eLearning Blog

How Cloud Authoring Can Help You Move To eLearning

For teams who have to deliver a large number of eLearning projects in a short time-scale eNetAuthor’s cloud authoring helps to streamline the development process in a number of ways.

Standardisation of processes

When authors work in isolation it is difficult to keep control of the design and quality of the development.

Cloud authoring allows your teams to collaborate on development. This sharing enhances productivity where everyone is working to the same output goals.

Organisations need their content to be on-brand and achieve a set level of quality. Cloud Authoring allows the setup of global templates, navigation containers, styles of objects and layouts, helping to ensure consistency of content quality and brand continuity.

To standardise the process, eNetAuthor provides a default course containing all possible page templates and layouts.

Once the course is set to Global you simply need to:

• make a copy of the course,
• complete the default pages,
• delete pages they don’t require,
• make any necessary changes to objects.

and the new course is ready for authoring!

Best Practice Suggestion: It is good practice to also create a template of any new pages/layouts for consistency. Along with saving time in developing course content, you will have consistency across all courses.

Multi-brand publishing

In eNetAuthor content is published in containers. The container hosts the brand, the menus, navigation and additional elements such as the number of pages and help functionality.

You can use these containers to publish the same content with a variety of branding and navigation.

The eNetAuthor® containers are automatically responsive so you don’t have to worry about making a container for device sizes, it is more about the look and feel.

Rapid development

Traditional authoring tools can be cumbersome to use. Cloud authoring tools have addressed this and made interfaces as intuitive as possible to use.

Simple controls are available to allow authors to do complex actions e.g. object dragging functionality with the ease of viewing content as you progress.

Developer licenses are available within eNetAuthor® allowing for the development of bespoke items. Code can be added to any content pages being created by non-technical authors. This provides a clear distinction between the author and developer roles so that there are no complex options for non-technical users to get confused with, whilst providing the developer with the tools they need to make changes quickly.

Manages multi-languages

eNetAuthor can help you manage multi lingual sites.

There are a few steps to consider when creating multiple language options. In particular you would want to:

• set up the various containers for each language,
• Create the sets of templates for the main language version and save these as a global course to be used for each language.Ensure that templates are created with text objects, i.e. stored text paragraphs. So instead of typing in the text, you should create the text in paragraphs.
• Create folders within the resource library for each language. Text should be stored in files ready to swap out in the various language options.
• Make up a task list of all objects that need to be edited by a translation. Copy this list for each language option and check them off as they are completed to ensure that nothing is missed.

Best practice suggestions:

• – Complete one language version before attempting the other language options.
• – Be wary of automatic translations. These can be useful but may require editing to get the context correct.
• – Be aware that the layout may change when you replace the text with the translated version.