"Content has little value until placed in context". Course content comes in all shapes and forms. Content might be a Microsoft Word® doc, a video clip, an Excel spreadsheets, an image, a PDF, a PowerPoint presentations, etc. Although we have been incorporating these forms of content in our face-to-face presentations placing them in an eLearning context adds a new set of variables:
- MS Word docs can be changed without your knowledge
- Viruses can be transmitted in Word, Excel or PowerPoint
- Uncompressed video clips can take forever to load
- An image can fill the screen, and then some...
- Content can go viral ("viral phenomenon")
Course content for online use will often need to be converted to a "web friendly" format. If improperly converted the file may take forever to download, may not open at all or may be stolen/modified without your permission. There are a few tricks and tips to getting conventional documents, photos and video into the context of an eLearning site. Let us help!
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Content: Microsoft Word Docs In many cases it will be as simple as using "File > Save As > PDF" or "File > Print > PDF " and then uploading the friendly version to your course site. This sample MS Word doc was converted to PDF. |
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Content: PowerPoint® Presentations PowerPoint has been around since the bald eagle still had hair and is still the standard for for face-to-face (F2F). That same .pptx file however, when placed in the context of an online course becomes a nightmare. Some folks will not be able to open the file at all; some could but won't want to because of the real fear of a virus; some may want to make a few modifications of their own, without your permission. |
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Music File Converted to mp3 Audio files can be huge. A typical 3 minute song coming directly off a CD could be millions of bytes taking minutes to download whereas that same song, converted to mp3, might be only kilobytes and take seconds to download. Size matters on the web... |
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Video for the Web Simply placing a video on the web for download can be real hit and miss. For one, there are about 15 common file formats some will work fine on a Mac but not open on a PC. Video files are also notoriously huge, here we are talking gigabytes instead of megabytes. There are a number of options for getting video on the web... |
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Photos and Photo Galleries Photos are an excellent learning tool, especially when the photos contain a caption and/or a placed in a "gallery". Photos too can be real dogs when it comes to uploading and downloading. Again, there are a few tricks to getting your photos on the web, in various file sizes, in compatible file types and in galleries that can be updated without changing existing links... |
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Other Course Content (More about these later...) There are other types of course content... (more about these later) |
