Lectora for Rapid Custom eLearning Development: The When and How

The need of the hour is rapid custom eLearning development within strict training budgets and timelines, without having to compromise on quality. I am sure you will agree to this. Organizations like yours constantly look for online courses that enable learners to interact with the eLearning content to enhance engagement. This is where the role of rapid eLearning authoring tools comes into play. To ensure you meet your learning demands, you can leverage Lectora for rapid custom eLearning development.

However, do you find that all rapid authoring tools have similar features? When should you choose Lectora for rapid custom eLearning? Find the answers through our case study!

Our Success Story: Using Lectora For Custom Rapid Custom eLearning Development

Well, to help you zero-in on why go with Trivantis’ Lectora Inspire for rapid custom online course development, here’s how we leveraged the tool for one of our clients.

Our client is a trusted financial services and solutions provider with around nine million customer relationships worldwide. The client approached us with the requirement of converting legacy courses to mobile-compatible eLearningThis required substantial rework in instructional design and development for 40 online modules (70% text-heavy slides).

We had to:

• Convert legacy courses – update modules instructionally and to reflect their latest branding
• Develop fully-responsive eLearning modules that run on desktops, tablets, and smartphones
• Ensure high-level of interactivity to ensure learner participation
• Translate the modules into 5 major international languages

The Features that Made Us Choose Lectora 

Since the existing modules were text-heavy and needed to be truly responsive, the best option was Lectora for rapid custom eLearning development.

• Each slide/screen developed in Lectora is saved as separate HTML5 file, which enables quick loading in different devices, even with heavy text.
• If you want to include a large amount of content in a single slide, Lectora provides the option of including a scrollbar on the screen, allowing learners to scroll for more. And if you feel a scrollbar can hinder smooth learning, you can increase the length of the screen.
• Lectora supports responsive course design (RCD) which allows one-time course design that will automatically adjust to any device. Instead of starting from scratch, you can convert your non-responsive eLearning courses to responsive and move on with making device-specific adjustments that ensure your eLearning courses will function seamlessly on every device.
• Device preview helps check how eLearning courses will look and function across devices and orientations.
• To fasten the feedback and iteration process, we used the in-built online review and collaboration tool ReviewLink™ of Trivantis. This enhanced option enabled reviewers and SMEs to review the course and provide their feedback directly on any slide of the course, reducing eLearning course development time drastically even when the development was scaled up.

How We Used Lectora for Custom Rapid eLearning Development

Lectora offers hundreds of characters, silhouettes, and built-in templates that can be customized and used for rapid eLearning development. To further reduce additional work, we created wireframes following the client’s new branding guidelines that worked as the skeleton framework of the course, speeding up the conversion and development of eLearning modules.

Apart from being text-heavy, one of the challenges was to make the dry content (mostly about insurance policies, packages, norms, etc.) engaging and intuitive. Our client also wanted to help their employees enhance their decision-making skills.

Hence, we developed scenario-based learning using the latest BranchTrack application of Lectora Inspire 17. This allowed our course developers to create, import, and edit scenario-based exercises in much lesser time. To make situations relatable, we imported and customized relevant background images from the media library. For instance, travel images with a relatable character having the same job responsibilities for a travel insurance module. Lectora allows changes in character poses directly from the ribbon without having to delete the entire character, which helped reduce development time.

For assessments in eLearning modules, we customized the simple match-the-following and drag-and-drop templates to make them more intuitive. To ensure learner participation, we chose and customized interactive elements and variables in the tool. For some slides that were text-heavy, we used click-on images and click-on tabs. Learners had to click for the information to be revealed.

Add On: For eLearning translations, our client wanted an individual course that could be accessed by learners in 5 different languages. They also wanted the interface of the course to let learners switch between different languages of the course, whenever they wish. Using Lectora, we developed a single course with a multiple language interface that had the ability to hold 5 languages. Needless to say, learners could switch to any language since the all the content was integrated in one course shell.

Hence, looking at the features, there is no doubt that Lectora offers robust support for rapid custom eLearning development. However, choosing an eLearning authoring tool depends on various factors such as your unique organizational needs, technical expertise of the development team, scale of development, and more.

However, no rapid authoring tool can be rewarding if it is isolated by the expertise needed to make the most out of it. Hence, ensure your eLearning vendor has the knowledge and experience to use the tool in conjunction with the eLearning content at hand, to make the development of rapid custom eLearning a success.