant to feel safe in a work environment on the Internet, that work environment must have a good user interface. What does it mean? In short, you need to make sure that the participant learns what is intended, without having to study the platform on which he is learning for too long. If the participant first has to master the platform on which he is learning, and only then move on to specific content, his motivation to learn will greatly decrease. The worst scenario is that the participant spends more time navigating the platform than on the content of the course itself.
Most educators first need to decide which learning platform to use. The technical solution means the choice of the platform, ie LMS (Learning Management System) software that will be used for the distribution of courses. There are many of them on the market, and before you make a decision on which one to use, you must research them well, that is, test the trial versions.
The most important thing for the participant is that the work environment is not too complicated. This means:
* Easy registration for the participant,
* There should be simple instruction for participants on how the platform works.
2. Quality and clear course content
We can say that a course has excellent quality if the content of the course can improve and expand knowledge, and then apply it in practice. A good online course always offers specific knowledge that you can use in daily life.
For a course to be considered quality, it must meet the following conditions:
* It should be written in clear language;
* It is well structured didactically;
* Has elements of narration (or “tells a story”);
* Content goes from easy to hard;
* Is written in an easy-to-understand way, but it also has an expert review of the content.
For the content to be well created, it is a prerequisite that the goals and outcomes of the online course are well defined in advance.
The length of the content must be in line with the topic covered in the online course. It should not be too short and superficially processed, because in that case, the participants will not have the acquired knowledge after completing the course. Also, one should not exaggerate and be too extensive. ?
Goals and outcomes
Watch a short video below about creating goals and outcomes for an online course.
3. Interactive content
The content of the course must not be boring for the participants.
If you only see lines and lines of text in the course, without any multimedia content to enrich it, you are actually reading a PDF document. For some content not to be boring for the participants, it is better to enrich it with exercises, examples, scenarios, tests, tasks, simulations, dialogues, case studies, links, manuals, presentations and more.
The quality of the online course will increase significantly if you make it interactive and allow participants to be active in the learning process.
Depending on what you want to achieve, you will use a program or web tool to create exercises for participants.
The list of programs and web tools used by the experts are numerous, and I will deal with this topic in more detail in one of the following articles. These are just some of the most popular ones at the moment.
Pay attention!
When using interactivity in an online course, be careful that the interactivity elements are justifiably embedded in the content.
The following should be taken into account:
* Not to add animations, sound, or colorfulness if it is not necessary, i.e., didactically justified;
* Not to overdo the number of interactive exercises.
Interactive content does not serve to visually enhance the course, but to encourage participants to take action.
4. Communication on the online course
Many creators of online courses neglect this important segment, and many of them consider it completely unnecessary.
However, when a participant learns something, he should get some feedback about his work and progress, but also needs someone he can ask for an opinion or suggestion if there are any misunderstanding. Exchanging opinions and ideas with other learners and working as a group also encourage the provision of knowledge to the participants.
A characteristic of online courses is the lack of personal contact between the lecturer and the participant. However, this challenge can be overcome in two ways:
Forums for discussion within the learning platform;
Direct communication with the author/lecturer of the course.
As in live communication, similar rules apply to online communication. If you are a course instructor/moderator, try to:
* Respond regularly to incoming messages from participants;
* Admit if you overlooked or made a mistake;
* Be kind and friendly when replying to messages;
* Use your knowledge to help participants master the content of the course.
In this way, you will provide your students with good and quality feedback and you will be able to overcome the lack of personal contact.
5. And what happens after the course?
Many courses do not have a clear outcome for participants after completing the course. Therefore, from the beginning, it is very important to define the goals and outcomes of the course, as well as the competencies that the participant will acquire at the end of the course. To be able to say that an online course has good quality, it must ultimately have a final product. The final product iswhat the participant created independently, but with the help of the knowledge acquired in his course.
You wouldn’t want to go back to the course after which you have the feeling that you have learned something new, but you might have no idea how to implement it in practice. This brings us back to the story of well-edited content, which is important to enrich with real-life or business examples.
Suggestions for ensuring the knowledge of participants after the course are:
Post-course activities – make sure your participants try out the knowledge they have acquired in the course in real life. Give them real-life opportunities and advise them on how they can use their knowledge.
Social networking – allow participants to connect with each other. Refer them to groups, forums, a community where they can find similar people with whom they will be able to share knowledge and experience and thus expand existing knowledge.
These are just some of the elements that are important for the development and creation of online courses but by no means the only ones. Anyone who embarks on the adventure of creating and distributing online courses should keep in mind that this area is very wide and that it is impossible to learn it from just one blog post.
How can you create an online course within a very short time? If you already have some content, structure it in an INGAGE mind map. Add the pictures and videos you want. Submit it to our Course Wizard and a minute later, you have a fully ready online course!
Large insurers, reinsurers and banks often have a lot of external developers from vendors joining their projects on a regular basis. Whether these developers come from the largest outsourcing companies around the world or small and very specialized consultancies, they often lack the knowledge of the bigger picture of the projects they join and, let’s be honest, feel a bit lost at the beginning…
One very experienced Agile coach working for a large bank told us very recently that he asked some third-party developers working for this bank (many of them based offshore): “Do you know who your client is?”, “Do you know what the strategy is?”, “What is the goal of our project?”, “Who are the decision makers and main stakeholders on the client’s side?”, “What are the KPIs for our success?”, “What are the key technologies involved besides the ones you work with?”.
The developers looked at each other puzzled. They had no clue.
We believe in empowering people rather than giving one order after the next. We believe that knowing your customer helps deliver a higher value.
This is the reason why creating online courses for onboarding at a TEAM’s level, including for externals – not only at company-level for employees – is key. It saves precious time – and money. However, so far it has been too cumbersome and expensive to create such online courses.
Thanks to our Course Wizard, this is now possible and faster than ever.
Do you have another experience, agree, disagree? Thanks for letting us know! We always appreciate feedback. 🙂
You have experts in underwriting, claims management, sales of insurance products, actuaries and many others. More often than not, they are happy to share some of their knowledge. However, they lack time.
Do your experts have a lot of knowledge that should be shared within the company or with clients? What if you could create engaging courses within a very short time thanks to a visual tool?
This is exactly what our Course Wizard does! Now, you can create an engaging course, not within months or weeks, but hours.
Do you have new recruits joining your company in Zurich, London, New York, Hong Kong? Or do you have clients that come to visit you for a workshop or a week-long seminar?
You might want to do a bit of team building and help them discover your city and its history! This app makes it possible for you to organize treasure hunts around the city or your company’s campus.
You can use or ready-made treasure hunts about Zurich or London specifically designed for the insurance industry. Use the out-of-the-box version or customize it to your need!
Avila Spaces and INGAGE partnered up to create this course specially designed for people in insurance companies and other industries to boost their entrepreneurial spirit.
The course aims to directly reply to simple and/or complex questions that Entrepreneurs live on a daily basis independently of success or failure. The entrepreneurial spirit and the constant decisions around financial and economical risk or the possibility of investing in new ventures were some of the essential drivers for building this course.
This course is designed to help students to evaluate the business skills and commitment necessary to successfully operate an entrepreneurial venture and review the challenges and rewards of entrepreneurship.
Welcome to this GDPR course, specially designed for Software Development!
My name is Lucas Gros and I’ll be your guide through this training module. In less than one hour, you should become familiar with the new (and still too mysterious for some) General Data Protection Regulation and how it will impact your software development activities.
We’ll be covering GDPR requirements for each step of the SDLC : from Business Requirements until Release.
Written by Philippe21 March 2022 
